When You Hate the Monster But Love the Art

How do we respond when bad people create our favorite things?

I had three heroes when I was growing up in the 80s: Han Solo, Kermit the Frog, and Michael Jackson. (I don’t know exactly what that trio says about me, but I assume it’s only good things.) This was long before the first accusations, when Michael Jackson’s notoriety was only due to his liquid tenor and his smooth moonwalk. He was the King of Pop and he was my friend.

I don’t know when the first fractures formed in my parent’s marriage. I just remember they suddenly needed to talk for hours at a time, and my brother and I were confined to our rooms for the duration. When you are 6 years-old, listening to your parents yell at each other while you are trapped in your room is rather unsettling. It felt like the world was ending, and in a way that was true. Maybe if I couldn’t hear them they wouldn’t argue, and we could go on as we had been.

So I dug out my red cassette player and popped in my treasured Michael Jackson Thriller tape and drowned everything in sweet music.

You may have forgotten, or maybe never knew, but Thriller was much more than the title track. It’s a murderer’s row of hits, one after another. The only songs I don’t like are Baby Be Mine and The Lady in My Life. Everything else is Grade A material.

With the music swelling, I danced around in my bedroom and played imaginary games of baseball, pausing to emphasize lyrics with a quick crotch-grab and maybe a ‘shamon’ if I was feeling spicy. I was in my own little world, insulated from everything else. It felt like everything was going to be okay. I wasn’t alone; Michael was with me.

Everything that came later — the many accusations of sexual abuse, the bizarre body transformation, the increasingly whacko behavior — leaves little doubt who Michael Jackson was: a sick man who was shielded from personal responsibility for his actions due to fortune and fame. It’s a tale as old as time.

Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13 year-old girl and has been hiding from justice in Europe for over 40 years, all the while making more movies. Kevin Spacey has been accused by multiple men of sexual assault, and is acting again after a brief hiatus. Joss Whedon built a reputation as a feminist but abused and belittled his cast behind the scenes, and had numerous affairs to boot.

All of these men are scum, and I have no intention of supporting any of their future projects. The matter becomes muddied when you consider the work they created before we recognized them for what they are, work we came to love. I won’t ever re-read the Whedon biography I bought during his heyday, but I still enjoy Firefly without reservations. And I feel no qualms doing so.

Michael Jackson was never found guilty in a court of law, but I believe he abused those poor boys. How then can I still enjoy his music? Am I letting him off some proverbial hook when I fire up Rock With You? Am I giving him a free pass? It still feels icky when I stop to think about it.

The truth is, those songs no longer belong to Michael Jackson, and not just because he’s dead. Once something is released into the world, it ceases to belong to the creator and instead becomes public property. You and I may not draw residuals from Thriller, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is ours: our memories, our experiences, our lives. Forcing yourself to pretend it doesn’t exist is just a form of self-lobotomy. What’s the use in that?

When I listen to old Michael Jackson songs — and it’s always his older work; I don’t like anything he released in the 90s or later — I’m not thinking about Michael Jackson at all. I experience the music, afloat on a sea of nameless emotions, drifting somewhere between memory and nostalgia and things that never were but might’ve been.

Michael Jackson was a monster. But his music was a steady companion during some dark days, and I can’t help but love it still. They are the songs of my life, and I will keep on playing them.

Eric writes about pop culture at Medium and considers Human Nature Michael Jackson’s greatest song. More awesome content here.

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