Michael Jackson wanted to live forever.
Just a year and a half before his death, I conducted what ended up being the last major interview with the reclusive Jackson in his suite at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City. And his words stopped me.
“Let’s face it. Who wants mortality? Everybody wants immortality,” he told me that warm September afternoon. “You want what you create to live, be it sculpture or painting or music. Like Michelangelo said, ‘I know the creator will go but his work survives. That’s why to escape death I attempt to bind my soul to my work.’ That’s how I feel. I give my all at work. ‘Cause I want it to just live.”
Most of us remember where we were when we heard that he was dead.
I was mowing the lawn at my house outside Chicago when I got the first call.
In fact, I got several calls and texts with the bulletin — first from TMZ and then from the Los Angeles Times — that he had died. But it wasn’t until I heard CNN’s Wolf Blitzer announce it at 6:28 p.m. ET that I finally believed it.
Michael Jackson was dead.
Sure, I was shocked when I heard the news that the King of Pop had left the world. But, in a way, I was not all that surprised. Jackson, even as troubled as he was, had given his all to the world during his 50 years on the planet. And now he was in the hands of history.
Just before that interview for Ebony magazine, I watched his youngest son, Blanket, then 7, politely greet me at the hotel room door and his father quickly correct him — “Blanket, you shake with your right hand, not with your left” — and in that moment I saw what those kids meant to him. It was indeed his children — Prince, now 17, Paris, now 16, and Blanket, now 12 — who gave us those dozen or so extra years of Michael Jackson’s life.
Jackson was a true father, and those kids were his heart. He lived for them. They gave his later life meaning. Never mind those images of a newborn Prince Michael II dangling from that hotel balcony in Berlin, or pictures of the kids wearing masks while being shuttled around by their dad. Away from the cameras and publicists and crowds, Jackson was about as regular a father as someone like him could be.
That’s why it was even more tragic that he died just four days after Father’s Day.
So, five years later, it is those kids who stand to benefit most from his immortality. If the lawyers and accountants and Uncle Sam get out of the way — The Associated Press reported that more than $91 million of the $600 million his estate has earned since his death has gone to taxes and licenses, and another $32 million went to lawyers and the executors of his estate — the three children and his mother will do quite well for the rest of their lives.
As a musical wonder at age 8, he and his brothers defined a genre of music in the ’70s. When he left the Jackson 5 and went on his own in the early ’80s, he did it again with his “Off the Wall” and “Thriller” albums, shattering just about every record held to date.
He sold out concerts around the world, rescued a stalled music industry and single-handedly put MTV on the map — “Nobody had ever seen anything like that,” legendary superproducer Quincy Jones once told me, after the “Thriller” video debuted on the fledgling music network. “That album sold something like a million and a half copies per week after we put that video out.”
Read More: http://www.kesq.com/news/Monroe-The-immortality-of-Michael-Jackson/26654870
Source: kesq / Bryan Monroe / MJ-Upbeat.com
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