The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson

Description

Michael 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 Creation of Michael Jackson will excite and enliven debates on this controversial figure, one that very much continues to remain embedded within our culture.

Ellis Cashmore is the author of Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption (2017) and Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama's America (2012), both published by Bloomsbury. A third edition of his Celebrity Culture is forthcoming. He has held positions in sociology at the universities of Hong Kong and Tampa, USA and is currently an honorary professor at Aston University, UK.

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 *