Michael Jackson and “Cancel Culture”: What If It’s All a Lie?
By Linda-Raven Woods
Long before a film called Leaving Neverland raised controversy and the lynch mob hysteria of “Cancel Culture” began screaming for his head, Michael Jackson was already on to the public perception of him that had been fed largely in part by the tabloid media, and at least in some measure by his own aesthetic choices. In a song titled “Is It Scary?” Jackson acknowledged that, like an artistic changeling, he would become whatever we projected upon him. “I’m gonna be exactly what you want to see,” he sings, later raising the question, “Am I amusing you/Or just confusing you?/Am I the beast you visualized?/And if you want to see eccentrialities/I’ll be grotesque before your eyes…” For Jackson, an artist who had long thrived on public adoration and the unconditional love of his fandom, it had taken an extraordinary journey to arrive at a point where he could write such lyrics, to acknowledge that he must accept and embrace the duality of a persona that now invited as much fear, scrutiny and speculation as it did joy.
That song came from a 1996 movie called Ghosts which has also become chillingly prophetic in its own right. As the lovable but enigmatic “Maestro” who is ultimately persecuted for his differences, Jackson foreshadowed not only his own physical death, but the imminent reaction to it…
