Ever since 1958, the year Jerry Lee Lewis arrived in England with a wife who also happened to be his 13-year-old cousin, rock music and transgressive behaviour have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship.
Violence, hard drugs, sexual deviancy, lurid public eccentricity — all frowned on in polite society, yet all de rigueur in the world of popular music.
The more extreme the conduct of rock stars, the better. We will apparently forgive them anything: mutilating wild animals with their teeth (Ozzy Osbourne), sexual assault (the late Tupac Shakur), beating their wives with a length of iron pipe while on PCP (James Brown). It’s unlikely that So Solid Crew’s chart-topping career will be damaged by the recent conviction of rapper Skat D, who broke a 15-year-old fan’s jaw when she refused his advances.
All of which makes Michael Jackson an utterly unique figure. The ongoing oddities of the self-styled King of Pop — sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, appearing in public wearing a smog mask, Bubbles the monkey — made for sniggering tabloid fodder throughout the 1980s, without any adverse effect on his popularity or monumental sales (Thriller, for instance, sold 47-million copies).
Since 1994, however, when Jackson settled a child abuse case out of court, his commercial success has been overshadowed. In the public consciousness, he has ceased to be merely a wealthy eccentric and become a rather sinister, twilit figure.
His every subsequent action has been viewed with suspicion. His marriage to Lisa Marie Presley was derided as a publicity stunt. His appearance at the 1996 Brit Awards made a hero of stage invader Jarvis Cocker. His attempt to introduce a “universal bill of children’s rights” was mocked both for its puzzling demands (how exactly would one enforce “the right to be thought of as adorable”?), and because Jackson launched it at Oxford University, accompanied by spoon-bender Uri Geller.
On the evidence of his first album in six years, even Jackson has realised his public image is out of control. Almost every aspect of Invincible stresses that — despite all evidence to the contrary — Jackson is just a normal guy. Six tracks boast input from heavyweight R&B producer Rodney Jerkins, famed for work with Brandy, Whitney Houston and Mary J Blige. His very presence attempts to recontextualise Jackson — instead of soul music’s own Citizen Kane, closeted in his Neverland mansion, Jackson is merely another R&B singer queuing for Jerkins’s magic touch.
The lyrics touch on Jackson’s relationship with the media and his unswerving dedication to healing the world (“I can’t do it by myself,” he magnanimously admits on Threatened), but essentially stick to straightforward love themes. The album was launched with a single, You Rock My World, that rather self-consciously apes the slick funk of Jackson’s 1979 album Off the Wall, and a New York concert that reunited him with the Jackson Five. Both deliberately recall the era before Jacko went Wacko, before his obsession with plastic surgery made him look inhuman, when the only peculiar thing about him was his inordinate talent.
The reunion concert turned into bizarre farce, however, when Marlon Brando delivered a bewildering lecture about “children hacked to death by a machete”, and every other attempt at normalising Jackson is similarly undermined.
Thanks to Jerkins’s production, the opening track Unbreakable is a fine, if overlong, example of jittering, pulsing R&B, but the track features a guest appearance from the late rapper Notorious BIG. The sound of Jackson sparring with the disembodied voice of a dead man is extremely disquieting.
The lyrics to ballads such as Break of Dawn may be clichéd, but the very fact that they are being sung by Jackson gives them a whiff of weirdness. “Let’s walk down to the park, making love until it gets dark,” he trills. The thought of Jackson having sex is odd and frankly distressing.
Then there is The Lost Children, a hideous, syrupy sub-Broadway showtune featuring Jackson and an infants’ choir. It ends with a fearful child’s voice saying “It’s so quiet in the forest … it’s getting dark, I think we’d better go home now.” It’s creepy, has deeply unpleasant connotations and is appallingly misjudged.
Ultimately, it is Invincible‘s quest for regularity that is its undoing. Jerkins’s contributions aside, it expresses its normality through utterly anodyne music. This time, Jackson sounds like a strange, sinister man who has made a boring and very long album. Tedious ballad after tedious ballad pile up over 16 tracks. Jackson strains away (on Speechless he even feigns tears), Carlos Santana pops up for a guest appearance, but the songs are unmemorable, not a Scream or Billie Jean among them. After 76 unremitting minutes, you’re left in no doubt: like its creator, Invincible has simply gone too far.