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Here comes Michael Jackson. Sixteen years dead, thrice disgraced, still too big to fail. MJ the Musical rolls into Melbourne spruiking 5 million jubilant customers across three continents. Another glorious tier to an empire sustained by the machinery of forgetting.

Don’t fret, music fans. This great art vs questionable artist argument has already been won. Riding so high in the coffers of history, cherished memories of Billie Jean and Beat It are not at stake. Weird, though, when the fantastic story of a man is written and rewritten so large it steamrolls our appetite for the truth.

I felt the first queasy rumble of the machine at the Brit Awards in London in 1996. You can watch Jackson’s performance of Earth Song on YouTube. Shame for the whole sick world was on us, as poor children of all colours were herded out to be healed by touching the pop messiah’s outstretched body.

Two years after Jackson settled a civil suit with 13-year-old Jordy Chandler’s family over sexual abuse accusations – the reported $35 million came with no admission of liability – the whole creepy uncle/martyr spectacle was both laughable and alarming. We’d never know whose account to trust, but this King of Pop geezer was beyond belief.

Sanctifying his special relationship with children was a classic example of what we now routinely call doubling down: an American gambling term for deflecting distrust with a crude act of reassertion, a power move brash enough to obliterate dissent. That’s been the MJ strategy ever since.

That year’s comeback plan was spearheaded by giant statues of Jackson dressed for battle, built to tower over Europe. His HIStory package reminded us of his greatness by slipping a disc of old hits in with his new stuff. Invincible continued the creative decline but the gameplan held firm: keep the legend larger than life and let scale blur detail.

Going back to the ’80s, it was Jackson who insisted on the King of Pop branding with MTV and other media that needed him too badly to suggest he wasn’t. And it was his publicity machine, we now know, that fed tabloids outlandish stories about hyperbaric sleep chambers and buying the Elephant Man’s bones.

The point........

© The Sydney Morning Herald