The early Jackson Five singles were beloved by fans and critics alike, so it seems the Motown producers came up with a vision of what reception theorist Wolfgang Iser might call "the implied audience" which matched the real one very well. But, judging by his subsequent remarks, Michael's vision may well have been different, perhaps at odds with the audiences which loved those early records. The early records, particularly the singles "I Want You Back" and "The Love You Save," were praised and adored for their feeling of exhilaration and enthusiasm. Michael bubbled over with thrilling, audacious shouts of joy and triumph. The records were optimistic, full of life. There were only hints that Michael was capable of representing something different. One critic (Vince Aletti, Rolling Stone, July 22, 1971, p. 39) was somewhat awed that a young boy could put over a song with the words "anguish and doubt" in the lyrics and make it believable (in "Never Can Say Goodbye" Third Album, Motown re-issue, 1986, MCDO8011MD]). Aletti couldn't have known at the time that, for Michael, it was the expression of uncomplicated joyousness which he may have (successfully) strained to reproduce for the Motown staffers. Critic Dave Marsh later commented that the great early records really did represent a kid "just doing what comes naturally.« (Marsh, 1985, p. 193) But since Michael claims he didn't experience the process that way at all, it's more difficult to assess the authenticity of these records' emotional representations.
What the records do confirm, for observers like Marsh, Aletti, and Berry Gordy (who never could figure out where the small boy singer got "that pain from") is that childhood is "naturally« a condition where one lives free from care, responsibility, and genuine suffering. Michael Jackson himself is not immune from accepting such ideological presuppositions. In 1990, after perusing a special edition of Life magazine devoted to "The World of Children," he felt compelled to write the editors and tell them of his strong feelings about the issue. After letting them know how grateful he was for the issue, he said he "wandered mentally through (his) childhood" and "laughed, cried and envied" the children featured in the special edition. ("Their Thriller," New York Daily News, June 5, 1990)
"The World of Children" features pages upon pages of kids laughing, playing, getting their shots, jostling their friends, hugging pets, dancing, visiting the dentist, and on and on. There is a small smattering of children who'd been in accidents, or were sick, or were victims of crime. There is only the slightest mention of the one-third of American children who live in poverty or of the many abused and neglected kids whose numbers continue to spiral upward year after year. They are seen as aberrations by Life, as sad blotches on the happy face of "childhood."
"The World of Children" does not feature a photo of one of the best-known children of the past decade: six-year-old Lisa Steinberg, whose 1987 beating death at the hands of her adoptive father made international headlines and whose vacant-eyed photo taken at a school Halloween party shortly before her murder was given much attention in earlier Time-Life publications. She, and the many others like her, are not really part of Life's "World" of children, yet we are encouraged by the editors to believe we are getting something like a full picture of this "world." Michael could only "envy" these children, since he had not been part of their world of serenity and freedom. He had to assume that he had grown up in a quite another world from the one Life assures us most children know. Any reader who knows or had known a world of responsibility, struggle, fear, uncertainty, and pain as a child would feel quite alone if they took the Life portrayal seriously. Michael took it seriously enough to thank the editors for making him feel this way.
© 1992 by Robin Markowitz. All rights reserved. Published by University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI.
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