Few people familiar with the recent life and times of Michael Jackson when lurid stories of his personal life and finances largely overshadowed his artistic and musical accomplishments would be all that surprised at the pop star's premature death. His was a story that did not seem destined for a happy ending.
Back in the late 1970s and the early '80s, Jackson's future seemed very bright indeed. After a successful early career singing in a band with four of his six brothers, Jackson launched a solo career which had a trajectory like that of the Beatles and Elvis Presley before him. Certainly the sales of his first two solo albums, Off the Wall (released in 1979) and Thriller (1982) reached stratospheric levels. Thriller became the biggest-selling record of all time with 50 million sales worldwide.
Nine singles from the album reached the Top 10 in the music charts, propelled in part by a cleverly conceived promotional clip for the album's title track that is now regarded as helping to usher in the age of the music video. Directed by John Landis, the clip brilliantly showcased Jackson's talent for catchy tunes and memorable stage performances complete with exacting choreography and precision acrobatics. The moonwalk featured on it came to be imitated in countless nightclubs and dance venues across the globe. The follow-up to Thriller sold eight million copies, but inevitably was regarded as a let-down. Other albums followed, along with elaborate concert tours, but nothing Jackson ever recorded again reached the artistic heights or the influence of Thriller.
As his music began slipping off the radar, Jackson began generating headlines with his eccentric behaviour and lifestyle. His music and performance style had always been somewhat mannered, but became increasingly so around the time of Thriller, when he took to wearing a single white glove. However, no one could have conceived of how bizarre his appearance would become over time. The hair-straightening, the rhinoplasty, and the bleached skin (all well documented with ''before and after shots'' in the gossip magazines) suggested not just an obsession with appearance (and a rejection of his ethnicity) but a self-destructive streak as well. Rumours abounded about Jackson's health; he himself blamed his bleached appearance on a rare skin condition called vitiligo. Certainly, his general physical appearance appeared to worsen in recent years.
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