Susan Fast

Dangerous is a tough book to read. It was written before Finding Neverland was released. Even so, we all had an idea that all wasn’t right with Michael Jackson’s personal life. He’s been accused of improprieties in his personal life since before this album was even released. So the first question you have to ask yourself is whether it’s possible to separate a deeply flawed artist from the art he created. How you answer this question will inform whether or not you’ll even pick up this book in the first place.

I’ve been listening to Michael Jackson since I can remember. As a kid in Saudi Arabia, the Kingdom had some curious rules about MJ’s music. You could possess a Michael Jackson tape, but no store in the country was allowed to sell his music. This led to a weird, speakeasy vibe at music stores where the proprietor would size you up and decide whether it was safe to offer you the illicit goods behind the counter. I must have looked like quite a shady character, because I was always offered a chance to buy bootleg copies of Thriller or Off The Wall. We moved to America in 1990, and when Dangerous came out the following year, it was a different experience for me. I could go into any Sam Goody or Musicland and buy the tape openly. But, just like the change in my life moving from the Middle East to the US, Michael Jackson had changed too.

As Susan Fast states in the book, Dangerous was a maturing point in Jackson’s music. The music is more overtly political, and less happy go lucky. There’s an extensive exploration of the expanding of Jackson’s emotional palette, which is explored extensively in each chapter of the book. There’s some allusion to Jackson’s strange relationships to kids, but they’re framed as MJ creating his own family to substitute for the family life he wasn’t able to have as a kid. This is a bit of a cop out, but the book is by a fan so we can’t expect a totally objective look into the less savory aspects of MJ’s life.

If you can separate Michael Jackson’s art from the man, then I recommend this book.… (more)