On the heels of his enormous popularity, Jackson
signed a $15 million promotional contract with Pepsi
in 1984, but he was seriously burned during an acci-
dent at the filming of a television commercial. Later
that year, he reunited the Jackson Five for the five-
month Victory Tour. Then, in January, 1985, he col-
laborated with Lionel Richie to compose “We Are
the World,” a three-time Grammy-winning song per-
formed by an all-star group of pop music’s biggest
stars to raise money for African famine relief. Follow-
ing the 1987 release ofBad, which spawned seven
more hit singles and topped the music charts for
eight weeks, Jackson launched a sixteen-month
worldwide tour that drew over 4.4 million fans. By
the end of the decade, each of Jackson’s three solo
albums had been certified multi-platinum, and he
had released five platinum and three gold singles.
Controversy By the mid-1980’s, stories about Jack-
son appeared regularly in the tabloid press, and
many of them portrayed him in an unflattering light.
Reports told of his attempts to purchase the bones of
Joseph Merrick, a Victorian-era man whose physical
deformities led him to be known as the Elephant
Man, as well as Jackson’s penchant for sleeping in a
hyperbaric chamber in an effort to retard the aging
process. Most controversial, however, was the dra-
matic change in his appearance. With each new al-
bum and his subsequent reemergence into the pub-
lic eye, Jackson’s skin grew lighter, his nose and lips
thinner, his cheeks higher, and his jaw line more an-
gular; at one point, he even developed a cleft in his
chin. Some questioned whether the alterations were
an attempt on Jackson’s part to reject his African
American heritage, but he explained the change in a
1988 autobiography as primarily the result of pu-
berty and diet.
Jackson’s attempts to expand his musical and
personal empire also courted controversy. He pur-
chased a controlling interest in the publishing com-
pany that owned the rights to most of the Beatles’
music, creating a serious rift with former Beatle Paul
McCartney, who was still performing and with whom
Jackson had collaborated to create several hit songs.
He became more extravagant in his dress, wearing
outfits with sashes and epaulets that resembled mili-
tary costumes, and in his work projects, such as a
short futuristic 3-D film for Disney,Captain EO, that
cost over a million dollars per minute, at the time the
most expensive film per minute ever produced. His
1988 autobiography shattered the myth of his fam-
ily’s idyllic nature, when Jackson documented the
physical abuse he suffered during his childhood at
the hands of his father. That same year, he built a pri-
vate amusement park and mansion in California
that he named Neverland Ranch, where he regularly
hosted sick children.
Impact By the end of the decade, Jackson had be-
come pop music’s biggest international star, enjoy-
ing a level of celebrity previously enjoyed in the rock
era only by Elvis Presley and the Beatles. In addition
to over one hundred Grammys and other music
awards, he was awarded a series of honors for nota-
ble achievements throughout the 1980’s, including542 Jackson, Michael The Eighties in America
Michael Jackson.(Paul Natkin)