I want muscles/All over his body.” The following year, Jackson wrote “Centipede,” which became Rebbie Jackson’s signature song. ![]() “She said she wants a guy/To keep her satisfied/But that’s alright for her/But it ain’t enough for me,” Jackson wrote in the 1982 Diana Ross hit song “Muscles.” The song continues: “Still, I don’t care if he’s young or old/(Just make him beautiful)…. And there were the songs he wrote for women-early idols like Diana Ross or his older sister, Rebbie-songs that expressed what he could never say about his own desire. There was his appropriation of Garland’s later style-the sparkly black Judy-in-concert jacket-during the 1984 “Victory” tour, his last performances with his brothers, whose costuming made them look like intergalactic superheroes. Early on, he recognized the power mainstream stardom held-a chance to defend himself and his mother from the violent ministrations of his father, Joe Jackson (who famously has justified his tough parenting, his whippings, as a catalyst for his children’s success), and to wrest from the world what most performers seek: a nonfractured mirroring.Īfter “Ben,” the metaphors Michael Jackson used to express his difference from his family became ever more elaborate and haunting: there was his brilliant turn as an especially insecure, effete, and, at times, masochistic scarecrow in Sidney Lumet’s 1978 film version of the Broadway hit The Wiz. He never changed that potent formula, not even after he went solo, more or less permanently, in 1978 at the age of twenty. They were as smooth as the Ink Spots, but there was a hint of wildness and pathos in Michael Jackson’s rough-boy soprano, which, with its Jackie Wilson– and James Brown–influenced yelps, managed to remain just this side of threatening. The Jackson Five were America’s first internationally recognized black adolescent boy band. Or, to put it more accurately, he was all child-an Ariel of the ghetto-whose appeal, certainly to the habitués of places like the Starlite, lay partly in his ability to find metaphors to speak about his difference, and theirs. ![]() ![]() For it was evident by then that Michael Jackson was no mere child with a gift. The title song for a film about a bullied boy and his love for a rat named Ben (together they train a legion of other rodents to kill the boy’s tormentors eventually Ben helps kill his human companion), the mournful ballad quickly became Jackson’s early signature song-certainly among the queens at the Starlite, who ignore its Gothic context, and play it over and over again as a kind of anthem of queer longing. It’s 1972, and “Ben,” the fourteen-year-old star’s first solo hit, is everywhere.
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