Michael Jackson. Did He Need To Die?

Who's Bad?

HL Special, Collector's Edition

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Michael Jackson Magazine cover HealthyLivinG Magazine. Did he need to die? Who's bad by Aida Poulsen

It’s been thirty years since a pair of moccasins and white socks needed only four minutes to change the world of music, dance, fashion, video—almost everything we call modern art. But after that epic Motown 25 performance in 1983 the newborn idol was crying backstage because… his performance wasn’t as good as he wanted. Roaring, standing, crying theatre wouldn’t do for approbation. He believed it only after a random child quietly told him that it was good. “Children don’t lie, as they don’t want from you anything”—was Michael Jackson’s lifetime conviction.

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Here is the question: what kind of music, performances, lyrics, films, philanthropy, hospitals, parks and who knows what else we would have possessed if the world would be willing to pay more for the well deserved press coverage of Michael Jackson’s artistry, than for his presentation as a freak and spectacle?

Another one: who else’s career would have survived the fanatical persecution for 26 years, with which he dealt so naively, trusting that his vision of the world, no matter how singular, if good natured, communicated through his denudating lyrics or TV confessions, will be heard?

As one of paparazzi, Ben Evenstad, puts it: “He was the only celebrity that, if you were devoted enough, he would let you into his house. You think somebody could go to Bruce Willis’s house and say, ‘I love you, I love you,’ that you’d get in? He’d call the police. That’s what all of them would do. All but Michael. If you said ‘I love you, I love you’ to Michael Jackson he would assume you meant you loved him, and he would let you in.”

Michael Jackson Magazine cover HealthyLivinGMagazine: Did he need to die? by Aida Poulsen

Beat It was filmed on Los Angeles’s Skid Row on March 9, 1983. Michael Jackson cast some 80 members of two LA street gangs, the Crips and Bloods, to promote peace.

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