Michael Jackson

Michael Joseph Jackson was born on 29 August 1958 in Gary, Indiana and died on 25 June 2009 in Los Angeles. He is regarded as one of the most influential entertainers of the late 20th century. His career carried him from a family group in his hometown to a solo standing in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Michael Jackson was the seventh of nine children. His career began with the Jackson 5, the group he started with his brothers Tito, Jackie, Marlon and Jermaine, and which launched him as a performer. The Hall of Fame essay on the group described the Jackson 5 as, in the end, Michael and four of his brothers.

His father Joseph married Katherine Scruse in 1949, and the couple raised nine children in a two-bedroom house in Gary, Indiana. The street where Jackson grew up was later renamed Jackson Boulevard in the family's honour.

The group took shape around Michael and his brothers, and before any contract existed they recorded a single called Big Boy on their own and worked as opening acts for R&B artists. Their audition impressed Berry Gordy, who signed them almost immediately, and in 1969 I Want You Back reached the pop and R&B charts. The debut album Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5 reached the charts in December 1969 while that single climbed to number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

The quintet, overseen by their father Joseph, scored immediate number one hits. The Jackson 5 recorded 17 singles that reached the R&B Top 10 during their six-and-a-half years with Motown Records.

In 1968 Bobby Taylor discovered the five brothers from Gary and brought them to Motown's attention. Four chart-topping releases followed over the next eleven months, making the Jackson 5 the only group to have its first four records reach number one. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, four years before Jackson entered it as a solo artist.

Jackson's solo career began with the debut album Got to Be There at age 13 in 1971 and reached its first solo number one with Ben in 1972. In 1978 he starred alongside Diana Ross in Sidney Lumet's The Wiz, playing the Scarecrow, and it was while making the film that he met Quincy Jones.

Off the Wall arrived in 1979 with Jones as producer and became the best-selling album of that year. It fused funk, disco and soul and yielded four Top 10 singles, the first American album to produce four number one singles, selling seven million copies in America alone. Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough earned Jackson his first Grammy Award.

Thriller was released on 30 November 1982. It arrived during a deep U.S. recession when Top 40 radio had all but died and MTV was still in its infancy. Jackson and Quincy Jones sifted through more than 600 songs before settling on a nine-track album, with at least a dozen of Jackson's own compositions including Billie Jean and Beat It. The record opened with Wanna Be Startin' Somethin', drawing on disco, funk, R&B and new wave and culminating in a Swahili chant. It drew contributions from Eddie Van Halen and Paul McCartney, and Beat It helped break down barriers between black and white artists on radio and in music videos.

Thriller stayed on the charts for 80 weeks, holding number one for 37 weeks. It generated seven Top 10 hits, the first album to do so. The album won eight of its 12 Grammy nominations. Guinness World Records lists it as the world's best-selling album with 67 million copies sold. On 20 August 2021 it was certified for shipments of 34 million units by the RIAA, extending its lead as the best-selling album by a solo artist in the United States.

The 14-minute Thriller short film, directed by John Landis, debuted on MTV in December 1983, transformed the music video into an art form and later became the first music video selected for the National Film Registry. In May 1983 Jackson appeared with his brothers on the Motown 25 television special and debuted the moonwalk while performing Billie Jean.

Bad came out in 1987 and spawned five consecutive number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, a feat no single album had achieved before. Much of Jackson's album Dangerous from 1991 was produced by Teddy Riley. In 1995 he released the double album HIStory, which mixed greatest hits with new songs. Jackson entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist in 2001 and released Invincible, his final studio album, later the same year.

As a songwriter Jackson wrote more than 150 songs, with more than 20 reaching multi-million performance status on American radio and television. In 1985 he and Lionel Richie co-wrote We Are the World, the signature single for USA for Africa, an all-star famine-relief project. By some accounts that project raised more than $75 million for humanitarian aid in Africa.

Jackson redefined both the sound and the look of pop, and with astonishing choreography he set new standards for live performance. His blend of rock, funk and electropop continues to influence later generations. He set an almost impossibly high standard in pop music as a record maker, dancer, fashion icon and video auteur, and his Moonwalk remains one of the most imitated steps.

At a time when American radio was largely segregated and MTV was oriented toward rock, Jackson's songs and videos were too compelling to be denied, and the 1980s became the most integrated decade in music history.

Jackson's competitive record is anchored in the Grammy Awards, where he won 13 trophies from 38 career nominations^{1Michael Jackson | Biography, Albums, Songs, Thriller, & Facts · Encyclopaedia Britannica ↗}. In 1984 he became the first artist to take eight Grammy Awards in a single night, seven of them for Thriller, a mark Carlos Santana later equalled^{11Remembering Michael Jackson's Record-Setting Music Career · Recording Academy ↗}. On the singles charts he placed 30 songs in the Billboard Hot 100 top ten, 13 of them at number one^{1Michael Jackson | Biography, Albums, Songs, Thriller, & Facts · Encyclopaedia Britannica ↗}. His chart presence proved unusually durable: he had Top 10 hits in each of the last five decades of his life, a run that began in the 1960s and closed with You Rock My World at number 10 in 2001^{11Remembering Michael Jackson's Record-Setting Music Career · Recording Academy ↗}.

Jackson outbid Paul McCartney when the Beatles' publishing catalogue came up for sale in 1985 and bought it for several hundred million dollars. Legal proceedings later came to dominate his public image. Jackson was charged with seven counts of child abuse and was acquitted five months later after a trial that transfixed both the media and fans. A 14-week trial that became something of a media circus ended in 2005.

Jackson died in Los Angeles on 25 June 2009 at the age of 50 after cardiac arrest and the death was ruled a homicide caused by a lethal combination of sedatives and the anaesthetic propofol. Murray told police he had given Jackson propofol for 60 nights in a row until 22 June 2009 and had then tried to wean him off the drug.

A televised memorial at the Staples Center in July 2009 issued 17,500 free tickets to fans by lottery and drew an estimated one billion viewers.

Jackson was in Los Angeles for rehearsals of the This Is It concerts at London's O2 Arena, which were scheduled to begin in July 2009 and run into the following year. Fifty shows were planned at the arena, and the tickets sold out instantly. Conrad Murray, who had been employed as his personal physician for the London shows at $150,000 a month, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter two years later and served less than two years of a four-year sentence.

At the time of his death Jackson was around $500 million in debt. In 2016 his estate sold its share of Sony/ATV for $750 million. In 2018 Sony acquired the estate's 25.1 per cent stake in EMI Music Publishing for $287.5 million. Sony Music Group completed a transaction to acquire half of Jackson's publishing and recorded masters in a deal that valued the total catalogue at around $1.2 billion. The deal included assets from Jackson's Mijac publishing catalogue but excluded royalties from the MJ Broadway musical, and Primary Wave Music retained a ten per cent stake in his publishing assets.

The estate's first project, Michael Jackson's This Is It, became the highest-grossing music documentary of all time, and two Cirque du Soleil productions followed, the Immortal World Tour and the permanent show Michael Jackson ONE in Las Vegas.