it started with a tape. one vhs. greatest hits. i was born in 1992. the thriller era, the bad era, all of it had already happened before i could walk. i was catching up. somewhere around 96, 97, 98, somebody put that tape on and i was in front of it. billie jean and the sidewalk lighting up one square at a time. nothing else on tv looked like that. beat it, the red jacket, the guitar solo, a whole crew moving together like they were daring something to go wrong. thriller was a full film not a video, zombies in formation, a voice i only recognized from scooby doo, him in the middle of all of it like he belonged there. rock with you in the dark with sequins catching light. bad and the subway platform, i used the arm of my grandmother's olive green suede fold-out couch as that ledge and jumped off it the same way, completely serious, no idea i was rehearsing anything.
black or white is where it got personal. i knew macaulay culkin from home alone, only from home alone, and seeing him in that living room at the top of that video genuinely threw me. was home alone a documentary? did he know kevin? was he involved with the wet bandits at some point? my grandmother was white and my grandfather was black and i grew up in all of that, so when that video ended with faces becoming each other i felt it somewhere i couldn't explain. didn't try to. just held it.
and then the way you make me feel. i didn't know much at that age but i knew i liked girls, and that video didn't leave room for a question in my mind. i had an intense affinity for the woman in it and her identity was a mystery to me for most of my life. tatiana thumbtzen. that came much later. at the time she was just a woman the camera kept finding in pieces, never the full picture at once. years later i made my first album cover with that same instinct, the figure before the full image, the ambiguity on purpose. i didn't connect it at the time. i'm connecting it now.
the tape was my whole world of him. no allegations, no trial, no context outside the music and the videos. just a kid doing private homework on someone he loved without knowing there was anything else to know. i didn't surface into the real conversation about him until the second trial was already underway and by then he was already a punchline. i didn't understand the grounds for it. nobody explained anything to me. all i knew was that at some point it became more socially acceptable to joke on michael than to love him, and it happened fast enough that i couldn't trace where it started. the jokes were just there one day and the reverence was gone and i was a preteen with no framework for any of it, only the feeling that something had shifted and that being loud about how much that tape meant to me was now a liability.
i wasn't fooled. the guilt i carry isn't from believing something wrong and correcting it. it's from knowing something was off and saying nothing. i was 12 during the 2005 trial. felt something was wrong with how it was all being handled, how cruel it was, how the verdict felt written before it came back. a major studio put him in the freak category and let the joke do the work without proving anything. the biggest rapper alive, who happened to be white, who happened to be from my hometown, used him as punchline material during his own very public spiral and called it music. i felt that was wrong and said nothing. laughed at some of it or went quiet, which is about the same thing. they didn't change what i believed. they just made it too costly to say.
the 1993 allegations came from a father recorded on tape talking about getting his money before any accusation existed. the boy told police nothing happened. the story changed after a sodium amytal session, a drug known to produce false memories, inadmissible in court for that reason. the settlement was an insurance company's call, not his, one he opposed. that boy recanted as an adult, cut his father off, never testified again. the 2005 trial, thirty two prosecution witnesses, sequestered jury, not guilty on all fourteen counts. acquittal. every accuser had a story that fell apart when you looked at it. prior statements that didn't match. prior lawsuits that told you something about the pattern. the people around him, the ones who were actually there, said something different and most of them still do. the fbi watched him for over a decade. wiretaps, surveillance, everything they had. found nothing. not a plea deal, not a sealed file, nothing. then ten years after he died a documentary gave two men four uncontested hours. both of them had previously sworn under oath that nothing happened. no cross examination, no corroboration, and the director stood to gain financially from the estate litigation. just putting that out there.
i want to be clear about something. everything i've shared about what his work meant to me, what that tape built in me, what i carry from it as an artist, none of that is why i believe he was innocent. i believe he was innocent because the evidence points there and common sense follows. what the personal stuff does is make the alternative harder to square. a man whose whole life, his music, his money, his time, all of it pointed toward protecting children and giving them what he never had. i can't make guilty fit that. the evidence and the life say the same thing.
i'm a father. i feel the weariness too. the instinct to watch, to wonder, to keep my kids close. that's real and i'm not pretending it isn't. but accepting that as the permanent state of things is different from it being right. the goal shouldn't be a world where we just hope adults don't harm children. it should be a world where they don't. he was trying to build that. said it his whole life. and the world took that and made it the charge against him. that's not a verdict on him. that's a verdict on us.
i'm a visual artist, a writer, a recording artist. built my whole creative life from a foundation laid in a living room before i knew what was being built. he made me believe a single piece of work could be complete and reach everyone at the same time. that precision and feeling weren't opposites. that's not nothing to give a kid. i let the noise make me quiet about it for too long and the quiet wasn't neutral. it was a choice. this is me unmaking it.
michael jackson was innocent. the evidence says so. the jury said so. the 12 year old watching the trial already knew. i should have said something then. i'm saying it now.
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
germansingergirl
prguitarman
romaincrisis
turnnoffyourmind
ellievsbear
