BIOGRAPHY
The Gary, Indiana years
Michael Joseph Jackson was the eighth of ten children born to Katherine and Joseph Jackson in a two-bedroom house in industrial Gary, Indiana. His father Joe — a former boxer and steel-mill crane operator — ran the household with a fearsome work ethic that would shape Michael's life. By the age of five Michael was the lead singer of the Jackson 5, performing at clubs on the chitlin' circuit. The group signed to Motown in 1968 and their first four singles all went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a feat no group had ever accomplished.
Off The Wall and the birth of a solo titan
After leaving Motown for Epic in 1976, Michael met arranger and producer Quincy Jones on the set of The Wiz, where he played the Scarecrow. Their first collaboration, 1979's Off The Wall, was a watershed: it sold over 20 million copies and made Michael the first solo artist to spin off four top-10 singles from one album. When the Grammys nominated it only in R&B categories he was so angry he vowed never again to be ignored. The result was Thriller.
Thriller and the world that came after
Released in November 1982, Thriller has sold an estimated 70 million copies worldwide — still the best-selling album of all time. Its short films (he insisted they were never called 'videos') for Billie Jean, Beat It and Thriller forced MTV to integrate, set the template for the modern music video, and made Michael a fixture of every household on Earth with a television. The Motown 25 broadcast on March 25, 1983, where he debuted the moonwalk to a stunned Pasadena Civic Auditorium, became the single most-watched moment in television-music history to that point.
Bad, Dangerous, HIStory — empire years
Through the late 80s and 90s Michael fused dance, R&B, hard rock, gospel, opera and electronic music in ways no one had attempted. He bought ATV Music — and with it the Lennon/McCartney songbook — for $47.5 million in 1985, the most consequential music-publishing acquisition of the century. He patented the anti-gravity lean from Smooth Criminal. He turned the Super Bowl halftime show from a marching-band intermission into a global spectacle. He toured the world four times. He gave away an estimated $500 million to charity over his lifetime — more than any other entertainer in the Guinness Book of World Records.
The final act
Following the trauma of two child-molestation cases (one settled in 1994, one acquittal in 2005) Michael lived as a recluse, moved his children between Bahrain, Ireland and Las Vegas, and finally announced a 50-show comeback residency at London's O2 Arena called This Is It. He died on June 25, 2009, of acute propofol intoxication administered by his personal physician, two and a half weeks before the first show. He was 50. The funeral service was broadcast in 200 countries. His estate has earned more money posthumously than any other entertainer in history.