Artist on artist: Vanessa Kisuule on the ‘complicated joy’ of Michael Jackson

I inherited Michael Jackson just as he was about to hit a sharp decline in his cultural dominance. It was the mid 1990s, around the age of five or six, the point where I’m first able to engage with the art around me in a meaningful way. I wasn’t really aware of his legacy at that point and I was too young to experience that trajectory of him becoming the biggest pop star in the world and then becoming stranger, whiter and more eccentric. Instead it all came to me in a bundle; the Off The Wall Michael, the Thriller Michael, the Bad Michael, the Dangerous Michael, in my little world all of those Michael Jacksons existed simultaneously.

I think what made Michael Jackson such a magnetic figure is he was a very diligent student of his craft. He really understood the elements of a pop star, and made it his life’s work to take all of those to their zenith. There’s something very total about him. You’re watching him dance; you’re looking at his incredible outfits and the music is some of the most catchy, irresistible pop music to ever be written. Every single angle is covered in a way that, other than maybe with Beyonce, I don’t think has been replicated since.

My favourite Michael Jackson album? I really like Dangerous. And ‘Remember the Time’ is one of my favourite ever videos. It’s a good time that era of Michael because he’s trying his hand at hip hop and new jack swing; it’s a really fun album and it’s probably the one I revisited the most when writing the book. Even the album cover, I used to look at it all the time as a kid because there’s so much to take in, it’s a very formative image for me with Michael’s ever-present eyes beaming out at you. I’m always going to be a contrarian because whilst it’s easy to say Off The Wall, and of course Thriller was the most popular, but I’ve got to give love to Dangerous.

Growing up my family all loved Michael Jackson, but the depth and intensity of obsession was mine alone. Maybe if I’d been a kid in the 1980s instead of the 1990s I’d have had more company in my fandom, but even then he was still a widely appreciated artist; my mum was always listening to the radio and he’d be played a lot on there; he’d be played at parties; people liked him, I mean, how could you not? The bangers were undeniable. Michael was still hugely popular in the early 1990s and so I shared him with others in that sense – oddly, I was none the wiser to the rumours of abuse that were swirling by around 1992 – but the intensity, the focus and the totality of my Michael Jackson fandom very much felt like my own.

I didn’t own a lot of Michael Jackson memorabilia growing up. I didn’t have money like that. I had the DVDs, I had the CDs, and then a lot of my stuff was homemade; printed pictures of Michael stuck on folders, t-shirts on which I’d drawn Michael Jackson’s face with a marker pen. When I launched the book, Max Porter gifted me an odd book, that’s basically a children’s transcription to the Moonwalker film. It’s very short and it has, with hindsight, these quite creepy sentences of ‘Michael loves to play with his friends Susan and Toby, and they run together into the forest where it’s dark and scary’. It feels too on the nose, a real element of foreshadowing. Max got the book as a gift when they were young and couldn’t bear to hold on to it, so now it’s a bittersweet heirloom living uneasily in my house.

I’m not really sure when my fandom of Michael Jackson started to wane, I think it just happened in layers as I got older. When you’re a child your world is very small – you go to school, you come home, everything is being decided for you – so I think that’s why you’re more likely to become fixated on things like pop stars at that age. Then as you get older you’re trying to work out who you are. You’re making friends and your friends become your new fixation, and you build collaborative fixations, which are actually just conduits to get closer to each other – they’re not really about the thing you’ve all pledged allegiance to. So the level of obsession I once had with Michael had to wane because my sense of myself was growing and I think that’s a big part of fandom. It’s a really absorbing thing, so when you don’t really have much going on for yourself as a person it’s a way to find purpose, a community and a sense of yourself in the absence of anything else.

If I could’ve been there for any moment in his career it would be the Bucharest show on the 1992 Dangerous world tour. It’s him at the height of his performance powers, because whilst he might be more agile on the earlier tours, with Dangerous you’re getting the whole discography across his four best albums. And the crowd at that concert is absolutely feral.

I was devastated when he died. Absolutely devastated. So many people I’ve talked to about the book say they remember where they were when he died, or who told them. It’s up there with 9/11 in that regard as a pivotal moment in recent history. There are certain people who when they pass, we have to rearrange our notion of our cultural landscape to account for their absence. Michael is one of those. And it’s a mark of his cultural resonance that even people who are quite ambivalent to him remember where they were when he died.

It was only through watching his memorial service that it hit me that he has children. It must be quite something to have your father discussed in the way that Michael Jackson is, but then have your own particular experience of him as his child. That they’d go downstairs in the morning and Michael Jackson is giving them a bowl of cereal and asking how they slept; the idea that people were related to him in a way that he was just ‘dad’ is mad. And then how do they metabolise what he was then accused of? What do they think of it? Do they staunchly refuse to believe it’s true, or do they concede to it, open that door and its wider implications? There are three people out there for whom Michael Jackson isn’t just a rhetorical device, he’s their father, and I often wonder what that means for them.

I recently discovered a track of Michael Jackson’s I’d not heard before. ‘I Want to Be Where You Are’. It’s little Michael, when he’s still at Motown, still very much the cute button-nosed lead singer. And I listened to it and it filled me with this strange latent grief; grief for that boy who didn’t know what was about to unfold, and wasn’t aware of the horrors that he was going to experience and the horrors he was going to inflict on other people. The flight of his voice is really beautiful, and like with ‘Let Me Show You the Way to Go’ there’s something about the chord progression that makes me feel quite mournful, even though it’s quite a jolly mid-tempo song.

What I feel now when I engage with Michael Jackson’s work is a complicated joy. I’ve been able to find my way back to enjoying his music and his videos, but it’s tinged. I’ll be listening and I’ll be bopping my head and then this quiet sombreness will settle over me that muffles it, so I can still enjoy it, but it will never be like it was before.

I often get asked whether we can separate the art of Michael Jackson from the artist. And I don’t think you can separate them, I think instead you sit with all that it is. The reason we ask the question is because we want to enjoy things without scruples or guilt – we don’t want to sit with the fact that people can do the sort of things that Roman Polanski and Harvey Weinstein did, and yet still enjoy aspects of themselves that are observant, conscientious, genius even. Unfortunately for those of us who like things to be simple, these are men who’ve made brilliant things, and you have to have something redeemable in you to do that, because if you are completely defunct of all compassion, care and astuteness you can’t you can’t make good art. If you want to read another book that addresses this, Monsters by Claire Dederer is brilliant and has loads of overlaps with my book, as well as its own more philosophical lens on this quandary.

We have to accept that terrible people also have good in them, and vice versa. That’s often the sticking point for people, because to acknowledge this sounds like you’re trying to excuse or minimise the terrible stuff. No, it’s just all there. So, being able to separate the art from the artist as far as ‘is there a way for me to engage with this thing that I love without having to think about this ugly, uncomfortable thing?’ No, there’s not. To want things to be simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is quite a child-like impulse. Being an adult is being able to say it’s all of these things; everything everywhere, all at once.

I initially felt defensive of Michael Jackson because I thought someone who was that brilliant and that amazing and made my life so joyous as a child couldn’t possibly be capable of what he was accused of. I think one of the hardest aspects of dissonance for us to deal with is that people we love and care for who are capable of great kindness, can also have treated others terribly. That’s why I wanted to write the book as I think that’s what our brain does; It can’t reconcile the good faith and allegiance we have to a person, with the idea that they might also be a figure of deep pain and violence for somebody else. And when you’re young, it makes sense to think and feel that way, because you’re far more rigid and binary in your thinking. But a sign of maturation is realising that these things can coexist, and being more familiar with the world is being able to hold all of these simultaneities in your head.

The one thing I’d want to ask Michael Jackson is why did you do it? I really want to know how he was framing that in his head. Because I think what’s especially painful for me is that evidently Michael was abused at the hands of his father – I’d argue that the level of fame and work he and his brothers were put under at such a young age is a form of abuse. It’s an environment that forces a quasi-adulthood of a child that will always warp their sense of self, the world, and how people relate to them. And so having had all of those experiences I find it flabbergasting he would do what he did. I’m so mad at him. So I want to understand what he thought he was doing, how he justified it in his head, and I want to hear it out of his mouth. Why did you do that? In what world did you think it was okay for you to do that?

He was obviously someone who was very ill at ease in himself. And I think we can all relate to that to some degree. He may seem like a very strange, inexplicable character, but I think he’s also emblematic of a lot of the anxieties and insecurities of the modern person, especially when it pertains to the body. We look at Michael as this freak of nature for bleaching his skin, but millions of people across the diaspora use bleaching products. He’s doing what other people are doing to assuage insecurities, but in proportion to the level of his fame he had to do it to a greater degree. In all his extreme body modifications, I think he makes us confront the natural endpoint of our dissonant beauty ideals.

I’ve learned a lot about how to be a stage performer from him. I often think about his stagecraft, how he would emerge on stage in a shower of sparks and then he’d just stand there for what felt like minutes. And the audience would lose their minds, just from the sheer sight of his presence. He would stand there, stock still, and they’d be yelling their throats hoarse. And then he’d make a micro movement, tilt his head slightly and the screams would reach a new pitch. It’s a masterclass in the power of being still, the use of gravitas to create anticipation. So because of him I really think about the visual aspects of my own performance. Few poets do that. They get up, do their poems, then go, whereas I’m very aware of the fact that people can see me so I want to give them something worth looking at. I really believe in the power and resonance of that.

I think because he was a massive popstar, Michael Jackson isn’t given much credence as a serious and considered artist. He really studied the greats and understood every aspect of the entertainment industry. Although a lot of things he did weren’t original, he always put his own spin on what he did. And he effectively invented the music video as a vehicle for music as we understand it. He was a real technician. Yet because he’s so ripe for caricature, it’s a nuance that people don’t give him credit for.

His visual branding is incredible. Can you imagine associating yourself with certain signifiers so much that people only need to see a black shoe over a white sock and they think of you; they see a sequined glove and they think of you. That’s a level of symbol-making bordering on Biblical.

Despite everything that happened, I’m very glad that Michael Jackson existed. And that doesn’t have to contradict the fact that what he did was awful, and that he never really meaningfully atoned for it. Each of us own our different set of scales on which we weigh these things up. No doubt my scale is affected by my own bias and residual desire (still!) to absolve my childhood hero. The hurt he caused is incalculable. But so was the joy he gave to so many of us. And I am deeply envious, and suspicious, of anyone who has a neat conclusion to draw from those two warring ideas.

Vanessa Kisuule was speaking to Glen Wilson