Michael Jackson the Father, Poet Songwriter, Dancer, Superstar

Michael Jackson’s Children (Prince Michael II, Paris Jackson, Prince Michael Jackson)

Sometimes I wonder when Michael Jackson began to realize he wanted a lot of children. In his song Can You Feel It he sings to us: Every breath you take is someone’s death in another place: Every healthy smile is hunger and strife to another child. The lyrics told me of his concern for children. Later, his immense philanthropic work showed the world his concern for children. He talked to his sister Janet about fatherhood. And he sure was a fabulous Dad.

I wish I knew a father like him when I was a child. His sensitivity shows, once again, when he sings I’ll Be There with his brothers at the Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration. Heck, I wish I could find a man with the father energy in him like MJ. I want the kind that would take me into the fantasy life children are supposed to have and adult writers are supposed to create from.

Until now, Michael’srole as a father has been described in little bits here and there, more like in moments. While his life as a star proved to be full of journalistic antics, new articles on his life report him as a beloved father, uncle, family man! Away from the cameras, Jackson created a home environment of love, attention and special moments for his children.

Every one of his nieces and nephews felt that Michael was a great role model, mentor and father figure. He would tell them what you can conceive you can believe and achieve. Quite a few new home videos are being released. My favorite captures the moment when Michael gave his children a Chocolate Labrador named Kenya.

And then there were the birds who danced to his music.

Two cats, named Katie and Thriller, also roamed the house.

I would argue his paternal nature was about translating a bisexual energy into world class giving. And you can do that for the loved one’s at home and for those who come to be your audience. I see every day that parents allow their girls to wear boys clothes and their boys to wear girl clothes. It’s the new thing to do. It’s popular in many towns in America these days. What is peculiar to me is why I have never heard MJ address the topic of bisexual energies and clothes.

I see him perform it, however. I don’t know if it’s a taboo subject to talk about, that is, to MJ. But we can see him costuming it in his live concert at Brunei.

His gestures there mime the insemination of his audience. Will his children care? I doubt it. Like the recent Miley Cyrus twerking incident, it’s just symbolism and the way the audience makes an artist want to give and give into the oneness of the atman, or the all, or the we-are-all one, feeling. Many of us want to own the oneness. It’s yin yang.

It’s not as if we, the audience can’t see it. The superstar Prince displays these same qualities.

We Are The World, a favorite of Jackson, and You Are My Life teach us how he liked to see life. Bad and Thriller show us how others needed him to see life. Which did he fall for the most? He certainly didn’t score that well with many Billy Jeans. And I doubt if anyone in his family cared! They seemed to enjoy him as is.

He taught his younger family members to have goals and they would see how he’d post his goals up on the wall so he could see them. Is Off The Wall a personal statement about this big habit of his? Maybe. I believe one of the fantastic contributions Michael made America was that he made us deal with the fact that there are all sorts of forms to paternal love. Michael’s form was of a certain, high- achiever, perfectionist kind. And admittedly, it felt and looked bisexual — something I had to come to terms with.

Showmanship and Idioms

MJ’s also considered himself to be an actor. His showmanship in The Wiz wasgiven good reviews. He also wanted to do Harry Potter and Iron Man. I loved the line he quoted in The Wiz – it was from Confucius, “Ignorance is the night of the mind, the night without moon or star.” Michael admitted that he fell in love with the scarecrow when he was a little boy because you feel sorry for him, his character.

I propose that the more pain we experience in childhood, the more giving we must do as adults. The giving relieves our soul. And Michael, and his extraordinary emotional range, often noted as a child star too, was all about giving because of his level of experiencing an intense reality as a boy. His awful memory of his father hitting him may have created an energy that had to be shared. But his emotional sharing could not have been done without the visceral and tonal experiential talent he had and the talent with which he surrounded himself. I feel this is worth mentioning because his songs reached such a tenderness that he himself would cry while into it.

Luckily he figured out how to go through many unusual transformations in a way that speaks to the demands of the modern people in America who had intense issues to struggle through. Michael liked to remind us that stars are people. They have feelings. They can get hurt. They need privacy about some topics and activities we all must do to mature. This contrasted drastically with many traditional kinds of males who were taught to not show their feelings and bully their way through life.

His lyrical messages, his moon walk, the costuming, the one glove, super star belts, sparkling socks, tape on his fingers and military regalia worked in his favor and I would say were part and parcel of his masculine kind of look. I loved his designer jackets.

Some people have argued that the line between the performer and private man became blurred by the early 1990s. But did it really? I mean what is a whole person but one who dresses his style and is his style no matter where he is! Isn’t it more the case that the private man was showing us himself on stage in all ways except in ways that are, according to the majority of people, modest things we do almost exclusively in private? In fact, he shielded his family from the public to have privacy.

I was glad to see his soft nature when he gave interviews and his rough nature when he danced hard. I’d say his mother did a great job making him stay connected to the feminine side of himself.

Music historians will probably teach us that Jackson came to define what it meant to be a poet star in the postmodern world. For those of us still living, we still can’t get enough of Michael. I will write about him one more time for the justsheetmusic.com readers who can retrieve Michael’s music right here. In the mean time, watch his favorite song for our world: