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Madonna (Entertainer)

Madonna, “2009 MTV Video Music Awards” speech transcript (September 13, 2009)

Michael Jackson. [Cheers] I have a little bit more to say than that. OK, here we go again. Michael Jackson was born in August 1958. So was I. Michael Jackson grew up in the suburbs of the Midwest. So did I. Michael Jackson had eight brothers and sisters. So do I. When Michael Jackson was six, he became a superstar, and was perhaps the world’s most beloved child. When I was six, my mother died. I think he got the shorter end of the stick. I never had a mother, but he never had a childhood. And when you never get to have something, you become obsessed by it.

I spent my childhood searching for my mother figures. Sometimes I was successful, but how do you recreate your childhood when you are under the magnifying glass of the world?

There is no question that Michael Jackson is one of the greatest talents the world has ever known. That when he sang a song at the ripe old age of eight he could make you feel like an experienced adult was squeezing your heart with his words. That when he moved he had the elegance of Fred Astaire and packed the punch of Muhammad Ali. That his music had an extra layer of inexplicable magic that didn’t just make you want to dance but actually made you believe you could fly, dare to dream, be anything that you wanted to be. Because that is what heroes do and Michael Jackson was a hero.

He performed in soccer stadiums around the world, and sold hundreds of millions of records and dined with prime ministers and presidents. Girls fell in love with him, boys fell in love with him, everyone wanted to dance like him. He seemed otherworldly — but he was a human being.

Like most performers he was shy and plagued with insecurities. I can’t say we were great friends, but in 1991 I decided I wanted to try to get to know him better. I asked him out to dinner, I said “My treat, I’ll drive — just you and me.”

He agreed and showed up to my house without any bodyguards. We drove to the restaurant in my car. It was dark out, but he was still wearing sunglasses.

I said, “Michael, I feel like I’m talking to a limousine. Do you think you can take off your glasses so I can see your eyes?”

Then he tossed the glasses out the window, looked at me with a wink and a smile and said, “Can you see me now? Is that better?”

in that moment, I could see both his vulnerability and his charm. The rest of the dinner, I was hellbent on getting him to eat French fries, drink wine, have dessert and say bad words. Things he never seemed to allow himself to do. Later we went back to my house to watch a movie and sat on the couch like two kids, and somewhere in the middle of the movie, his hand snuck over and held mine.

It felt like he was looking for more of a friend than a romance, and I was happy to oblige. In that moment, he didn’t feel like a superstar. He felt like a human being.

We went out a few more times together, and then for one reason or another we fell out of touch. Then the witch hunt began, and it seemed like one negative story after another was coming out about Michael. I felt his pain, I know what it’s like to walk down the street and feel like the whole world is turned against you. I know what it’s like to feel helpless and unable to defend yourself because the roar of the lynch mob is so loud you feel like your voice can never be heard.

But I had a childhood, and I was allowed to make mistakes and find my own way in the world without the glare of the spotlight.

When I first heard that Michael had died, I was in London, days away from the start of my tour. Michael was going to perform in the same venue as me a week later. All I could think about in this moment was, “I had abandoned him.” That we had abandoned him. That we had allowed this magnificent creature who had once set the world on fire to somehow slip through the cracks. While he was trying to build a family and rebuild his career, we were all passing judgement. Most of us had turned our backs on him. In a desperate attempt to hold onto his memory, I went on the internet to watch old clips of him dancing and singing on TV and on stage and I thought, “my God, he was so unique, so original, so rare, and there will never be anyone like him again. He was a king.”

But he was also a human being, and alas we are all human beings and sometimes we have to lose things before we can appreciate them. I want to end this on a positive note and say that my sons, age nine and four, are obsessed with Michael Jackson. There’s a whole lot of crotch grabbing and moon walking going on in my house. And, it seems like a whole new generation of kids have discovered his genius and are bringing him to life again. I hope that wherever Michael is right now he is smiling about this.

Yes, Michael Jackson was a human being but he was a king. Long live the king.

“Rolling Stone” (October 20, 2009) (archived)

“Rolling Stone”: You and Michael were born in the same month, August of 1958. What was it like to witness a kid your age do what he did?

Madonna: I was madly in love with him, totally smitten. He was mind-bogglingly talented. The songs he sang were not childlike at all.

“Rolling Stone”: When did you first meet him?

Madonna: I met him in the early Eighties, when I first started working with my manager, Freddy DeMann, who at the time was managing Michael Jackson. I saw him play at Madison Square Garden, and I was blown away. He was flawless. There was a party at the Helmsley Palace Hotel. He was very shy, but it was a thrill for me.

“Rolling Stone”: Were you jealous of him?

Madonna: In a good way. I'd wished I'd written "Billie Jean" and "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'." What song didn't I love?

“Rolling Stone”: Ten years later there was talk of you recording together, and you went to the Oscars with him.

Madonna: There was a period of time when we hung out. He wanted to work with me, I think he wanted to get to know me, and I wanted to do the same. When you write with somebody, it's a weird experience, you feel vulnerable and shy. When I worked with Justin Timberlake I felt that way. To write songs together is a very intimate experience, like getting tossed into a juggernaut. "On your mark, get set, create!" You have to get past these hurdles, which are, "I want to impress this person, but will they think my ideas are stupid? What if their ideas are stupid? Can I be honest with them? Will they be offended?" You end up talking and gabbing and socializing, and you have to do that in order to get to the next level, to be creative. So that's what we were doing: watching movies, having dinner, hanging out, going to the Oscars, being silly, seeing if we could work. He got relaxed. He took off his sunglasses, had a glass of wine, I got him to laugh.

“Rolling Stone”: You're the only other entertainer in the world who can relate to enduring that level of scrutiny. Why did it destroy him?

Madonna: All I have are my opinions, I wasn't very close to him. It's good to have a good childhood and a sense of yourself in the world before people start telling you who they think your are. Where you can make mistakes and have a sense of innocence. It gives you a sense of confidence. I don't think he started off that way. Did he have any sense of himself outside of the world of being adored and famous? It's hard to survive like that. I think he felt insecure about the attention he got, and had a love-hate relationship with his job. He didn't seem to have any close friends. And in the last decade, everybody abandoned him, or wrote him off as crazy. People have said so many things about me that aren't true, and I never once had a second thought that the accusations against him might be true. But he didn't seem to have a way to deal with that, publicly or privately, and it can destroy you. When he died, everyone was saying what a great genius he was, but it's important to appreciate things before you lose them. It's a great tragedy.

“The Times” (September 20, 2009) (mirror) (archived mirror)

Of the Jackson collaboration, she says: “We spent a chunk of time together, and became friends, but it never happened. I wrote a bunch of words and presented them to him, and he didn’t want to go there. He didn’t want to be provocative. And I said, ‘Well, why come to me?’ I mean, that’s like asking Quentin Tarantino to not put any violence in his films. I felt like he was too inhibited, too shy. Well, I’m shy too. When you’re writing with somebody, you immediately become shy, because, unless you’re already good friends, you can’t be honest and say, ‘That’s the shittest thing I’ve ever heard.’ You’re afraid to say that you don’t like something because you don’t want to hurt their feelings, or you’re afraid your ideas are shit; and if you reveal those cards, they’re not going to want to work with you.” Surely any musician in the world, I think, would kill to work with her. But of course that’s not the point. Madonna needs to want to work with them. It’s never the other way around.

“The first thing that came into my head,” she continues, referring now to Jackson’s death, “was the word ‘abandoned’. I feel like we all abandoned him and put him in a box and labelled him as a strange person. And it used to pain me to see people go write such horrible things about him, accuse him of being a child molester, and all these things that nobody had any proof of — because, you know, I’ve had plenty of things I’ve been accused of. When I adopted David, I was accused of kidnapping him, for God’s sakes; and it’s very hurtful, and people love to jump on bandwagons. The lynch-mob mentality is pretty scary.”