Michael Jackson

Michael Joseph Jackson was born on 29 August 1958 in Gary, Indiana, a steel town near Chicago, the eighth of ten children. His father Joseph worked as a crane operator in a steel mill and played in a rhythm and blues band; his mother Katherine was a Jehovah's Witness and raised the children in that faith. The family of eleven lived in a house with two bedrooms.

Around 1964 he joined the group of his brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine and Marlon, in which he soon took the lead vocals. Joseph made the boys rehearse for hours and punished mistakes harshly; Michael said in 1993 that he was beaten as a child and feared his father, who admitted the beatings but did not call them abuse. After talent contests and appearances on the club circuit the group signed with Motown in 1968.

The Jackson 5 scored four consecutive number one hits in 1969 and 1970: 'I Want You Back', 'ABC', 'The Love You Save' and 'I'll Be There'. In 1975 the group left Motown for Epic. On the set of the film 'The Wiz' (1978) Jackson met producer Quincy Jones, with whom he made 'Off the Wall' (1979): a blend of disco, funk and soul that produced four US top ten singles.

'Thriller' (1982) yielded seven top ten singles, including 'Billie Jean' and 'Beat It', and won eight Grammy Awards in 1984. Estimates of worldwide sales usually arrive at about seventy million copies; higher figures cannot be verified. The videos for the album, with director John Landis's fourteen-minute 'Thriller', turned the music video into a short film with a story and choreography.

With 'Bad' (1987) he became the first artist with five US number one singles from one album; 'Dangerous' (1991) and 'HIStory' (1995) followed, along with world tours for millions of concertgoers. His dancing, with the moonwalk as its best-known move, built on street dancers and on models such as James Brown and Fred Astaire. He gave large sums to charity and founded the Heal the World Foundation in 1992.

Jackson grew up while the civil rights movement was ending legal segregation in the United States, but the music industry remained divided in practice. MTV, launched in 1981, played almost only white rock artists in its early years. That 'Billie Jean' nevertheless went into rotation in 1983, according to the record company after heavy pressure, is regarded as the moment when that dividing line on music television broke.

The 1980s were the era of the CD, the video recorder and the worldwide satellite broadcast, and Jackson was the first pop artist to use all those media at once. His changing appearance became a staple of the tabloid press. He said in 1993 that he suffered from vitiligo, a disease that removes pigment from the skin; the autopsy in 2009 confirmed it. He also underwent several operations on his nose.

His success opened the major radio stations, MTV and stadiums to black pop artists and made him one of the first world stars equally famous on every continent. Singers and dancers from Usher and Beyoncé to the South Korean pop industry name him as a model. By buying the ATV catalogue in 1985 he showed that an artist could also own music rights; that purchase did cost him his friendship with Paul McCartney.

In 1993 the family of thirteen-year-old Jordan Chandler accused him of sexual abuse. Jackson denied it; the civil case was settled in January 1994 for a sum estimated at more than twenty million dollars, and because the boy would not testify there was no criminal trial. After a second complaint he stood trial in Santa Maria in 2005; the jury acquitted him on all fourteen counts. The cases did lasting damage to his reputation and his finances.

Jackson died on 25 June 2009, aged fifty, in a rented house in Los Angeles during rehearsals for fifty concerts in London. The coroner found that he had died of acute intoxication with propofol, an anaesthetic that his personal physician Conrad Murray gave him at home as a sleeping aid. Murray was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in November 2011 and sentenced to four years in prison, of which he served about half.

His memorial service at the Staples Center was broadcast worldwide and his records returned to the top of the charts afterwards. In the documentary 'Leaving Neverland' (2019) Wade Robson and James Safechuck stated that he had abused them as children; the estate denies this and points out that both men had earlier said the opposite under oath. Their lawsuits were first dismissed and then revived by a California appeal court in 2023. How his work and these allegations relate to each other remains a matter of debate.