Michael Jackson

Michael Joseph Jackson was born on August 29, 1958, in Gary, Indiana, a steel town on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. He was the eighth of ten children born to Joseph Jackson, a crane operator who had once played guitar in a local rhythm and blues band, and Katherine Jackson, a devout Jehovah's Witness who worked part time at a department store ^[1]. The family of eleven shared a small two-bedroom house on Jackson Street, and money was tight throughout Michael's childhood.

Joseph organized his sons into a musical act in the early 1960s, first with the older brothers Jackie, Tito, and Jermaine, then adding Marlon and Michael. By the age of six Michael was performing in public, and he quickly moved from playing bongos to sharing lead vocals. The group, eventually named the Jackson 5, worked a punishing circuit of talent shows and clubs across the Midwest, including adult venues where the boys performed late into the night ^[1]. Joseph's discipline was severe. Michael spoke openly in later interviews about beatings and intimidation during rehearsals, experiences he said left lasting emotional scars ^[2].

A victory at the famed Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1967 marked a turning point. Within two years the brothers had signed with Motown Records, the Detroit label that had already carried acts like the Supremes and Stevie Wonder to national fame, and the family relocated to California ^[1].

Motown launched the Jackson 5 with remarkable speed. Their first four singles for the label, "I Want You Back", "ABC", "The Love You Save", and "I'll Be There", all reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969 and 1970, a feat no group had achieved with its first four releases ^[3]. Michael, singing lead at eleven years old, drew comparisons to adult soul singers for the maturity and precision of his voice. Anyone asking who was Michael Jackson at the start of the 1970s would have heard a simple answer: the most gifted child performer in American pop.

Motown also released solo records under Michael's name while he remained in the group, and songs such as "Got to Be There" and the ballad "Ben" (a number one hit in 1972) confirmed that he could carry material on his own ^[3]. The brothers left Motown for Epic Records in 1975, renaming themselves the Jacksons because Motown owned the original name. Jermaine, married to the daughter of Motown founder Berry Gordy, stayed behind.

The decisive step in Michael's adult career came through film. Cast as the Scarecrow in the 1978 movie musical The Wiz, he met the producer and arranger Quincy Jones, who agreed to oversee his next solo record ^[1]. The result, Off the Wall (1979), blended disco, funk, and polished pop balladry. It sold in the millions, produced four top ten singles in the United States, and won Jackson a Grammy Award, establishing him at twenty-one as a major solo artist independent of his family ^[4].

Thriller, released in December 1982, transformed the scale of what a pop record could do. Again produced with Quincy Jones, the album sent seven of its nine tracks into the Billboard top ten, including "Billie Jean" and "Beat It", and spent thirty-seven weeks at number one on the album chart ^[4]. Guinness World Records recognizes it as the best-selling album of all time, with estimated sales often cited at more than 66 million copies worldwide ^[5]. At the 1984 Grammy Awards Jackson won a record eight trophies in a single night ^[4].

Among the most cited Michael Jackson achievements is his role in turning the music video into a cinematic form. The fourteen-minute short film for "Thriller", directed by John Landis, and the videos for "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" ran in heavy rotation on MTV and helped break the network's early resistance to Black artists ^[3]. His performance of "Billie Jean" on the Motown 25 television special in March 1983 introduced the moonwalk to a mass audience and became one of the most replayed moments in pop history ^[1].

The albums that followed sustained his dominance. Bad (1987) produced five consecutive number one singles in the United States, a record at the time, and its supporting tour was the highest-grossing concert tour of the 1980s ^[4]. Dangerous (1991) and the double album HIStory (1995) each sold in the tens of millions. Jackson co-wrote "We Are the World" with Lionel Richie in 1985, a charity single for African famine relief that became one of the fastest-selling records ever issued ^[3]. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, with the Jackson 5 in 1997 and as a solo artist in 2001 ^[6].

Jackson's private life attracted scrutiny matched by few public figures of the twentieth century. From the mid 1980s his appearance changed visibly: his skin grew lighter, and his facial features altered. He stated in a 1993 televised interview with Oprah Winfrey that he had vitiligo, a condition that destroys skin pigment, a diagnosis later confirmed by his autopsy report ^[7]. He acknowledged some cosmetic surgery while disputing tabloid accounts of its extent.

He married Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis Presley, in 1994; the marriage ended in divorce in 1996. Later that year he married Debbie Rowe, a nurse he had met through his dermatologist, and the couple had two children, Prince and Paris, before divorcing in 1999. A third child, known as Blanket (later Bigi), was born in 2002 to a surrogate mother whose identity was never disclosed ^[1]. Jackson raised the three children himself at Neverland Ranch, the 2,700-acre California property he bought in 1988 and fitted with a fairground, a zoo, and a private cinema ^[2].

In 1993 a thirteen-year-old boy accused Jackson of sexual abuse. The civil claim was settled out of court for a reported sum in the tens of millions of dollars, and no criminal charges followed ^[7]. In 2003 Jackson was charged with molesting another boy who had appeared with him in a television documentary. After a trial in Santa Maria, California, lasting more than four months, a jury acquitted him on all fourteen counts in June 2005 ^[8]. Further allegations surfaced after his death, most prominently in the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, which his estate strongly denied and challenged in court ^[7].

The trial left Jackson financially strained and personally withdrawn. He had earned enormous sums, including from his 1985 purchase of the ATV music catalogue containing most of the Beatles' songs, yet heavy spending and borrowing left him hundreds of millions of dollars in debt by the mid 2000s ^[2]. After the 2005 acquittal he lived abroad for a period, spending time in Bahrain, Ireland, and elsewhere, and released no new studio album after Invincible (2001).

In March 2009 he announced a comeback: a fifty-show residency titled This Is It at the O2 Arena in London. Demand was extraordinary, and the entire run sold out within hours ^[3]. Jackson rehearsed in Los Angeles through the spring while under the care of Conrad Murray, a physician he had hired for the tour.

On June 25, 2009, Jackson died at his rented home in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles at the age of 50. The Los Angeles County coroner ruled the death a homicide caused by acute intoxication from propofol, a surgical anesthetic Murray had been administering as a sleep aid, combined with sedatives ^[8]. Murray was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 2011 and served two years in jail. A televised memorial at the Staples Center drew a global audience estimated in the hundreds of millions, and the rehearsal footage was released that October as the documentary film This Is It ^[8].

Any full Michael Jackson biography has to reckon with influence on an unusual scale. His fusion of soul, funk, rock, and pop set the commercial template for the modern global superstar, and his estimated total record sales place him among the best-selling artists ever, with figures frequently cited at 400 million or more ^[5]. Performers across generations, from Usher and Justin Timberlake to Beyoncé and The Weeknd, have named him a direct model for their singing and staging ^[3].

His innovations extended past sales figures. Jackson treated the music video as a narrative art form with budgets and directors drawn from cinema, helped integrate MTV, and codified a dance vocabulary (the moonwalk, the lean, the precise isolations) that is still taught and imitated worldwide ^[6]. His humanitarian giving was extensive: the Guinness organization once cited him for supporting dozens of charities, and "We Are the World" raised tens of millions of dollars for famine relief ^[5].

At the same time, the abuse allegations have permanently complicated public memory of him, prompting continuing debate over how to weigh the art against the accusations, none of which resulted in a criminal conviction during his lifetime ^[7]. His estate, which controls his recordings and image, has become one of the most profitable of any deceased celebrity, generating well over a billion dollars since 2009 through music sales, the Cirque du Soleil shows built on his catalogue, and a Broadway musical ^[2]. Among enduring Michael Jackson facts, one remains simple and unarguable: no entertainer of his era reached more people, in more countries, than the boy from Gary, Indiana.