Michael Jackson

[Rev. Rye]

Well, here's my take on the whole Michael Jackson-Pedophilia thing:

I spent most of my life taking the molestation allegations at face value, even after his death, at least until around 2013, after literally hundreds of people accused Jimmy Savile of molesting them, and loads of other famous people (most notably Rolf Harris) ended up getting brought down by the accusations. Meanwhile, in the years since Michael Jackson died, there's been remarkably little in the way of new allegations, and the only ones that came were from people who previously denied it. And it turns out even with the previous cases, it turns out there was, in fact, a reason Michael got off that didn't have to do with being obscenely wealthy (including multiple police probes finding nothing illegal, and remarkably, bugger all in the way of corroboration for the stories of the accusers).

It's also worth noting that when the Neverland Ranch was raided after the second allegations, they did find quite a bit of porn, but all of it was legal (Michael did seem to have a particular liking for "Barely Legal" porn, remarkably for his reputation, with women). That said, this doesn't necessarily mean he wasn't a pedophile, since one study of NAMBLA members concluded that: "'I had found NAMBLA's “porn”, and it was Hollywood." That said, at this point, I don't know of anything dodgy but verifiable that can't be written off as his being someone who, due to his fucked-up childhood had A) a strong identification with children and childhood, and B) nowhere near the proper level of social skills to actually act normally with people (like holding sleepovers with boys and having them sleep in his bed).

But, if he really was a pedophile (a child molester, even), does this actually mean it's okay to dismiss his body of work? Well, first of all, given the heavy influence he's exerted on the music world, to dismiss the whole thing seems closed-minded. Really, there are many great artists with alarmingly shitty personal lives. For a small list:

• Edgar Degas being a rabid anti-semite who broke with all his Jewish acquaintances after the Dreyfus Affair (even after it turned out to all be bollocks).
  
• John Lennon was accused of wife-beating by his first wife Cynthia.
  
• Gloria Grahame, well, everything people have accused Woody Allen of with Soon-Yi, she actually did, just with the genders reversed. And the kid in question actually was the biological son of her husband Nicholas Ray.
  
• Varg Vikernes is one of the greatest musicians in metal today, and yet, he's a convicted murderer and one of the leading white supremacists in Europe (to be fair, he has the good sense to not put those themes in his music).
  
• Caravaggio once killed a guy over a game of tennis.
  
• Benvenuto Cellini, one of the top sculptors of Renaissance Italy, would have fit the definition of a serial killer (he killed four people, by his own admission, and not as a soldier).
  
• Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old girl and is only legally able to move across a few European countries as a direct result.
  
• William S. Burroughs killed his wife and didn't serve any jail time.
  
• Bing Crosby apparently beat his kids.
  
• Franz Schubert allegedly fell in love with a girl of 11 when he was 21.
  
• J.D. Salinger making his kids' lives miserable in his quest for spiritual enlightenment.
  
• Mel Gibson's well-documented bigotry and spousal abuse.
  
• Roald Dahl being a tremendous dick (one allegedly blackballed from knighthood for his anti-semitism, long past the point where it could be treated as mere Values Dissonance.)
  
• An alarmingly high number of the artists I've come to love in my traversals through German Expressionist Cinema becoming Nazi collaborators (most notably Emil Jannings, the first person at all to ever win an Oscar)
  
• John Wayne repeatedly making an ass of himself over Vietnam.
  
• Clint Eastwood's disgraceful performance at the 2012 Republican Convention.
  
• Richard Wagner's virulent views on race possibly being an inspiration for the Holocaust.
  
• Jim Carrey's disgraceful adoption of anti-vaxxer conspiracies that may have helped seal the fates of several children who died of preventable diseases.
  
• Doc Rosser, the man behind the epic piano riff that opens John Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane", turned out to not only be a pedophile, but notorious enough about it that he became the first person to make the FBI Ten Most Wanted list solely for sex crimes against children.
  
• Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of one of the most influential portraits of logical positivisim in fiction, Sherlock Holmes, was actually dumb enough to believe in goddam fairies.
  
• All the celebrities who support PeTA.
  

Honestly, there are loads more where this comes from. But, the point is, I prefer to judge an artist by his works and not by his personal life, even if it has been verified. I mean, sure, I feel comfortable dismissing someone like Chris Brown as being a violent sociopath, but at least his work sucks. If I were to dismiss good artists solely for their own personal failings and not their artistic triumphs, you'd have to admit: the world would be a lot less rich a place.  Make no mistake, if we were to say "if they were that bad in person, who cares how good their works might be?" Well, the consequences wouldn't be too good.

And, seriously, barring his incalculable influence in music today, I'm not a huge fan of him, but his oeuvre is certainly quite good.