Just wanted to endorse the following remarks by Jody Rosen of Slate:
Increasingly … [Michael] Jackson’s music was warped by megalomania: huge production budgets, Wagnerian ballads, songs that swung wildly between self-pity and grandiosity. “Heal the World,” he sang, but his own face, rent by plastic surgery, revealed the sickness within. At the 1995 Brit Awards (the U.K. equivalent of the Grammys), Jackson sang “Earth Song” surrounded by a worshipful children’s choir and an actor dressed as a rabbi, whom Jackson “blessed.” The performance was interrupted by the arrival on stage of Jarvis Cocker, the lead singer of the Britpop band Pulp, who shook his butt at the audience while Jackson rose toward the rafters on a hydraulic lift. (“My actions were a form of protest at the way Michael Jackson sees himself as some kind of Christlike figure with the power of healing,” Cocker said.)
The bombast was embarrassing as spectacle and also a catastrophic musical miscalculation. Beneath their sumptuous production, Jackson’s best songs were models of small-bore rigor.
On that note, take it away, Adam Rafferty:
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