The Awfully Big Adventure

Michael Jackson died on June 25 2009 in Los Angeles, from of acute propofol and benzodiazepine intoxication (according to Wikipedia). The one-time King of Pop was preparing for one last assault on the mainstream with a proposed 50 night run of shows at the 02 (thereby trumping his arch-rival, Prince, who had just concluded his legendary 21 Nights). His exhaustion, paranoia and general ill-heath were an open secret. He had lived many lives and inhabited many bodies; PT Barnum, Fred Astaire, and Peter Pan in one mortal coil. His death was mourned by hundreds of millions of fans but it was almost as if he had been dead for some time already. And in his death, in vivid technicolor, we relived the dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and perversions that we had all projected on to him for four decades. Paul Morley's short biographical portrait of Michael Jackson looks at how we turned the most outrageous child star talent of the late 20th century into a monster; how his decline soundtracked the end of Pop and the end of American Imperialism; how his once staggeringly modern and funky music became secondary to the dysfunctional freak show of watching a vulnerable man literally disintegrate. Tender, erudite, and provocative, Morley's monograph documents a tragedy that is so Shakespearean in scale that it obscures the legacy of the last of the great Song and Dance Men.

Writer, broadcaster, and cultural critic Paul Morley has written about music, art, and entertainment since the 1970s. He wrote for the New Musical Express from 1976 to 1983 and formed the Zang Tumb Tuum record label with record producer Trevor Horn. A founding member of the Art of Noise and a member of staff at the Royal Academy of Music, he collaborated with Grace Jones on her memoirs and is the author of a number of books about music including The Age of Bowie (a Sunday Times bestseller), his history of classical music A Sound Mind (a Sunday Times Music Book of the Year) and a biography of Bob Dylan, You Lose Yourself, You Reappear.