Something told me to walk into the Sundry shop at my job afterwork on Friday. I walked in and saw it from across the store. New Pristine - kinda a visual representation of what Mike feels he’s been trying to reach. I snatched up five copies and then I put four back. I’m an adult - I can take care of one. A co-worker saw me come out the store and noticed it in my hand. She rushed over and asked was that it. I told her yea, my weekend had gotten better as we speak. I wouldn’t let Caun touch it because I didn’t want the natural oils of our hands to smudge the cover.
A drink and just a tshirt on later, I was ready to delve into his first sit down interview in 10 years. I flicked through the entire book and he started showing up early on. In an introduction by the editor etc. Having seen all the pictures on the net, didn’t prepare me for the actual spread. Here they were three-dimensional. You could see depth, creases, etc. and I felt that feeling that I get from him. I was ready to read!
I hadn’t read Ebony in awhile because they are so ‘fluffy’. I didn’t know what to expect. A whole bunch of one word answers, some silliness, some dellusion. I WAS BLOWN OFF MY FEET! Enough to have a damn near two hour conversation with Caun, post reading.
Mike is somewhere else in his life and in his head. The verbage that “Mike is normal” could possibly be right. You don’t get your normality from your appearance, you get it from what’s going on in your head. Unless he’s mastered appearing normal - I think something wonderful has happened out of the darkness that has been his life. He’s merged being a man, being a black man, being an adult and being grown together. That’s quite a feat if you ask me and I am now more sorry than ever that he has laid a past that he can’t get away from.
You know how you have an epiphany and you come to peace within your self about your life, your ups, your downs and their outcomes, alot of which you just couldn’t control - YET during your time of unrest you do things, even to yourself, that now in your aura of peace become painful reminders of your time of ‘dis-ease’, that’s the man you are looking at today. I had a strong strong feeling that he wishes he hadn’t of taken his looks this far. I could just feel it.
He was engaging, he was funny, he wears glasses now, he takes good care of his kids, he was articulate, he admitted that now he cusses a bit, there were stories laced with, ’cause you know thats what blackfolks do’ AND he is on some other level when it comes to the mechanics of music. I hadn’t seen him in this light and boy oh boy. He knows his way around a chord and a melody. His explanations about the craft and the way he views it etc. were amazing. There’s this kinda unwritten thought process that the Jacksons as a whole are unintelligent. You don’t get to where Mike is by being an employee of a label. He’s been in the business longer than alot of his fans have been alive and he’s been looking, listening and learning. At 49 he’s moved into that space where he can fondly look back on sitting in sessions with Stevie Wonder and watching him work.
One of the most evident representations of his here and now is the way he speaks about….. Joe Jackson,his father. Maybe because he’s left his children with stained futures - can he see the prolific yet flawed beauty of his own father, but whatever it was, I felt a strength in his words of admiration and gratitude for his Father. He no longers gets physically ill around him.
His thoughts on his position in musical history seem in a peaceful place as well. We don’t know and have never known what it’s like to be Michael Jackson. Only people like Elvis and The Beatles know. Living in the God fearing but human worshipping world that we live - it is alot to be a believer of God yourself, but worshipped. It would fuck with my head. So ‘listening’ to him speak on his place in all of that and him not wanting to work as an older man and the pain of watching James Brown have to work till the day he died instead of being able to just be that legend, was a man channeling his grown man fo sho!
So, you won’t find any ’secrets’ or any new ‘rumors’ to put into effect in this article. Reading around the boards, post release, there was a swell of excitement and prayer that he wouldn’t be playing himself yet again. What you will find is a man who’s journey has been something most of us dream about (even the new entertainers). A man who along this journey, let that which he thought he had missed control him. Now, at a great cost, he has moved into 2007, the here and now and the greatest achievement about that? Is that he….belongs and he feels comfortable in his own skin. The greatest tragedy, that nobody could get through to him that it was not a literal meaning and now he’s got to live with that part of his life journey.