My nine-year-old son loves Michael Jackson. How do I get him to stop?

His son’s adoration for Michael Jackson leads Sarfraz Manzoor to confront the difficult question: how much criminal behaviour had he ignored because an artist’s work was just too good?

It’s Saturday morning and I am curled up with my nine-year-old son Ezra on a sofa while his mum is upstairs enjoying her weekend lie-in. We have YouTube on the television screen. I ask him what he fancies watching, knowing full well what he will reply. It’s the same thing he’s asked for when we have Spotify in the kitchen, the same thing he wants when in the car. “Michael Jackson,” he says.

I don’t quite know how Jackson first entered Ezra’s consciousness – he might have seen a poster for MJ the Musical, which is coming to the end of its West End run on 28 February, or an online trailer for Michael, the film biopic set for release on 24 April. However it started, Ezra is now fully obsessed with Michael Jackson. If it were up to him, our lives would be led against a looped soundtrack of “Billie Jean”, “Beat It” and “Smooth Criminal”. We sit on the sofa and put on the video to “Billie Jean”. It takes me back to being 12 years old, the summer of 1983 and the first time I heard Michael Jackson.

It isn’t hard to see why Ezra loves Michael Jackson. I became obsessed with him for the same reasons when I was a young boy: the way he sang, the way he looked and the way he danced. I show Ezra the performance of “Billie Jean” from the 25th anniversary Motown concert. Jackson seemed possessed of an unearthly talent and charisma. I tell Ezra that I saw Michael Jackson in concert as a teenager on the Bad tour at Wembley Stadium in 1988. He is aghast. He looks so full of joy as he listens to Jackson, and while I am happy that he is happy I am also happy conflicted: there is a reason why I stopped listening to Michael Jackson.

We always knew Jackson was strange. The rumours of sleeping in an oxygen tank, The Elephant Man obsession, Bubbles the chimp, and Jackson’s seeming transformation from being black to white. From the early 1990s, he was repeatedly accused of sexually abusing boys he had befriended, culminating in a criminal trial in 2005. That case ended in Jackson’s acquittal on all charges. (A Channel 4 series, Michael Jackson: The Trial, which revisits the case, started this week.)

‘I am not sure if even then I completely believed Jackson was wholly innocent but being honest, I think I chose to look the other way because the music was just too good’ (Getty Images)

I am not sure if even then I completely believed Jackson was wholly innocent – Johnnie Cochran, who was part of his defence team, had also represented OJ Simpson – but being honest, I think I chose to look the other way because the music was just too good. When allegations first broke in the early 2000s that R Kelly had been involved with the abuse of underage girls, it was easy not to listen to his songs because I never had. But to live without the music of Michael Jackson... And, anyway, they were just stories, and he had been acquitted, and how great is Eddie Van Halen’s guitar on “Beat It”?

It was the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland that convinced me that those excuses no longer worked. Director Dan Reed told the story of two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who alleged they had been sexually abused by Michael Jackson when they were boys. It is true that there was never a criminal conviction and no definitive physical evidence, but it was hard to listen to music that had once sparked joy after you had been offered a glimpse of “the evil lurking in the dark”. So I stopped listening to Michael Jackson.

The first time my son mentioned that he wanted me to put on a Michael Jackson song, I tried to say no. When he insisted to know why, I struggled to know what to say. Just saying no would not suffice but did I really want to introduce him to all the sordid details that would explain why he had never heard any Jackson songs in our house? There will be a day when we may need to have A Conversation about Michael Jackson, when my son will need to grapple with the question of whether one can separate the artist from the art, but what I love about being with Ezra is that he reminds me of what it is like to feel an uncomplicated pleasure. That is so hard for me these days perhaps because I once counted Woody Allen, Philip Roth and Noam Chomsky among those I admired. I envy Ezra’s ignorance. There will come a time when he will learn troubling facts about Jackson and maybe he will decide he can no longer listen to his music. For now I am happy for Ezra to listen to Michael Jackson and grateful that he gets to spend a little while longer in Neverland.