Description
Book SynopsisMichael Jackson died in 2009, but he has never really left us and there are no signs he ever will. A globally acclaimed child star in the 1970s, the world's premier entertainer in the final decades of the 20th century, a perplexingly odd character in the 21st century, Jackson defied every known category and became borderline incomprehensible. To remedy this, in
The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson, Ellis Cashmore reflects the restless, unorthodox and mysterious life Jackson led in order to understand more about him as well as his cultural impact. Exploring how Jackson emerged from the post-civil rights era when America was searching for someone who symbolized a new age as it struggled to unburden itself of racial inequality, Cashmore's book is the first to examine Jackson's career through the prisms of American racial politics and celebrity culture. Uniquely structured, beginning in the present and journeying back to Jackson's birth,
The Destruction and Cre
Trade Review
Cashmore’s book attempts to be more than another rehash of scandals. He discusses Jackson, who he calls ‘a bewilderingly complex character’, in the light of his role as a ‘shining symbol of a post-civil rights land of opportunity’, and looks at how Jackson’s character was affected by American culture. -- Martin Chilton * The Independent *
In The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson, Ellis Cashmore takes a unique look at the life and career of one of the most controversial and ubiquitous figures in popular culture in this brilliantly written and well-researched biography-in-reverse. * Buzz *
The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson … travels backwards, from death to birth, in considering the strange, troubled life of the one-time child star, through the prism of celebrity culture and America’s radical politics. * Choice *
As innovative, entertaining, and slyly subversive as its subject was at his peak, Ellis Cashmore’s vibrant and challenging counter-clock world examination of Michael Jackson prompts us to reconsider the relationship between Jackson the icon and Jackson the abuser: it is no less than a Time’s Arrow for the former King of Pop. * Joe Street, Associate Professor in History, Northumbria University, UK *
The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson can hardly be classified as a biography, though it does trace the events in Jackson's life. Rather, Cashmore uses the pop star as a prismatic lens through which readers can consider how popular music, race, and celebrity intersect to produce the multiple, conflicting and still-emergent meanings of Jackson and his legacy. This innovative, gripping reverse genealogy prompts a profound rethinking of how we come to sanctify, abhor, and retell the life stories of global icons like Jackson. * Lindsay Bernhagen, Lecturer in Women's and Gender Studies and Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, USA *
Table of Contents
Introduction: Destruction and Creation: Timeline 1 1. Pact with the Devil 2. Ticket to Ride 3. Nothing Strange about Your Daddy 4. Prisoner of All Those Around Him 5. Yesterday’s News 6. Through the Eyes of a Child 7. With Walt Disney or Michelangelo 8. A Nightmare 9. In Aladdin’s Cave 10. Whatever Reality They Want 11. Shifting the Needle 12. From His Sexuality to His Face 13. True or Not, It Didn’t Matter 14. Wearing Different Masks 15. Prophets of Black Conservatism 16. Nothing Was the Same After 17. Phantasmagorical Bubble Machine 18. Without the Grit of Reality 19. The Wand 20. Old Soul in a Young Body 21. In This Good Land of Ours 22. Close to the Threshold of Hell Destruction and Creation: Key Players Playlist Bibliography Index
