Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson

Cashmore, an author and professor of sociology, examines Michael Jackson's life in reverse chronological order, to understand the causes of actions, events, and circumstances in his life. He discusses Jackson's place in recent history; his death and the aftermath; his time in Bahrain and other parts of the Middle East; the criminal charges against him, the trial, and his acquittal; the lead-up to and initial fallout from the Martin Bashir documentary; how the Jackson narrative began to spiral out of control; the history of violence against African Americans; Debbie Rowe, Princess Diana, and their impact on Jackson; the Chandler sexual abuse accusation, his drugs confession, and his marriage to Lisa Marie Presley; whether Janet Jackson was the most culturally significant female artist of the 1980s; how Michael Jackson's ultimate destruction began in 1990-1992; how the stories about him in the National Enquirer added to his persona; his relationship with Don King and Arnold Klein; the role of Bill Cosby in creating the culture of the late 20th century; the impact of MTV and the video age on Jackson's status; the importance of Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, and other black symbols of the 1980s; why people started to analyze Michael Jackson and reinterpret him in the mid-1980s; the impact of Quincy Jones and the Off the Wall album; the rise of Motown as a cultural force; the Jackson family origins and prehistory of the Jackson 5; and who created Michael Jackson and what would have happened if he had lived. Annotation ©2022 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Michael Jackson died in 2009, but he has never really left us and there are no signs he ever will. A globally acclaimed child star in the 1970s, the world's premier entertainer in the final decades of the 20th century, a perplexingly odd character in the 21st century, Jackson defied every known category and became borderline incomprehensible. To remedy this, in The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson, Ellis Cashmore reflects the restless, unorthodox and mysterious life Jackson led in order to understand more about him as well as his cultural impact.Exploring how Jackson emerged from the post-civil rights era when America was searching for someone who symbolized a new age as it struggled to unburden itself of racial inequality, Cashmore's book is the first to examine Jackson's career through the prisms of American racial politics and celebrity culture. Uniquely structured, beginning in the present and journeying back to Jackson's birth, The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson will excite and enliven debates on this controversial figure, one that very much continues to remain embedded within our culture.