Download On Michael Jackson AudioBook Free
Michael Jackson was once universally acclaimed as a song-and-dance man of genius; Wacko Jacko is currently, more often than not, dismissed for his bizarre race and gender transformations and confounding antics, even as he's commonly reviled for the child molestation charges twice brought against him. Whence the weirdness and alleged criminality? How to take into account Michael Jackson’s rise and fall? In On Michael Jackson—an at once passionate, incisive, and bracing work of cultural analysis—Pulitzer Prize–winning critic for The New York Times Margo Jefferson brilliantly unravels the complexities of one of the very most enigmatic figures of our own time.
Who is Michael Jackson and what does it mean to call him a “WHAT'S It”? What do P. T. Barnum, Peter Pan, and Edgar Allan Poe want to do with our desire for Jackson? How did his curious Victorian upbringing and his tenure as a child prodigy on the “chitlin’ circuit” inform his character and multiplicity of selves? How is Michael Jackson’s celebrity related to the outrageous popularity of nineteenth-century minstrelsy? What's the perverse selling point of child stars for grown-ups and what's the price tag on such stardom for these children and for all of us? What uncanniness provoked Michael Jackson to become “Alone of All His Race, Alone of All Her Sex,” while establishing himself as an undeniably great performer with neo-Gothic, dandy proclivities and a producer of visionary music videos? What do we find so unnerving about Michael Jackson’s presumed monstrosity? In short, how are most of us of us implicated?
In her stunning first book, Margo Jefferson gives us the incontrovertible lowdown on call-him-what-you-wish; she offers a powerful reckoning with a quintessential, richly allusive signifier of American society and popular culture.
