Anybody who bought their ticket early
for Quincy Jones’ show at London’s
O2 in June will have noticed that the
event that took place was not exactly what
they signed up for. When it was announced
in February, it was billed as an orchestral
tribute to Jones’ three blockbuster collabo-
rations with Michael Jackson: Off The Wall,
Thriller and Bad. In May, however, a new
wave of posters appeared around London,
rebranding the night a “Soundtrack Of The
80s”. The poster still listed several Jackson
numbers (interspersed, in some printings,
with considerably fewer famous songs from
Jones’ 1981 solo album, The Dude), but the
singer’s name was absent. This awkward com-
promise sums up the inconclusiveness of the
general response to the upsettingly credible
allegations of child abuse in the documentary
Leaving Neverland.
When the documentary aired in the UK
in March, I must have read a book’s worth
of think piece columns about whether
or not Jackson was “cancelled”. The idea
of zero-tolerance “cancel culture” took
off in a big way last year, but its hyper-
bole is meaningless in the world beyond
Twitter. While the cultural commissars in a
totalitarian regime might have had the power
to strike artists from the record and render
their work inaccessible, in a democracy the
process is never so ruthlessly emphatic.
The cultural verdict on the legacy of an
artist who has done something atrocious
emerges from a complicated matrix of count-
less individual judgements.
En masse, these judgements amount to a
kind of moral arithmetic: subtract the gravity
of the offence from the greatness of the
music and look at the remainder. When, in
February, the New York Times published
claims that Ryan Adams had manipulated
and harassed several younger women, Adams
quickly discovered that his place in the pan-
theon of Americana singer- songwriters was
not as secure as he might previously have
hoped. But in Jackson’s case the numbers
on both sides of the equation are immense.
What do you do when the biggest pop star of
all time appears to have committed one
of the worst possible crimes? The question
was asked when such claims first surfacedStory by Dorian Lynskey Illustration by Matt KenyonQuincy Jones’ publicists airbrushed Michael Jackson from their posters, but whether
disgraced stars are airbrushed from history is up to all of usCancel culture vs the untouchablesMusicin the Nineties but was magically erased
by his death in 2009. According to Margo
Jefferson, author of the terrific book On
Michael Jackson, “Death restored his reputa-
tion as an artist.” But now that conundrum is
back with a vengeance.
If Jackson was still alive it would be a
more practical matter: just ask R Kelly,
whose musical reputation has been finally
and irreparably damaged by allegations of
sexual abuse, or Adams, who effectively
cancelled himself by pulling his tour dates
and disappearing from view. But Jackson
is beyond punishment or repentance, so it’s
left to his fans to decide what to do with his
music. Having read enough about how people
should react, I’m more interested in how
people actually have reacted. Five months
after Leaving Neverland, it’s possible to get a
clearer picture of how people have responded- and it’s a mess.
S
everal Jackson tributes have been aban-
doned, yet Thriller Live has extended its West
End run until April 2020 and the new jukebox
musical Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough is still
bound for Broadway next summer. Some DJs
have vowed never to play his songs again,while others still use them to pack dance
floors without receiving a word of complaint.
When I asked my Twitter followers whether
they had experienced Jackson’s music in the
wild since March, one said he’d heard “Don’t
Stop ’Til You Get Enough” at a wedding:
“People seemed unsure if it was OK to dance
to this version of Michael, if it came before
all the unpleasantness.” Another said that
his spin instructor in California had a 100 per
cent Jacko playlist and when he complained
about it, his fellow spinners booed him. A
third had heard “Billie Jean” in a grocery
store: “[I] turned to my roommate and said, ‘Is
this allowed?’ And then we both sang along.”
The language is revealing. Is it OK? Is it
allowed? Is “I Want You Back” permissible
because Jackson was only eleven at the time
but “PYT (Pretty Young Thing)” isn’t? If we
dance (or spin) to his music, will we be judged
as amoral? If we don’t, will we be deemed
killjoys? We need rules, damn it, but there
are none, so we end up in the weird yes-
and-no man’s land of the Quincy Jones
poster. When the writer Chuck Klosterman
called Jackson “too massive to cancel”, it
wasn’t a moral argument, merely a state-
ment of fact.
The relationship between art and artist
is such a hot topic these days that it’s easy
to think it’s a distinctly modern concern,
that earlier generations weren’t enlightened
enough to care what creators got up to in
their private lives. But this moral dilemma
isn’t a recent invention. In 1944 George
Orwell offered one solution: “One ought to
be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously
the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman
and a disgusting human being. The one does
not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other.”
Following the Me Too movement and similar
grim revelations, critics and commentators are
now far more likely to take a hard line and
say that, actually, reprehensible behaviour
should discredit the art. That is the simplest
and safest position to take in public. In their
lives, however, most people are instinctively
closer to Orwell’s position. “Billie Jean” is a
timeless jam. The man who recorded it was
most likely a predatory paedophile. The one
does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the
other. They hesitate. They sing along.09-19DropMusic.indd 136 09/07/2019 14:49
132 GQ.CO.UK SEPTEMBER 2019