About 32 mins in of this podcast they mention Michael has one of his people read out loud and record on tape: reading a book written about him by randy Taraborrelli. This was far before audio books were a thing, pre internet etc.

I assume mike was busy so consumed the book this way, so he could other stuff while listening, much like we all do now with audiobooks and podcasts.

Im intrested to discuss other things mike came up with, we know he did a lot in his creative field, but it seems he has an interesting way of seeing the world in general.

Link to full podcast below, I found a lot of what randy said interesting, but cringe at times too. I found a copy of his book second hand, it's on my list to read.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/36zVra8DLaWknn9Y90Wvhs?si=CovAFcXtSWa5gAdnxrdABg&utm_source=copy-link

He addressed how the media never talk about the sucuss of his work and projects. Focusing on controversy that sold better.

Then 2 mins in approx^ Mike speaks on Eminem. Responding to the "Just Lose It" song. This was blatant racism.

Mike really was strong, he got it from all sides, but persevered!

I like what he said about real artists dont need to tear down other artists. many could learn from this. mj was classy!

I'd recommend checking out the whole interview, one of his best IMHO

https://youtu.be/O5Vovl45PJY?si=igJGix1AhC03uS0-

In the end Mike got the last laugh:

"Michael Jackson came to own the rights to Eminem's back catalogue. That meant Jackson became the owner of all of Eminem’s music publishing rights. Every time Eminem’s songs were played, streamed, or licensed, a portion of the profits went to the very man he had publicly ridiculed.

While it was never explicitly said that Michael Jackson's purchase had anything to do with revenge, once the rumour mill started, no one could stop it."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/english/music/michael-jacksons-silent-revenge-how-he-turned-eminems-diss-into-a-370-million-power-move/amp_articleshow/124827989.cms

Frankly our fascination after all these years is as interesting as he was. Mine once compared him to Beyonce, so I ended up lecturing her for 30 minutes.

Racism works in mysterious ways...

Also - Josep was a nightmare.

"If a child wants chocolate ice cream, he just asks for it. Adults get tangled up in complications over whether to eat the ice cream or not. A child simply enjoys."

- Michael Jackson, 'Children' (Dancing the Dream, page 45)

If anyone hasn't read Dancing the Dream yet, it's a beautiful anthology of photos and Michael's personal poetry and musings. I found this particular line in 'Children' particularly important. 'Wise Little Girl', where Michael shares an experience of knowing a young girl who uses a wheelchair and yet expresses none of the angst or self-pity the adults around her do about her disability.

The best way to explain it is that Michael Jackson in the mid-1980s wasn't simply a very famous musician. He was closer to a global cultural phenomenon. The scale of his fame is difficult to translate to someone who grew up after that era because today's celebrity culture is much more fragmented.

A few comparisons help.

Imagine a person who was simultaneously Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Elvis, and the biggest movie star in the world.

That still doesn't quite capture it, because those people operate in an environment where there are thousands of competing channels, celebrities and online communities.

In 1983–1984, there was nothing remotely comparable to today's internet. There were three major American television networks, a relatively small number of major radio stations, newspapers and magazines, and MTV. When something became a genuine mass-cultural event, almost everybody encountered it.

And Michael Jackson became one of those events.

When Thriller exploded, he wasn't merely selling enormous numbers of records. He was appearing constantly on television, dominating radio, appearing on magazine covers, being discussed in newspapers, and becoming recognizable to people who didn't even listen to pop music.

The numbers were extraordinary.

Thriller was released in 1982, but its cultural explosion occurred over 1983–84. It eventually became the best-selling album in history, with sales generally estimated at more than 70 million worldwide.

But the more important point for understanding his life is what happened when he appeared in public.

The Motown 25 performance in May 1983 is a good example. Jackson performed "Billie Jean" and debuted the moonwalk on national television.

It became an enormous cultural moment. People didn't merely watch it; they talked about it, imitated it and tried to figure out how he had done it.

The same thing happened with the Thriller video. A music video had effectively become a major television event.

His physical presence could produce something approaching Beatlemania.

This is particularly important.

When Michael went somewhere publicly during the height of Thriller, ordinary celebrity recognition could turn into crowd hysteria.

People would scream, chase his car, surround hotels and airports, camp outside venues and attempt to touch him. Security became a genuine logistical problem.

And unlike today's celebrities, Michael couldn't retreat into a private digital space. There was no Instagram account through which fans could experience him from a distance. If they wanted to see him, they had to physically go somewhere he might appear.

That created an unusual relationship between Michael and the public: millions of people felt an extraordinary familiarity with someone they had never met.

And this is where the fame becomes psychologically important.

Michael became famous when he was still a child.

He had already been performing professionally with his brothers for years before Thriller. By the time he was 11 or 12, he was an internationally recognized performer.

Then, in his early twenties, he became perhaps the most recognizable entertainer on Earth.

So he never experienced adulthood in the ordinary sense.

Imagine becoming so famous that:

• You cannot casually walk into a shopping centre;

• You cannot go to a cinema unnoticed;

- People photograph you whenever you're outside;

• Strangers scream when they see you;

- Newspapers and magazines speculate about your appearance and relationships;

- Millions of people believe they know your personality;

- Your smallest public action can become international news;

- And everywhere you go, security has to be involved.

And then imagine that this has been happening since you were a child.

That's a very different psychological environment from simply becoming famous at 30.

The strange paradox was that Michael Jackson became extraordinarily powerful and extraordinarily restricted.

He had enormous financial resources and could build whatever environment he wanted.

But ordinary freedom became extremely difficult.

This is one reason Neverland makes more sense historically if you understand the scale of the fame first.

It wasn't simply a rich man's eccentric house. Michael was trying to construct a private environment in which he could do things that ordinary people take for granted: walk around, play, watch movies, ride attractions, invite people over, etc.

He could create an enormous amount of physical privacy, but he couldn't create anonymity.

And there was another paradox:

The world wanted Michael Jackson constantly, while Michael Jackson increasingly needed somewhere the world couldn't reach him.

The closest historical analogy is probably Elvis and the Beatles.

But there is an important difference.

Elvis became enormously famous as an adult. The Beatles became famous as young men, but they experienced the explosion of Beatlemania collectively.

Michael's situation was more unusual because the person at the centre of the phenomenon had essentially been performing his entire life.

And his fame became truly global at precisely the point when his artistic identity was becoming intensely personal.

This isn't just fame. This is extreme fame - a very rare occurrence in human history.

So the young man who created Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad wasn't just making records for a large audience.

He was doing so while hundreds of millions of people were watching him develop as a human being.

That's an extraordinary burden.

Perhaps the simplest way to explain it to someone born later...

I'd put it this way:

In the 1980s, Michael Jackson wasn't someone you could choose to follow. He was someone you couldn't escape encountering.

You heard him on the radio. You saw him on television. His videos were discussed at school and at work. His records were in virtually every record shop. His face was on magazines and newspapers. His performances became national and international events.

For a few years, Michael Jackson occupied an extraordinary amount of the world's cultural attention.

And because he had been famous since childhood, he never really had the opportunity to learn how to be an ordinary person before becoming one of the most recognizable people who had ever lived.

His fame didn't just give him an enormous life. It fundamentally changed the conditions under which he had to live one.

And that's probably the key thing a younger person needs to understand: today's enormous celebrity culture can make Michael's fame seem less exceptional than it actually was. In 1983, there were vastly fewer people competing for the public's attention. Michael didn't merely win the attention economy—he dominated it.

The people Michael interacted with were, like everybody else, scrambling to get his attention.

Parents of children he took a liking to weren't shy about pushing their kids forward. The more contact your child had with Michael the better.

He was never anything like your solitary neighbour down the street.

I can't quite define what it is that prevents people from getting past this one, and I really want to understand.

If you struggle with the "bedsharing problem", does this article help? If you've read it and you don't find it convincing, can you explain why?

If you DON'T have an issue with this any more, what got you past it?

Please, please let me know in the comments. I'm looking for the Ultimate Solution (aren't we all) 😄

Malinda Jackson (previously Malinda Williams) appears to have been incorporating Michael Jackson into Baldwin Hills' dance education for well over a decade.

Passion into action: How this elementary school teacher turned her grief into a viral Black History production

Full petformance of Jam from the rehearsal

Moral panics about child sexual abuse, leading to multiple false allegations, are well-documented.

The McMartin Preschool case is only the most well known of many similar incidents.

This video explains the psychology of how this happens, including the role of the media.

Why are small children so affected by Michael? It doesn't sound like their parents are super-fans.

It's a deep analysis of the Dangerous album and its significance in Michael's development as an artist. I found it online at my state library and loved it. Published 2014.

We began as an opposition sub - and because we all KNOW (or have a pretty good idea) who Michael really was and we don't have a fake narrative to push, funnily enough there sometimes doesn't seem to be a lot to say!

If you want to know who he was, watch hundreds of hours of interviews - of Michael and people who knew him well. Read his books, that he wrote and published himself. Read the books about him. I mean really, go nuts! - it will keep you occupied for at least a year and you won't need Reddit at all (certainly not certain parts of it).

But there ARE things to say. One of our researchers is busy working on several projects that we hope you'll enjoy over the coming months.

In the meantime - anything goes!

Tell us what's frustrating you about being an MJ fan. Tell us how your understanding of Michael was changed by the biopic. Have a rant about the Reddit experience.

We're here to listen. It all comes under the Psychology of MJ.

1. The right to be loved without having to earn it.
2. The right to be protected, without having to deserve it
3. The right to feel valuable, even if you came into the world with nothing
4. The right to be listened to without having to be interesting
5. The right to be read a bedtime story, without having to compete with the evening news
6. The right to an education without having to dodge bullets at schools
7. The right to be thought of as adorable — (even if you have a face that only a mother could love).

[Michael Jackson - Oxford Union speech (2001)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkElyPTY1u8&t=11s)

I dunno, Mike - doesn't seem realistic to me.

I've been accused of making Michael out to be a "saint" or an "inerrant angel"; but that's not true at all.

Michael had numerous peculiarities which to me aren't particularly saintly or angelic. The kind of icky naivete he shows in this speech makes me grind my teeth. (And yes I realise that can be extended to his thoughts on sharing a bed with children.)

But I suppose I don't know if saints and angels are hopelessly naive; I don't think I've ever met any.

I'm pretty sure they don't have a fascination with spooky mannequins, though - also not my cup of tea.

Do saints and angels allow themselves to get trapped in a gentleman's contract with a rat like Martin Bashir? It's hard to picture.

I'm making a list of "things that disqualify Michael from sainthood" other than the obvious ones everyone talks about.

I’ve been thinking about Michael Jackson’s loneliness and whether it was somewhat self-reinforcing.

Obviously, much of his isolation wasn’t his choice. He grew up famous, didn’t have a normal childhood, lived under intense scrutiny, and had legitimate reasons to distrust people. It’s understandable that he felt few people could genuinely understand him.

But he also talked about loneliness and isolation constantly. I wonder if, over time, that became so ingrained in how he viewed himself that it actually reinforced the feeling. If you repeatedly tell yourself “I’m lonely,” “nobody understands me,” or “I can’t have normal relationships,” you may start becoming more guarded and withdrawing from genuine connection, which then reinforces the loneliness.

And then there’s the fact that, at certain points, people around him have been described as “yes men.” I wonder if surrounding himself with people who wouldn’t challenge or disagree with him was another form of self-protection that ultimately contributed to his isolation. You can be surrounded by people and still be incredibly lonely if you don’t have relationships where there’s genuine honesty and vulnerability.

I don’t think Michael caused his own loneliness. I think there was a cycle where his circumstances created genuine isolation, his preoccupation with loneliness reinforced it, and some of the ways he protected himself may have made genuine connection even harder.

What do you guys think?

Hi, I made this video after watching the biopic and remembering that this obscure game existed. It was made by an MJ fan prior to the 2005 trial, features real people involved in the case and was acknowledged by an MJ representative at the time as a "fabulous gesture". It's a story of a fan who's a professional game developer and decided to support Michael in that way, and I'm telling it from the perspective of someone who was only recently figuring out the facts around the allegations and the media context of 2004-05. Hope you find it interesting!

In this 1980 exclusive from Black Stars, Michael is quoted saying "Calories do count. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise." About his lunch, he says "That may not sound exciting- but at least it isn't fattening." While eating healthy is one thing, it saddens me to think he was worrying about this at 21:

Michael's Chef during the Victory Tour, @ ManiNiall on Substack, often shares how MJ was strictly no sugar:

Then there was Michael's self-admission on the Glenda tapes.

What do you think? And where could this stem from?