jacko

We will apparently forgive them anything: mutilating wild animals with their teeth (Ozzy Osbourne), sexual assault (the late Tupac Shakur), beating their wives with a length of iron pipe while on PCP (James Brown). It's unlikely that So Solid Crew's chart-topping career will be damaged by the recent conviction of rapper Skat D, who broke a 15-year-old fan's jaw when she refused his advances.

All of which makes Michael Jackson an utterly unique figure. The ongoing oddities of the self-styled King of Pop - sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, appearing in public wearing a smog mask, Bubbles the monkey - made for sniggering tabloid fodder throughout the 1980s, without any adverse effect on his popularity or monumental sales (Thriller, for instance, sold 47m copies). Since 1994, however, when Jackson settled a child abuse case out of court, his commercial success has been overshadowed. In the public consciousness, he has ceased to be merely a wealthy eccentric and become a rather sinister, twilit figure.

His every subsequent action has been viewed with suspicion. His marriage to Lisa Marie Presley was derided as a publicity stunt. His appearance at the 1996 Brit Awards made a hero of stage invader Jarvis Cocker. His attempt to introduce a "universal bill of children's rights" was mocked both for its puzzling demands (how exactly would one enforce "the right to be thought of as adorable"?), and because Jackson launched it at Oxford University, accompanied by spoon-bender Uri Geller.

On the evidence of his first album in six years, even Jackson has realised his public image is out of control. Almost every aspect of Invincible stresses that - despite all evidence to the contrary - Michael Jackson is just a normal guy. Six tracks boast input from heavyweight R&B producer Rodney Jerkins, famed for work with Brandy, Whitney Houston and Mary J Blige. His very presence attempts to recontextualise Jackson - instead of soul music's own Citizen Kane, closeted in his Neverland mansion, Jackson is merely another R&B singer queuing for Jerkins's magic touch.
The lyrics touch on Jackson's relationship with the media and his unswerving dedication to healing the world ("I can't do it by myself," he magnanimously admits on Threatened), but essentially stick to straightforward love themes. The album was launched with a single, You Rock My World, that rather self-consciously apes the slick funk of Jackson's 1979 album Off the Wall, and a New York concert that reunited him with the Jackson Five. Both deliberately recall the era before Jacko went Wacko, before his obsession with plastic surgery made him look inhuman, when the only peculiar thing about him was his inordinate talent.

The reunion concert turned into bizarre farce, however, when Marlon Brando delivered a bewildering lecture about "children hacked to death by a machete", and every other attempt at normalising Jackson is similarly undermined. Thanks to Jerkins's production, opening track Unbreakable is a fine, if overlong, example of jittering, pulsing R&B, but the track features a guest appearance from the late rapper Notorious BIG. The sound of Jackson sparring with the disembodied voice of a dead man is extremely disquieting. The lyrics to ballads such as Break of Dawn may be cliched, but the very fact that they are being sung by Jackson gives them a whiff of weirdness. "Let's walk down to the park, making love until it gets dark," he trills. The thought of Jackson having sex is odd and frankly distressing.
Then there is The Lost Children, a hideous, syrupy sub-Broadway showtune featuring Jackson and an infants' choir. It ends with a fearful child's voice saying "It's so quiet in the forest... it's getting dark, I think we'd better go home now." It's creepy, has deeply unpleasant connotations and is appallingly misjudged.

Ultimately, it is Invincible's quest for regularity that is its undoing. Jerkins's contributions aside, it expresses its normality through utterly anodyne music. Jackson emerges as strange and sinister as ever; this time, he sounds like a strange, sinister man who has made a boring and very long album. Tedious ballad after tedious ballad pile up over 16 tracks. Jackson strains away (on Speechless he even feigns tears), Carlos Santana pops up for a guest appearance, but the songs are unmemorable, not a Scream or Billie Jean among them. After 76 unremitting minutes, you're left in no doubt: like its creator, Invincible has simply gone too far.

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Beat it

It was Michael Jackson's first gig in 11 years and all his friends were there to support him. Michael Ellison wishes none of them had bothered
You really did have to be there. Otherwise you might find it impossible to believe that a performer even more eccentric than Michael Jackson could upstage the singer during his first American concert in 11 years.

But Marlon Brando has been at it for a long time, as have many of the "friends" Jackson recruited to appear with him at the Madison Square Garden show with which he intended to renew his career.
There was Liza Minnelli, belting it out as though she were leading the communal singing before the FA Cup final; Ray Charles, hidden in the middle of the orchestra, lending an incongruous whiff of authenticity to the proceedings; and Dame Elizabeth Taylor, resplendent in a black dress and feather boa, introducing her "best friend".

Her best friend was the Michael Jackson of old, largely addressing the moment he captured almost 20 years ago. He bleated his catchphrase, "I love you", at every opportunity, but how many of us still love him is another matter. Jackson's "people" announced at the beginning of last month that the show had sold out in five hours; strangely, tickets were still on sale at the box office a few hours before the gig.

The event was like a visual gossip column: Britney Spears (strutting, inaudible), 'N Sync (fleeting, clod-hopping), Billy Gilmore (young, melodramatic), Marc Anthony (preening), Destiny's Child (startlingly sassy), Yoko Ono (clapping out of time), the Jackson Five (of whom there were six).

Their cameos were linked by longueurs and video testimonials from other celebrities, including the long-dead Sammy Davis Jr and Gene Kelly, insisting that Jackson remains the world's favourite person.

Jackson himself spent barely an hour on stage - a quarter of a show intended to celebrate a 30-year solo career. The act was dynamic, his slippery-shoe shuffle moves were intact, and the crowd lapped it up when he performed with his brothers for the first time in 17 years - a medley of old hits including a soulful take on I'll Be There. But he sang only one new song, the single You Rock My World. There was a reek of "these you have loved", especially when he invited the audience to nominate the next song. He played Beat It; well, they were never going to ask for Elvis Costello's Ship building.

The show started an hour late, but this did allow the punters to absorb the souvenir programme. For some reason, there was no mention of the defining incident in the performer's surgically altered, animal-friendly man-child weirdness: the moment eight years ago when a woman accused him of sexually abusing her 13-year-old son, a matter settled out of court by a payment said to be between $5m and $20m.

The souvenir programme cost $25; the best seats at the concert, $2,500. Brando, as far as anyone could make out, wanted whatever small change the fans might have left. The lights came on after one of the many long, dark, silent passages of the night to reveal a man in massive shades sitting at a table as though he were waiting to see the dentist.
"I'm, ah, Marlon Brando. While you were sitting there wondering, 'Who's that old fat fuck? What's he doing there?', I took one full minute. I wanted you to realise that in that minute there would be hundreds, if not thousands, of children around the world who would be hacked to death with machetes, beaten to death by their parents or died of some disease like typhus. Or woke up blind and didn't have an older brother to take them around with a stick."

At this point a waiter asked if anyone wanted champagne at $7 a glass and the audience started chanting, "Michael! Michael!" Brando ploughed on: "Please think about what I'm saying. Don't chat. It could be your children. How many of you have known a kid get his legs blown off by a landmine because the United States didn't want to remove them? Sick kids. That's what this evening is about." The remedy, he said, was to give "a fingernail of what you take home" to MichaelJackson.com.
The thousands of people who had paid a great deal of money to be there were not inclined to agree and started booing. Jackson, though, sitting in a box stage left, bookended by Taylor and Macaulay Culkin, rewarded him with an air kiss. All the performers in Jackson's tribute to himself received an air kiss or a standing ovation from the 43-year-old in the sparkling white jacket. All except Shaggy, who directed a piece of advice at Jackson intended for use "in case you get caught". This was probably not intended as a reference to that unpleasantness eight years ago.

The four hours of hot air and self-congratulation will be boiled down into a television show to promote Jackson's new CD, out at the end of next month. But the boldly named Invincible may need more help if it's to live up to its title. It's one thing to have "friends" but fans are more fickle, or discriminating. Thriller (1982) sold 26m copies in the US. Bad (1987) sold 8m, Dangerous (1991) 5.5m and HIStory (1995) 2.3m. Brando might be able to detect a trend here.

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