Conspiracy theories I kinda actually believe
It's been almost 20 years, but from day 1, I thought about this, and I'm surprised it never made the rounds. People like to theorize about how Paul McCartney's been dead for decades, or about Elvis or Hitler secretly living out the remainder of their lives somewhere rather than dying dramatic deaths, but nothing about Michael Jackson — when I think, in his case, there's the most evidence and the most reason and possibility for him to fake his own death.
It's a conspiracy theory, of course, so "evidence" is in scare-quotes here.
Who was Michael?
We first need to talk about why he would do it. For those who aren't aware, Michael Jackson was possibly the most famous person on the planet for decades. He was an extremely successful musical performer under the Sony label. People in Liberia in the 90s couldn't tell you who Mickey Mouse was, but they knew Michael Jackson. His music made pop what it is today as much as Eminem influenced hip hop and Shakespeare influenced theatre.
So yes, he was extremely wealthy. He lived on a property with its own theme park. One of his albums, HIStory, was advertised by erecting ten giant statues of himself around the United States. He's also the man you can thank, for better or worse, for the expectation of successful performers and other public figures to become philanthropists, as he donated over half a billion dollars (not accounting for inflation) over the course of his lifetime to philanthropic efforts.
So, he was huge, he was rich, and he was influential.
He was also extremely controversial. In the early 90s, he was accused of child molestation. He was found not guilty due to a lack of evidence and also the claimant (the father of the child in question) stating, "I'll be rich, and he'll never sell another album again", not realizing he was on the record. Another case later in the 2000s was similarly thrown out.
It never went away, though. This occurred around the same era as the OJ Simpson trials, and the public was understandably very cynical about celebrities in court. It also didn't help that, even if he wasn't actually a sex offender, Jackson was an absolute weirdo, and the paparazzi never had a shortage of things to report about him. And to a lot of people, if you're crazy enough to dangle your baby out a window because you're proud and want to show them off to the cameras, and if you're distressed enough to undergo all those plastic surgeries that he did, then you probably also hurt kids, too.
Because of this, after the second allegations, and some very predatory conflicts with Sony, Jackson went on hiatus in 2002 after his last studio album, which would last until 2009. During this time, he was on a lot of medications to deal with his anxiety and depression, which he had been covering in his music, especially in HIStory and Blood on the Dance Floor.
So He Was Crazy...but would he do it?
Yup. Absolutely. Out of all the big names people conspire about faking their deaths (or faking their lives), Jackson is the only one I could absolutely see doing it. Not just because he was prone to some rather brash and often childish responses to things, but because he'd already had to do a lot of other crazy things to protect himself and his family. His children, whenever they were in public with him, had to wear masks so that they wouldn't be recognized in class. It wouldn't be a far cry, especially now they were older, for them to now have to act as though their father was dead so that he could have his life back.
He also had the means. He had his own private doctor who was the one responsible for prescribing the medications that Jackson supposedly overdosed on, and he had enough money to ensure that even in the case that this doctor never worked again on account of going along with this plan, he'd be fine. And it was likely he would never work again, and he must have known that: propofol, the drug Jackson was administered by Murray, was not prescribed properly. It's unbelievable that Dr Murray would be so negligent without very good reason.
But what about the other professionals — the people who found him? Well, they couldn't seem to keep their accounts straight; paramedics, LAFD, and attorneys all say different things about when Jackson was taken to hospital and when his heart failed, and he had more than enough money for all of them.
Where's your proof?
As mentioned above, he was extremely troubled, and it isn't even that he merely believed that the only way for him to escape the predatory media would be if he died — that was the truth of it. A lot of his lyrics were very raw and autobiographical, arguably going all the way back to "Billie Jean" in 1982, but hitting a spike in 1995 with HIStory and songs like "Tabloid Junkie", and "DS", about his prosecutor in the CSA case. Blood on the Dance Floor in 1997 had one of my personal favourites, "Morphine", about his ongoing addictions. Unlike a lot of other hip hop artists who create about their pasts, Jackson didn't shy away from creating about things he was presently going through, despite (or perhaps because of) the 24/7 media coverage of his life.
Invincible was a return to his more corporate form, as directed by Sony, and as a result, is easily his most widely panned album — and, as mentioned, his final one. But that wasn't the end of Jackson's autobiographical songwriting. And neither was 2009.
In that year, he started rehearsing for a comeback tour, called "This Is It" — in my opinion, quite on the nose for what we're discussing here, but moving right along. After his (alleged) death, Sony released Xscape. I'm personally surprised the title of this album alone didn't raise eyebrows, let alone its content. Released in 2014, it contains lyrics like this, from the title track:
Escape (Escape)
I gotta get away from a system
Loose in the world today
Escape (Escape)
The pressure that I face from relationships
Had to go away
Escape (Escape)
The man with a pen that writes the lies that has no end
Escape (Escape)
I do what I wanna 'cause I got to please nobody but me
Escape
Though in particular, the song that makes my ears perk up is "A Place With No Name" — you'll just have to listen to it for yourself, though.
Is this real evidence? Song lyrics and personal history? Of course not — it's a conspiracy theory — but when taken all together, when we consider how Jackson used his music to express himself, often couldn't help himself from doing so, and how important it was to him, and how these are the tracks that his estate allowed to be placed on his final, post-mortem album, and all the strangeness around his death, and how he could have feasibly orchestrated that strangeness himself...why wouldn't he?
So what happened?
Childhood: Jackson is turned into a celebrity, along with his brothers, by his father, who was highly abusive and forced them into musical stardom.
1986: Tabloid speculation gets really turned on to Jackson on account of his vitiligo, and never goes away thereafter, hounding him for every single odd thing that he did (and he did a lot).
1993: First CSA allegations, followed by acquittal and raw music about it. Jackson begins on prescription narcotics.
2001: Sony cracked the whip and had him churn out Invincible, which (at least by his standards) tanked.
2002-2008: The second wave of allegations, and the second media blitz. Hiatus and ensuing financial issues from all this.
2009: Seeing that none of the above things are going away, Jackson hires a new doctor, who promptly allows him to be on an inappropriate medical regimen for his insomnia. Coordinates with his family and lawyers to ensure the story holds in the scenario in which things don't shake out, including his new tour. Music had been his life, so he wanted one more opportunity to be on the stage, to be filmed, to see if he's ready to leave it, and the simple fact is that he was. And, ever the showman and the communicator through his music, he arranged for his last album to be a letter for his fans, the people around the world who would miss him, to hopefully explain to them that he just "gotta get away".
Coming to notice that, contrary to popular belief, anti-theism really is the Western mainstream these days. It appears to have been co-opted by the ruling class. We talk about how LGBTQ+ has been co-opted, and the watered-down concept of "rebellion", but one thing that liberals and leftists alike seem to agree on is that religion is, at best, something we must regrettably tolerate.
And you may be thinking now: Ferret, what are you talking about? Batshit insane Christianity is a hallmark of American reaction. And you're right, it is — but is that religion? Do these people believe in anything they say they do? Do they know what Jesus stood for? Have they ever read anything at all in their entire lives longer than a tweet, let alone a single book of the Bible?
To me, these two statements are part-and-parcel: Batshit Christianity is the direct result of state anti-theism. That is, it's a bad thing to care too much about religious philosophy. Leave that to either your ministers or to the crazy non-Christians. Look at media, and it's clear this is the case: As much as reactionaries will say that God is against whatever it is that reactionaries are against, and their source is just believe me bro, my minister said so — how often is it portrayed for someone to read their sacred texts and practice their faith in a meaningful way and it be anything other than either crazy or niche? Certainly, these people are never seen as heroes.
This is important, because religion, if directed by anything other than the ruling class, is frequently revolutionary, and has the capacity to unite large numbers of people. It wasn't talked about much by either side, but the Bolshevik Revolution was substantially supported by Muslims in Russian territories who were tired of being sidelined, and in the aftermath of the Civil War, a large number of mosques were built. Islam has also been mobilized heavily in the Middle East and parts of Africa in revolutionary movements, which is why it was so important that the Taliban be funded in Asia and Salifism be made the state religion of Saudi Arabia, to force conservative religious doctrine and prevent revolutionary religious doctrine from appearing. Although not exactly a religion, Juche, too, has a lot of elements of religious practice and identity, and Kim Il-sung was inspired by the way in which religion brings people together, being the son of Christian missionaries and a Sunday school teacher in his youth, and pushed hard for the inclusion of Chondoists in the revolution.
The unfortunate thing is that the ruling class has convinced us not only that religion is inherently conservative or reactionary, but also convinced us that it was our idea in the first place.
In the west, it has been impossible to organize, to get people attached to a revolutionary movement, because of a lack of identity within those movements. Working class identity has been heavily eroded, but the reality is, working class identity is very rarely the motivator behind revolution. It occurred once in the USSR, and almost certainly would not have occurred if not for the perfect storm of a crumbling empire, a recently deposed monarchy, a losing war, and a powerful Marxist political party. It is unlikely to ever happen again, even without the efforts the ruling class makes to ensure working class identity remains low on people's agenda. Typically, it is national identity in the third world, a rebellion against the imposition of imperialism.
So how do we build identity in the west? The issue is that our identities, per capitalism, are highly ephemeral: We're LGBTQ+ people, or we're neurodiverse, or we're denizens of a certain city. There are only two identities that are, more or less, inherent to a person, or at least require a great amount of dedication: Race, and religion. This is why the Black Panthers came possibly the closest anyone has ever come to revolution in the United States, and likewise the IRA in the UK. These two countries are not the only ones with significant, long-lasting oppressed racial minorities in the developed world, but it is interesting to notice that revolutionary movements rarely, if ever, arise out of Indigenous populations, but that is a very complicated and difficult subject.
But something that all these states have been very quick to shut down are religious minorities: The instant Islam entered these nations, despite the fact that their beliefs, if anything, were quite conservative in comparison to mainstream Christian beliefs at the time, the media was all over ensuring that no one would ever want to ally with them. The action was two-pronged: The Islamic ruling class ensuring that Muslims only know the highly conservative and exoteric views of their religion, and the secular ruling class ensuring that any progressive elements of the population believe Islam to be exclusively conservative and exoteric. Contrast this with the Bolshevik portrayals of Muslim women proudly casting aside their hijab and fighting for the Red Army.
Despite all this, more and more, I feel that religion may be the way forward in organizing the working class. I think, with the difficulty of our lives, we do not have the impetus to devote ourselves so heavily to working class revolution, and something that hinges so heavily on progress is innately stifled by a lack of progress. It becomes a catch-22. Religion, though, serves the working class population in bringing to them simultaneously a sense of hope and belonging and a sense of unity and devotion to a cause. It is the difference between another material obligation being added onto the pile of one's life, and an entirely new meaning to that life. Reaction already does this, and does this very well, as we've seen, but, if we can break through the alliance of the antis and capitalist media, it may become our best tool as well.
And you may be thinking now: Ferret, what are you talking about? Batshit insane Christianity is a hallmark of American reaction. And you're right, it is — but is that religion? Do these people believe in anything they say they do? Do they know what Jesus stood for? Have they ever read anything at all in their entire lives longer than a tweet, let alone a single book of the Bible?
To me, these two statements are part-and-parcel: Batshit Christianity is the direct result of state anti-theism. That is, it's a bad thing to care too much about religious philosophy. Leave that to either your ministers or to the crazy non-Christians. Look at media, and it's clear this is the case: As much as reactionaries will say that God is against whatever it is that reactionaries are against, and their source is just believe me bro, my minister said so — how often is it portrayed for someone to read their sacred texts and practice their faith in a meaningful way and it be anything other than either crazy or niche? Certainly, these people are never seen as heroes.
This is important, because religion, if directed by anything other than the ruling class, is frequently revolutionary, and has the capacity to unite large numbers of people. It wasn't talked about much by either side, but the Bolshevik Revolution was substantially supported by Muslims in Russian territories who were tired of being sidelined, and in the aftermath of the Civil War, a large number of mosques were built. Islam has also been mobilized heavily in the Middle East and parts of Africa in revolutionary movements, which is why it was so important that the Taliban be funded in Asia and Salifism be made the state religion of Saudi Arabia, to force conservative religious doctrine and prevent revolutionary religious doctrine from appearing. Although not exactly a religion, Juche, too, has a lot of elements of religious practice and identity, and Kim Il-sung was inspired by the way in which religion brings people together, being the son of Christian missionaries and a Sunday school teacher in his youth, and pushed hard for the inclusion of Chondoists in the revolution.
The unfortunate thing is that the ruling class has convinced us not only that religion is inherently conservative or reactionary, but also convinced us that it was our idea in the first place.
In the west, it has been impossible to organize, to get people attached to a revolutionary movement, because of a lack of identity within those movements. Working class identity has been heavily eroded, but the reality is, working class identity is very rarely the motivator behind revolution. It occurred once in the USSR, and almost certainly would not have occurred if not for the perfect storm of a crumbling empire, a recently deposed monarchy, a losing war, and a powerful Marxist political party. It is unlikely to ever happen again, even without the efforts the ruling class makes to ensure working class identity remains low on people's agenda. Typically, it is national identity in the third world, a rebellion against the imposition of imperialism.
So how do we build identity in the west? The issue is that our identities, per capitalism, are highly ephemeral: We're LGBTQ+ people, or we're neurodiverse, or we're denizens of a certain city. There are only two identities that are, more or less, inherent to a person, or at least require a great amount of dedication: Race, and religion. This is why the Black Panthers came possibly the closest anyone has ever come to revolution in the United States, and likewise the IRA in the UK. These two countries are not the only ones with significant, long-lasting oppressed racial minorities in the developed world, but it is interesting to notice that revolutionary movements rarely, if ever, arise out of Indigenous populations, but that is a very complicated and difficult subject.
But something that all these states have been very quick to shut down are religious minorities: The instant Islam entered these nations, despite the fact that their beliefs, if anything, were quite conservative in comparison to mainstream Christian beliefs at the time, the media was all over ensuring that no one would ever want to ally with them. The action was two-pronged: The Islamic ruling class ensuring that Muslims only know the highly conservative and exoteric views of their religion, and the secular ruling class ensuring that any progressive elements of the population believe Islam to be exclusively conservative and exoteric. Contrast this with the Bolshevik portrayals of Muslim women proudly casting aside their hijab and fighting for the Red Army.
Despite all this, more and more, I feel that religion may be the way forward in organizing the working class. I think, with the difficulty of our lives, we do not have the impetus to devote ourselves so heavily to working class revolution, and something that hinges so heavily on progress is innately stifled by a lack of progress. It becomes a catch-22. Religion, though, serves the working class population in bringing to them simultaneously a sense of hope and belonging and a sense of unity and devotion to a cause. It is the difference between another material obligation being added onto the pile of one's life, and an entirely new meaning to that life. Reaction already does this, and does this very well, as we've seen, but, if we can break through the alliance of the antis and capitalist media, it may become our best tool as well.