Michael Jackson back from the dead? It was more or less the synopsis of Thrillera historic clip that propelled the youngest of the Jackson Five into the pantheon of pop music. Forty-three years later, the same scenario is playing out again – except that Michael Jackson, who died on June 25, 2009 of a drug overdose, is really dead.
His work had not seemed so alive for a long time. Michael is a hit in cinemas. In just three weeks of release, Antoine Fuqua’s biopic (with Jaafar Jackson in the role of his uncle) has already attracted more than 3.5 million spectators in France. The film’s soundtrack, composed of the main hits of the “king of pop”, is at the top of album sales. On streaming sites, listening to Billy Jean or from Beat It have exploded, as the “moonwalk” has become a trend on TikTok. “It’s a bit as if all the planets were aligned,” summarizes Richard Lecocq, specialist in black American music and author of the biography Michael Jackson – Legend (Glénat).
The musical icon of the 1980s
Spontaneous craze or the result of an XXL marketing strategy? Michael Jackson’s catalog is also a capital to grow, valued between 1.2 and 1.5 billion dollars. To recover half of it, Sony wrote a nine-figure check in 2024. But advertising hype doesn’t explain everything. “Michael Jackson truly has an iconic dimension, which transcends generations. Every year on Halloween, Thriller returns to the chartsit almost became its soundtrack. There is a universal side to his work, which is rare in pop culture. Today, we look at his clips a bit like we would watch a Tex Avery, a Disney or a Charlie Chaplin. It is both very marked in its time, but the emotions that it conveys, the scenarios, dances, it goes through the years,” continues Richard Lecocq.
Its rediscovery is also part of a certain idealization of the 1980s, illustrated by the success of the series Stranger Thingsand the role of transmitters of a new generation of artists, from Billie Eilish to The Weeknd, who do not hide the influence that Michael Jackson may have had on their music.
Deadlock on child molestation charges
In 2019, after the release of Leaving Neverland, damning documentary in which two men accused the singer of sexual abuse when they were children, no one would have bet on this rebirth. Some radio stations had even started to deprogram his titles. “There were the Epstein, R. Kelly and Puff Daddy affairs, and people had points of comparison. They realized that the accusations against Michael Jackson have always been made on the same pattern, by people who first go to see lawyers before the police,” estimates Richard Lecocq, who prefers to remember that the only trial for sexual assault on minors brought against Michael Jackson ended in 2005 with a acquittal. But a second must be held in November, brought against the singer’s companies by the two alleged victims cited in Leaving Neverland.
These accusations were ignored in the biopic, officially due to a clause in the out-of-court settlement concluded between Michael Jackson and the family of Jordan Chandler – the first to have accused him in 1993 of sexual assault.
According to the specialist press, the Chandler affair should have been the central theme of the film. Ending the tour Bad from 1987-1989, the latter on the other hand hides nothing about the relationship between Michael Jackson and his father Joseph – a foundational relationship for understanding the psychology of the singer, deprived of his childhood by a despotic father who transformed him into a cash machine. “What touches people is also the rather sad human trajectory of Michael Jackson. He didn’t have an easy life. Even when he was at the height of his fame, he always had this disastrous relationship with his father. HAS”
