Re-living ‘MICHAEL’

It had rained just before dawn.

You had purchased a ticket online to see the film ‘MICHAEL’ at Lekki Purple mall at 2pm, when your work exertions would be ending.

On WhatsApp a greeting came through from your brother Gbenga. It was still raining cats and dogs in Ikeja, and he hoped you were not headed that way.

No, you replied, happily. The plan was to consult in Lekki in the morning and then pop into Genesis film theatre nearby to watch ‘MICHAEL’.

‘You should see the film too’, you ventured.

‘Michael as in ‘Michael Jackson’,’ he queried? ‘No, thanks’.

Many upstanding people would not give Michael Jackson the time of day if he popped up in front of them in the Lagos traffic. But many other people loved, and still love, the troubled genius, so many years after his death.

The Hollywood biopic on his life has been breaking Box Office records for early attendance world-wide.

2pm on a weekday, it appeared, was the best time to go to the movies in this neck of the woods. You had the auditorium to yourself, and as the film rolled, you were immersed in a vortex of pulsating sound that came at you from every side.

Michael was born on 29th August 1958 in Gary, Indiana. He was the eighth and youngest child of the Jackson family.  It was a family uniquely blessed with musical skills. The father, Joe, was a factory worker, and a man who ruled the roost with an iron hand and his belt, which he used to whip the children, especially Michael, into line. His explanation, when he deigned to offer one, was that he did not want his children to end up as factory workers like him.

Michael would live for only fifty years and die in 2009 from cardiac arrest caused by an abusive use of the anaesthetic drug propofol. In those fifty years, he became many things – an international pop music star  – possibly the greatest there has ever been; a suspected sexual offender, accused and almost jailed for allegedly abusing  young male victims; a fashion icon and entertainer who held hundreds of thousands spellbound on the streets and at some of the largest venues in the world with his magnetic aura. Twice married – if ‘married’ was the right description for his transient dalliances with his ‘wives’, father of three children, once famous for holding his tiny baby and showing him to the world through an upstairs window in a London hotel while, on the streets below, thousands of excited fans of all ages screamed his name. And – oh – a shatterer of all manner of glass ceilings that had kept even the most talented black musicians in the USA and the world down below a certain level of achievement and exposure in the entertainment world – because an unwritten law reserved the top of the table exclusively for white people.

It is impossible to tell the story of such a weird ‘creature from another planet’, who from early childhood preferred to play with animals and cartoon figures rather than interact with human beings – in a film of two hours. And, indeed, the film critics and the sanctimonious establishment have been brutal in their reviews. But just as in life, despite their regular excoriation, the masses, black and white, swooned and jumped over one another to touch Michael, so they have been trooping to watch ‘MICHAEL’, in different parts of the world.

All of this was going through your mind as you sat in the dark auditorium, soaking in the story of this strange character, played with remarkable verisimilitude by his nephew Jaafar.

Other things were going through your mind, too. So pervasive was the grip of Michael once on the imagination of children worldwide that you remembered your son Ay practising his hip swaying crotch-grabbing dance and trying to do the moonwalk in your sitting room so he could show it off to his friends. For his brother’s landmark tenth birthday party, your wife had to hunt out a ‘Michael Jackson’ imitator-DJ who got the children’s gathered friends in Ikeja GRA into an ecstatic funk.

The film is a journey of musical highlights, and it leaves more out than it could ever hope to put in. The rise of the Jackson 5, driven by the ambition and whipping belt of their father. The pivotal moments. The solo album ‘Michael’ achieving unprecedented chart success. The making of ‘Thriller’.

Michael performing with the family ‘one last time’ to celebrate 25 years of Motown record company. With the routine set over, and his brothers leaving the stage, Michael would come back to the microphone and announce to the crowd – ‘I like the old songs, but I like the new ones more.’

Before the packed hall and a live television audience of almost fifty million, unprecedented in those days, he would sing ‘Billie Jean’, dance a Moonwalk that would send children and adults in the hall and in their living rooms all over the world crazy, spinning furiously round and ending up on the tips of his toes in an electric  sequence that nobody had ever experienced before.

MTV, the gatekeepers of entertainment videos and the top of the industry which they had kept exclusive for white musicians would begin to play ‘Billie Jean’. Other black musicians would follow in his wake.

The indescribable ‘Bad’ tour, starting with that unforgettable performance at Wembley Stadium.

The court case; the hired doctor administering illegal propofol infusions; the plan for the World Concert Tour to end all Tours – none of that is touched, yet.

It is likely there will be a sequel.

The gate-keeping critics continue to shellack ‘MICHAEL’ as nothing but a ‘whitewash’.

But it is a good film to see, you conclude, as you depart Lekki Purple. And you hope that Nigerians watch it and make up their own minds.