Does artist = art?

The new Michael Jackson biopic shows how much we need nuanced ways of thinking about musicians’ lives.

Unsurprisingly, the new Michael Jackson biopic opened to widespread controversy last weekend. The big question was how they were going to address the sexual abuse allegations that defined Jackson’s later life. And the answer is — by avoiding them completely.

‘Antoine Fuqua’s demi-biopic of Michael Jackson gives you the chimp, the llama, the giraffe … but not the elephant in the living room,’ wrote The Guardian. A previous version of Michael had apparently opened with the allegations, but these scenes were removed from the final cut following the realisation that a historical settlement prevented Jackson’s accuser, Jordan Chandler, from being depicted in any film. So the final version stops in 1988, at the end of the sold-out Bad tour, at the very height of Jackson’s fame.

Avoiding the allegations has understandably riled critics. It’s been labelled a ‘sanitized’ version of Jackson’s life (IndieWire), and ‘untethered from reality…two hours of pure and unadulterated bullshit’ (The Times). For fans, however, it doesn’t seem to have been a problem. Michael has had the biggest ever opening weekend for a biopic. Taking $217mn globally, it even surpassed Oppenheimer. It seems Paris Jackson was right when she predicted that the film would ‘pander to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in the fantasy, and they’re gonna be happy with it.’

The fantasy that Michael sells is of Jackson as a triumphant hero, struggling against an abusive father to emerge as the “King of Pop”. In doing so, it adopts a tired but still powerful biographical model that has been used to portray musicians for the last two hundred years, rooted in the Romantic idea of the genius musician as a transcendent figure whose art brings them as close to the divine as humanity is capable. According to this conception of genius, the artist is allowed to have demons and difficulties — indeed they ought to have a “dark side”, to make them capable of accessing the emotional intensity that genius requires. Crucially, though, the artist always either overcomes these difficulties (e.g. Beethoven and deafness), or succumbs to their personal demons a way that allows them to still be a tragic hero (e.g. Amy Winehouse/Kurt Cobain and addiction). The artist can and should struggle, and their struggle should be heard in their art — but they must always be ‘redeemed by that art,’ so they ‘can still be celebrated as a great and god-like human being.’

There is so much that is alluring about this narrative model. Artistic creation is extraordinary, so it’s easy to see why we’ve historically pedestalised musicians and turned to the supernatural for explanation. But this story we have told ourselves about creativity is just a story. Musicians are humans, and transforming them into heroes means that we have very few ways of conceptually dealing with great artists doing, or being accused of doing, reprehensible things. The overcoming/succumbing hero model doesn’t have the nuance to handle a musician being a perpetrator. It can’t even really accommodate brilliant musicians who are nonetheless dull biographical subjects, living lives of relative comfort and privilege and making boring and uninspiring life choices. And it certainly can’t handle a figure as complex and flawed as Jackson.

Although the allegations against Jackson have never been proved and he was acquitted of all charges brought against him in 2005, the history of allegations against him stretches back to 1993, and the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland contained ‘highly detailed accounts of abuse.’ Even if the allegations weren’t true, he did deeply problematic things that have been verified, such as “sleepovers” with children in his bedroom. Jackson’s relationship to children and childhood, and obsessions with Peter Pan, innocence and fantasy, were a major part of his personality that need to be dealt with in any serious attempt to come to terms with his life and legacy.

Michael Jackson performing live in Italy, 1992.

Dealing with these issues, though, would also mean starting to unpick the way that these aspects of Jackson’s personality might have shaped or been reflected in his music. It’s pretty obvious what the producers’ incentives are for sidestepping these difficult questions. Michael is another step on the road towards making the Jackson estate a billion-dollar industry. But for many fans, too, there’s a deep emotional investment in avoiding these issues, and that’s partly because of the way that the music we love is bound up with our own sense of identity. This is musicologist Simon Frith on the way music interacts with identity:

Making music isn’t a way of expressing ideas; it is a way of living them. … Music, the experience of music for composer/performer and listener alike, gives us a way of being in the world, a way of making sense of it… The experience of pop music is an experience of identity: in responding to a song, we are drawn, haphazardly, into emotional alliances with the performers and with the performers’ other fans… We absorb songs into our own lives and rhythm into our own bodies.

This blurring of boundaries between music and listener is critical for understanding why people care about protecting the reputation of music that is meaningful to them. For many people, the music they love is an important part of who they are. There are elements in the music that resonate with them, or who they would like to be. This intense kind of relationship with music won’t apply to everyone, but it does apply to a significant number. So when you have a musician who is as famous as Michael Jackson, the number of people who feel his music says something about them starts to stretch into the millions.

So after we add in the belief that a musician’s life and personality is connected in some way to their music, it can therefore feel more than disappointing when a loved musician turns out to be someone whose views or actions you deeply disagree with. It feels personal. Whether consciously or not, for fans of a particular creator, an attack on the creator is felt as an attack on their own sense of self, on their identity. If I’m a Michael Jackson fan and it’s true that he was a child abuser, what does it say about me, about my life and their perspectives and beliefs, that I have built at least some of my identity around someone who did something abhorrent?

This is an uncomfortable question for fans to grapple with, because ultimately the simple fix of completely divorcing an artist’s output from their life just doesn’t work. No matter how hard you try, you can’t completely dissociate art from the personality of its creator. And clearly, people going to watch Michael don’t believe that an artist’s life and work can be kept completely separate. It is a biopic. The whole genre rests on the assumption that there is a connection between life and work, and that by examining the two in tandem we can get a glimpse into how a person became an artist, and what decisions and actions led to the art we love. The extent to which composers write autobiographically differs wildly between individuals, but even when you have a textless piece of music with no obvious connection to any event in the composer’s life, their style and artistic choices reveal something about their perspective on the world. And when you identify with their music — play it, love it, live with it, learn the lyrics, dance to it — you are identifying with their perspective. It’s therefore much, much easier to ignore problematic or dislikable elements of a musician’s personality than it is to grapple with what it means for you, personally, to have such a close emotional relationship with such a figure.

Dan Reed, director of Leaving Neverland, has said that Michael’s success shows that ‘people just don’t care’ about the possibility that Jackson abused children. I’m not sure Reed is right about this though. On the contrary, many fans do care. They care immensely — that Jackson was not what he was accused of being. In The New York Times, journalist Nekesa Mumbi Moody wrote about the experience of being a Michael Jackson fan:

Even before the allegations of pedophilia — those would come later — Jackson became a punchline, the target of endless jokes. By extension, so did his fans. As one of those fans, I often found that I had to explain myself and my sanity: How could a proud Black woman, a professional journalist no less, rep for him so hard? Still? … His friendships with children as he neared 30 became harder to justify. Friends would look at me and ask: Yo, is this still your dude? For real?

This strikingly honest appraisal gets at the heart of why fans are clinging to a pre-allegations Jackson. It’s about what Jackson’s music and subsequent downfall did to them. Being able to experience ‘an M.J. renaissance’ is validating, reassuring. If Jackson is socially acceptable again, then so too are his fans and their relationship to his music. The implication is that we’ve collectively decided that there aren’t any problems to deal with here. Any thorny questions can be dispelled by a loud rendition of ‘Beat It.’ Michael, as Moody puts it, ‘solidified for me that maybe it was OK to be an out and proud Jackson fan again.’

The popularity of this film shows how badly we need more nuanced ways of talking about the way musicians’ lives and music relate to each other. We need ways to think about what it means to enjoy music created by problematic and dislikable people, because having a dominant model of creativity that constructs musicians as heroes isn’t just lazy. It’s dangerous. It sends an implicit signal that if you are talented enough, music is a place where awful actions will be covered up, excused, forgotten or ignored. We have to do better than that. We need models that permit ambiguity and difficulty, and help us to deal with the fact that sometimes, horrific people can also be truly brilliant musicians — and that many hundreds, thousands, or even millions of us will love their music.