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Michael Jackson · S1 E8
The Last Ordinary Day
What Gary, Indiana never got to give him back
Gary, Indiana, early 1969. The family loads the last of their things into the car, and Michael Jackson, ten years old, will never live here again.
Childhood. Michael Jackson (1995). He wrote this explicitly about what was taken from him. "Have you seen my childhood?" is not a metaphor.
Childhood. Michael Jackson (1995)
Key of D major, roughly 66 BPM, written entirely by Michael with no co-writers. The melody moves like a lullaby slowed to grief. The lyric is unusually direct: "Before you judge me, try hard to love me. Look within your heart, then ask, have you seen my childhood?" It is the most autobiographical song he ever released.
The Trade
What Michael traded for fame was ordinary life, and he made the trade at an age when he couldn't understand what he was giving up. No school friendships, no slow afternoons, no anonymity. By the time he was old enough to grieve these things, he was the most famous person on earth.
“I never had a childhood. I had no friends my own age. I used to cry from loneliness.”
— Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey interview, February 10, 1993
2300 Jackson Street, Gary, Indiana
The two-bedroom house where eleven people lived, where Joe ran rehearsals, where Michael first heard Katherine play piano. Today it is a national historic landmark. It is also a near-ruin.
TAP TO REVEAL: What happened to the house on Jackson Street
Human Nature. Michael Jackson
A 1982 Thriller track about longing to go out and just walk, just exist, unrecognized. Steve Porcaro of Toto wrote the melody, John Bettis wrote the lyric. For a man who couldn't walk a street unnoticed since age ten, "if they say why, why, tell them that it's human nature" is not a pop lyric. It's a confession.
In his 1993 Oprah interview, how did Michael describe his childhood?
Gary is behind them, and the Motown machine is waiting. Season 2: Los Angeles, 1969, three number-one singles before Christmas.
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