Michael Jackson, king of pop in France

Michael Jackson back from the dead? This was more or less the synopsis of Thriller, the historic video that propelled the youngest of the Jackson Five to pop music stardom. Forty-three years later, the same scenario is replaying itself – except this time Michael Jackson, deceased on June 25, 2009 from a drug overdose, is truly dead.

His work, however, had not seemed as alive as it had in a long time. The film Michael is a hit in theaters. In just three weeks of release, the biopic by Antoine Fuqua (starring Jaafar Jackson as his uncle) has already gathered over 3.5 million viewers in France. The film’s soundtrack, featuring the main hits of the “king of pop,” is leading album sales. On streaming sites, listens to Billie Jean or Beat It have skyrocketed, while the “moonwalk” has become a trend on TikTok. “It’s as if all the planets were aligned,” summarizes Richard Lecocq, a specialist in African American music and author of the biography Michael Jackson – Legend (Glénat).

The musical icon of the 1980s

Spontaneous enthusiasm or the culmination of an XXL marketing strategy? Michael Jackson’s catalog is also a capital to capitalize on, valued between 1.2 and 1.5 billion dollars. To recover half of it, Sony wrote a nine-figure check in 2024. But advertising doesn’t explain everything. “Michael Jackson truly has an iconic dimension that transcends generations. Every Halloween, Thriller returns to the charts, it has almost become the soundtrack. There is a universal side to his work, which is rare in pop culture. Today, we watch his videos like we would watch a Tex Avery, a Disney, or a Charlie Chaplin. It is very marked in its time, but the emotions it conveys, the scenarios, the dances, all of that transcends the years,” says Richard Lecocq.

Its rediscovery is also part of an idealization of the 1980s, illustrated by the success of the series Stranger Things, and as the catalysts of a new generation of artists, from Billie Eilish to The Weeknd, who do not hide the influence that Michael Jackson has had on their music.

Impasse on allegations of pedocriminality

In 2019, after the release of Leaving Neverland, a damning documentary in which two men accused the singer of sexual abuse when they were children, no one would have bet on this resurgence. Some radios even started to boycott his songs. “With the Epstein, R. Kelly, or Puff Daddy cases, people had points of comparison. They realized that the accusations against Michael Jackson have always followed the same pattern, made by people who first go to lawyers before the police,” says Richard Lecocq, who prefers to remember that the only trial for sexual assault on minors against Michael Jackson ended in acquittal in 2005. But a second trial is set to take place in November, filed against the singer’s companies by the two victims mentioned in Leaving Neverland.

These accusations were ignored in the biopic, officially due to a confidentiality agreement reached between Michael Jackson and the family of Jordan Chandler – the first to accuse him in 1993 of sexual assault.

According to the specialized press, the Chandler case was supposed to be the thread of the film. Ending with the 1987-1989 Bad tour, it does not hide the complex relationship between Michael Jackson and his father Joseph – a foundational relationship to understand the singer’s psychology, deprived of his childhood by a despotic father who turned him into a cash machine. “What touches people is also the rather sad human trajectory of Michael Jackson. He did not have an easy life. Even when he was at the height of his glory, he always had this disastrous relationship with his father,” explains Lecocq.