He might be mad ... but is Michael Jackson wrong?; Accusations of

decadence to decay It don't matter if you're black or white. Or so Michael Jackson insisted in one of his last great chart-busters before the self-styled King of Pop's career nosedived to Neverland. Now Jackson has changed his tune after an outburst on a sweltering double-decker bus outside the Rev Al Sharpton's National Action Network headquarters in Harlem.

He now says Sony record chief Tommy Mottola is "racist" and "very, very, very, devilish". Sony, says Jackson, has never forgiven a black artist for outselling white icons such as Elvis Presley. And he argues that all the problems that have come together virtually to sink his career - the accusations of child abuse, the stories of his eccentricities and his tumbling record sales - have been engineered by a racist industry out for revenge. (Not so simple as ABC.) The pages of the American press overflow with suggestions as to why Jackson would lob such hefty accusations at Mottola, the ex-husband of Mariah Carey, and a company which has a long history of signing black artists.

Some suggest that Jackson is so skint that last year he was forced to cough up a $2 million diamond watch as collateral for a bank loan. Other commentators place the back catalogue of Beatles songs, which Jackson so controversially bought up from under the nose of Paul McCartney in 1985, at the centre of the current crisis.

It's acknowledged that Jackson once used that catalogue to borrow $200m from the record label. Now, so the conspiracy theories suggest, the record company is calling in that loan at a time when it knows Jackson can't afford it and thus cornering him into forking over the rights to the Beatles songs.

All this comes at a time when Jackson's star status is well and truly on the wane. His latest album, Invincible, failed to sell more than $5m worth worldwide. Despite the fallen star's rant that the disappointing performance boils down to poor promotion by Sony, the critics have remained scathing about the quality of the former child prodigy's current music.

Jackson's decision to play the race card has also failed to win universal support within the black community. Norman Kelley, editor of Rhythm And Business: The Political Economy Of Black Music, says it looks more and more like another loopy, Jackson-style publicity stunt rather than a plug for civil rights.

"Michael Jackson's been in the music industry for 30 years. He's just now becoming aware that there's racism in the recording industry?" says Kelley, who in his book, and in an article headlined Blacked Out in The Village Voice newspaper in June, tackled the long- held concerns of black artists getting duped into signing inequitable contracts by record executives.

Kelley believes Jackson's allegations have brought nothing new to the discussion. Racism has always floated around the recording industry, just as it embeds itself into almost all facets of American life, he says.

"It might have something to do with the traditional role of black people being at the bottom," says Kelley. "In hip-hop, for example, young people come out of the inner cities, where the level of schooling is really bad. A lot don't read contracts. They're seduced by the glitter and glamour of being hip-hop artists."

Certainly, the exploitation of starry-eyed artists by the corporate machine (for example, the recording companies) isn't exactly a new idea, and it doesn't affect only black artists. On June 11 Courtney Love of Hole appeared in a Los Angeles court to sue her record company, Universal Music Group, after the label sued her for backing out of her contract in 1999. (Love failed to deliver on her five contracted albums and the company freaked.) Three years ago Love, who's also embroiled in a bitter dispute with her late husband's band Nirvana, circulated a letter to her fellow recording artists that blasted the industry for not taking care of its own. In it she outlined a number of iniquities.

"Recording artists don't have access to quality health care and pension plans like the ones made available to actors and athletes through their unions," she wrote. "Recording artists are paid royalties that represent a tiny fraction of the money their work earns."

Love highlighted the plights of black artists but did not blame a racial divide for the problem. She wrote: "Multi-platinum artists like TLC and Toni Braxton have been forced to declare bankruptcy because their recording contracts didn't pay them enough to survive. Florence Ballard of the Supremes was on welfare when she died."

George Michael sued Sony in 1992 through 1995, claiming the company had reduced its promotional support for his records when they veered away from an initially successful formula. And Prince took umbrage at Warner Brothers for refusing to release the huge volume of music he was recording, appearing in public with the word "slave" emblazoned on his cheek.

Even Elvis Presley died with an estate valued at less than $3m. It took the business acumen of his widow, Priscilla, and her advisers to build the empire back to the million-dollar money-spinner it is today.

Darrell McNeill, director of operations for the Black Rock Coalition, believes that when it comes to exploiting up-and-coming artists, the dollar-driven American recording industry has pretty much granted equal opportunity, although black artists in recent years have found themselves on a disproportionate end of the shoddy deals.

"White artists, black artists, latinos across the board get systematically exploited. It all depends on what the market will bear and the path of least resistance," says McNeill. "Where was Michael Jackson when you had various artists in the modern era making these claims?" McNeill asks. "You have TLC and Toni Braxton basically declaring themselves bankrupt because they got these onerous deals with their respective record companies. If Michael Jackson is so concerned about racism how is it that he manages to own a catalogue of other black artists, writers and producers and not speak about it along those lines?"

But not everyone agrees that Jackson's most recent outbursts are simply another example of the madness that has circled his life since he first found fame as a five-year-old with his brothers in The Jackson Five.

Harry Allen, hip-hop activist and co-founder of the Rhythm Cultural Institute, says that just because the press has had a field day this past week making fun of Jackson's claims doesn't mean people shouldn't listen to what he's saying. Regardless of what people want to think, says Allen, Michael Jackson is black, and if anything, his altered physical appearance serves as a brutal indicator of his attempt to fit into a world where whites often wield the power.

"It's easy to make fun of Michael Jackson," he says. "It's easy to get laughs because of his weird behaviour, his skin colour. All this is really irrelevant. This is a person with credibility because he's sold an enormous amount of records. Everything he has said needs to be taken seriously."

Certainly, race is the fault line which has run through popular music since its very beginnings. From Elvis to Eminem, white artists have adopted the ideas and stylings from black culture and repackaged them to make their fortunes. But when black artists attempt to cross over into genres dominated by whites, such as rock and alternative, they struggle to cut the same deals with the big labels, with Lenny Kravitz being - after years of hard work - perhaps the most successful black artist, after Jimi Hendrix, to make it.

Norman Kelley's article in The Village Voice claimed that since his own book and a report titled The Discordant Sound Of Music, issued nearly 15 years ago by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, no one has taken a formal interest in the economic exploitation of black recording artists or picked out the economic consequences of black music.

But with the rise to prominence of rap and R&B, black artists with clout have started to emerge and are more powerful than ever before. Puff Daddy, Jay-Z, Nelly and other artists own their own labels or hold large executive rights.

Instead of helping the cause, Kelley fears Jackson, and Sharpton - a possible US presidential candidate who constantly miscounts the major American record labels at four instead of five - might be hurting its legitimacy.

Lobbing around words like "racist" and "nigger" amounts to little more than petty name-calling and innuendo, he says. "Any type of organising should be led by musicians because they understand the issues intimately," Kelley says. "What Michael Jackson and Al Sharpton are doing to some degree is muddying the water. Now when people hear about musicians down the road they're not going to pay much attention because of Michael Jackson's Return From Neverland Tour."

1991 Jackson releases Dangerous. The video of Black And White shows Jackson grabbing his crotch and violently smashing windows and stirs up protests that the images are inappropriate for young viewers. Controversy continues over his plastic surgery and gradual "skin whitening", later explained by Jackson as a rare skin disorder.

1994 Jackson marries Elvis Presley's daughter, Lisa Marie, on May 26. Rumours fly that the marriage is a publicity stunt crafted to revitalise Jackson's career. They split18 months later.

1995 Jackson's friendship with a monkey and Neverland, his lavish fantasy-theme-park-like home, do not help his failing image. Jackson is accused of molesting a 13-year-old boy. The suit is settled out of court for $20 million, which many regard as an admission of guilt. Jackson appears on television, saying: "I could never harm a child children love me, I love them. They follow me, they want to be with me. But anybody can come in my bed, a child can come in my bed if they want."

1996 Jackson announces that his friend Debbie Rowe is carrying his child. The two later marry and Prince Michael Joseph Jackson Jr is born in 1997. The couple insist their union was natural and Rowe publicly states she was not artificially inseminated. Rowe gives birth to a daughter, Paris Michael Katherine Jackson, in 1998. Jackson and Rowe have since split.

2001-2002 In the wake of September 11, Jackson rallies musicians to record a fundraising single that he wrote called What More Can I Give? The project is mysteriously abandoned and Jackson accuses Sony of blocking its release. The Los Angeles Times reports that Jackson's advisers halted the project after they discovered that the song's executive producer Marc Schaffel produced and directed gay pornographic videos.

Copyright 2002
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