Michael Jackson
— On a Pure
Gaze

Inside the 1982 album Thriller, three of the tracks came from his own hand as writer and composer: Wanna Be Startin' Somethin', Billie Jean, Beat It. The title track itself was written by Rod Temperton, but the hand that translated it again into the grain of moving image was Michael's.

The video he made with John Landis was closer to a thirteen-minute short film than to a music video. Until that piece appeared, the music video as a form was almost entirely a singer standing in front of a camera, singing. The moment he stepped past that form in one motion is the moment the phrase "music video as a work of art" first became possible.

That a person trying to release everything inside himself found one form of music not to be enough. That only by weaving another medium — the moving image — with his own hands could some of what he carried begin to loosen. You keep coming back to that, every time you notice how meticulously crafted his videos are.

Songs like We Are The World and Heal The World tend to get filed away as his charity work. We Are The World, written with Lionel Richie in 1985. Heal The World, written by his hand in 1992. On the surface, songs for raising funds. But if you step back into the place of the person who made them, the grain shifts.

On stage, millions cheered toward him. Off stage, his skin, his face, the endless growing rumors kept separating him from other people. The person standing in the most loved place in the world was, in his daily life, alone more often than almost anyone. The place where he cried, with such urgency, "we can be one" was the exact opposite side of that separation.

If you leave those songs filed only as charity work, the breath of the one who wrote them gets cut out of them. When the most unhealed person in the room reached past himself toward a unit as large as the world and offered the word healing, that word was also the one he had first offered to himself.

The fact that he wanted, unusually often, to be near children has been quickly translated into suspicion. You want to read that place once more, in another grain. Children don't yet carry filters. They don't begin, as adults do, with "why is that person like that" — they simply see Michael as Michael. In the place where the world was endlessly producing new ways of looking at him, the eyes of children alone stood outside those ways.

What drew him may not have been children as such, but a way of looking that was still alive inside them. A gaze that had not yet compromised with the world. He looks like a person who tried to keep that same gaze alive inside himself, all the way through. No matter how strange the world found him, he was the kind of person who would ask, with his own eyes again, "but why is this strange?"

The most open heart drew the heaviest misreadings. It was a world where the purer you stayed, the more exposed you became.

Without following this grain to the end, one whole reason he so often ended up in the place of suspicion stays out of view, and you let him go without seeing it. The more someone tries to keep his innermost way of looking intact, the more often he slips out of step with the circuits of the world.

What gets discussed most often inside the Jackson family is the conflict with the father. The brutal childhood training; the fear laid through it. But between Michael and his brothers there was a distance of a different grain. In the Jackson 5 years, the five of them lived on the same stage in the same rhythm. Then, after Off the Wall and Thriller, Michael alone moves into a place that belongs to a different dimension.

His brothers tried their own solo careers from that place, but for the most part the market did not return enough of an answer. With Jermaine — who had the grain of the original leader — a quiet tension during that period keeps showing up in the stories. A landscape where no one openly fought, and yet Michael's solo flight kept making the brothers' places smaller and smaller.

Not a distance born of fighting,
but a distance no one created and no one can fix.
A distance you simply carry.

Maybe what made him so explosive on stage was the fact that, off stage, he was mostly the one absorbing every grain. The textures that never got sorted out inside him — those finally borrowed his body, on stage, to be released all at once.

In the early 2000s he publicly called the CEO of Sony Music, Tommy Mottola, "the devil." For one of the most significant artists of an era to name the head of his label like that, in public, was rare in itself. On the surface, it was a conflict over catalog rights and marketing decisions. But beneath that surface ran a deeper grain.

In 1985 Michael had bought the Beatles' publishing catalog with his own hand. Later, when Sony entered into joint ownership of that catalog, he may have felt the strange sensation of something he had bought himself slipping back out of his hand. The deeper issue was that he wanted to be the owner of his own music. A label system is, at its heart, a structure that manages artists as product, and he had known this far too well since he was a child.

The moment he later came out publicly, saying Black artists were being stripped of ownership of their own music, sits along the same grain. He didn't keep it as his one private problem; he tried to pull the place of others who stood where he stood into the same frame.

What he tried to keep, all the way through that fight, was one thing. That at the very least the grain of his own music had to stay in his hand. The moment that was conceded, he would no longer be able to tell where he himself ended — and he knew that, almost on instinct.

There is one grain you have to face, or you cannot pretend to have seen him whole. Without the harsh childhood training and the deep isolation that began inside it, what kind of person would Michael have become? Maybe he would have ended as one merely talented entertainer — that thought keeps following the question.

His energy, with nowhere to go, kept digging inward into himself. In the hours inside hotel rooms and studios — hours with hardly any time for friendship — he was alone with himself for far too long. What that being-alone-together with himself was eventually woven into, we know. It became Thriller. It became Billie Jean. It became a movement.

The world may have been consuming Michael's pain.
He absorbed it; the world only took the fruit.

You don't want to take this place to a closed conclusion. You don't want to declare that isolation was the condition of his genius, and you don't want to lock that isolation inside the single word tragedy either. Only this asymmetry — between the weight one person carried inside, and the music we loved from outside — you want to look at, once, before walking on. The place of loving someone carries a responsibility with it.

You look around him once more. The father, the brothers, the label. Was there even one place in that ring where he could lay his own grain down at ease? With the father the fear never fully left, even after a lifetime. With the brothers the distance no one created kept circling him. With the label he was fighting over his soul.

He was someone who tried to meet the world with art and with an unguarded heart. And yet, almost no one near him received that heart exactly as it was. People said they loved him, but you wonder whether the word love has ever fallen so heavily, so often, around any other one person. How much of that weight was love that actually received him as he was — almost no one really knows.

What he tried to keep, in the end, looks like a single thing. His own world. The music woven in his own grain, the videos refined precisely by his own hand, the choice to stay near children as a way of keeping the gaze inside him. When the grain of the world kept pouring into him in other grains, he tried to keep one inner place, all the way through, in his own hand.

A person who tried to live purely got wounded more, precisely because he stayed pure.

And the music that came out of that wounding — we are still listening to it. The grain one person bore inside himself arrived as the sound of an era, and only much later do we begin to guess at where, and how, he was bearing it until that sound arrived.