Michael Jackson/YMMV

• Author's Saving Throw: HIStory didn't go over very well, as there was no way to buy it without also getting the Greatest Hits Album that comes with it, so Michael decided to create Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix, which has some new material, as well as remixes of songs from HIStory, so that songs would both get more exposure to people who didn't buy the album, and still be something new to listen to for the people that did.
• Broken Base: Bad rep aside, there are fans that prefer his pre-Thriller work and some like his work up until HIStory, the first post-allegations album. Oh, and some who like it till the end, including Invincible.
• Dude, Not Funny: The Memetic Molester jokes, at least during the year or three Too Soon grace period.
• Epic Riff: "Beat It." Just "Beat It."
  • The bass riff in "Smooth Criminal" too.
• Epileptic Trees: Considering the guy's strange life, it can generate all manners of theory. Especially about his death.
• Even Better Sequel: Off the Wall? Awesome. Thriller? SUPER AWESOME.
• Face of the Band: He pretty much was the only significant member of the Jackson 5.
• Family-Unfriendly Aesop: The public relations folks at Motown taught Michael and his brothers that it was okay to lie for the sake of their image.

Ed Sullivan: How old are you, Michael?
Michael: Nine. (He was eleven.)

• Fanon Discontinuity: The first four albums of his solo career, Got To Be There, Ben, Music & Me, and Forever, Michael, were made under the Motown banner and Michael himself didn't have creative control. Thus, some fans often do not consider them a part of his official solo catalog. He would get complete creative control with the move to Epic Records, starting with his next solo album Off The Wall.
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: The Thriller video became scarier by the mid-2000's when the real appearance of Michael mimicked his zombie makeup.
  • And of course, there's the fact that now he's actually dead, which has just launched roughly a billion or so of these moments, from the amount of parodies and jokes at his expense over the years. Of course, there's a limit to how much it applies, given that he's presently dead as opposed to undead like in the music video.
    • There are t-shirts originally printed for his upcoming tour featuring Thriller zombie Jackson with the words "This is It" (the name of the tour) emblazoned across them. They didn't go on sale until after his death.
  • There was a painting done by artist Dana Schutz, called "Autopsy of Michael Jackson". It was painted in 2005.
  • In This Is It, the new video for "Thriller" ends with Michael and the other zombies ascending into heaven...
  • In "They Don't Care About Us", these lyrics are sung by Michael:

"Beat me, hate me / You can never break me / Will me, thrill me / You can never kill me"

• • The best Funny Aneurysm Moment came almost two decades before his demise, and had absolutely nothing to do with his death. Say hello this cover to Disney Adventures's June 1993 issue. Michael's smiling and hoisting Pinocchio on his shoulders, and there's the promise of things the reader (probably) didn't know about Michael Jackson. This was a mere two months before the disturbing sexual abuse allegations became public and shone a whole new light on the cover.
  • Michael Jackson claiming "I'm not like other guys" in the music video of Thriller is very funny in the light of everything that happened to him next, to the point that it could be called Captain Obvious.
  • When Michael sang "Man In The Mirror" in 1987, about changing the world by starting with yourself, his facelifts had already significantly changed his own view in the mirror, and considering he just kept on changing his face...
    • For that matter, his unwillingness to stop spending so much of his time with young boys despite advisors' and friends' warnings that it looked bad would lead to his career's ultimate implosion at the Turn of the Millennium.
  • Just before his death, Q magazine published an article questioning whether or not his fragile health could take the strain of another tour.
  • Michael singing about the things that begin to beginning to "notice boys you like" during his 1991 appearance on The Simpsons. It's a song about the changes an eight-year-old girl goes through, but, still.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: As popular as he was in the United States, he was more popular in other countries (including Germany) due to the negative press being not as bad there. In the end, while he had tours for Dangerous and HIStory mounted, they did not include stops in the continental U.S.; he was planning for the Dangerous tour to reach the U.S., but then the first round of abuse allegations arrived. His This Is It tour was planned to be exclusively held at a single stadium in London.
• Glurge: He wrote a book called Dancing the Dream about, as a reviewer summarized: "a fanciful collection of poems, reflections and photographs that champions kids, endangered species, the homeless, AIDS victims and planet Earth." If that isn't Glurge I have no idea what is.
  • Ghosts and "Earth Song" also qualify, especially the notorious Brit Awards performance of the latter in 1996 (see Messianic Archetype on the main page) which Pulp's Jarvis Cocker crashed at the midway point.
  • There's a lot of this in the rabid fandom too -- the website Inner Michael is completely devoted to propping him up as a shining exemplar of humanity who was pure and perfect, a helpless victim of the black-hearted folk of the world who displaced their evil onto him by distorting his forever-innocent behavior.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The song "Morphine". Made in 1997, it was about his addiction to prescription drugs. Even when he was alive it was pretty chilling. But now that it is suspected his death may have been linked to use of prescription drugs, and that's when it became downright scary.
  • There's also Harsher in Hindsight if you watch Ghosts, which is about Michael's character's house being raided by an angry mob of people who hate him because he's strange. At the end, he asks them if they still want him to go and the mob leader says yes. He says something "Fine, I'll go" and pounds himself into dust on the floor. It was just a ruse on Michael's character's part, but it's still creepy as hell now that the guy is actually dead, especially considering how much of his poor mental state and isolation was due (from his perspective) to people treating him like this.
  • Then there's the fact that his never-performed 2009 comeback tour was to be called This Is It.
  • And this.
• He's Just Hiding: When his death was announced, several people thought he was staging it in order to boost his sales and a lot of fans were/are believe he is actually still alive.
• I Thought It Meant: Smooth Criminal is often used as a nickname for Michael and a lot of people think he is the title character in the song and music video; the title character is an unseen scumbag who has beaten up (possibly to death) a woman named Annie in her apartment. It's quite a bit darker than its often remembered as too.
• Memetic Molester: In the eyes of sizable chunk of the population, with another sizable chunk being offended on his behalf, and a third sizable chunk sick of hearing about it one way or the other.
• Memetic Mutation: HEE HEE!
  • Cha'mone!
  • HOO!
  • WHO'S BAD?!
  • The dancing prisoners grooving to their version of Thriller.
    • Which in turn became an Ascended Meme when Sony filmed the prisoners for the This is It DVD.
• Mondegreen: Ask ten people what the lyrics to "Smooth Criminal" are, and you'll likely get ten different answers.
  • Also, the repeated cries of "cha-mone!" in his songs are actually, if one cares to but look at the printed lyrics in the album sleeve of the "Bad" CD, just Michael unclearly singing "come on!"
• Needs More Love: Many fans agree that the Invincible album is terribly underrated. It was voted the best album of the 2000s in a Billboard magazine reader survey at the end of '09, though that was clearly influenced by Jackson's passing.
  • HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I is another one. The second disc is pretty solid, with favorites such as "They Don't Care About Us", "Stranger in Moscow", "You Are Not Alone", "Earth Song" and the Janet Jackson collaboration "Scream". Unfortunately, to this day it's only available on CD bundled with a greatest hits album, which makes it significantly more expensive than Jackson's other albums and is probably part of why it didn't sell as well as hoped.
    • The CD was bundled with that greatest hits album with the intent of making it sell better: the producers were targeting newcomers that didn't buy Michael Jackson's precedent albums and they wanted to take all their chances after his reputation was soiled by the child molestation case.
    • It still sold enough to be considered, alongside Pink Floyd's The Wall, to be one of the best-selling double albums of all time.
• Older Than They Think: Many people think Michael invented the moonwalk, but Jazz musicians like Cab Calloway were doing the move as "The Buzz" as far back as the 1920s.
  • He also did not invent the story-driven Concept Video; David Bowie (who was doing them at the end of The Seventies) is just one artist who predates him in that area.
• Protection From Editors: Why Dangerous, History and Invincible ended up how they did.
• The Scrappy: No one likes Joe Jackson.
• Sequel Displacement: As noted above, it's usually acknowledged that his solo career starts with Off the Wall, which marks his departure from Motown to Epic Records.
• Snark Bait: His last album Invincible, which was actually followed by his career bottoming out as he left Sony. The typical joke was/is to say "Ha! MJ is certainly no longer invincible!"
• Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: His entire life dropped two anvils - child abuse is bad, and dealing with fame is hard.
• Stuck in Their Shadow: With the exception of Janet, who launched her career in 1982 but didn't hit it big until '86, no one seemed to care about Michael's siblings once he became a megastar.
• Tough Act to Follow: Thriller.
• Uncanny Valley: Michael's plastic surgeries steadily pushed him into this.
• Vindicated by History: Somewhat. Although many of his detractors still think some of the things he allegedly did were wrong, they admit his past work was still cool.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: "Black or White" and "Remember the Time".
• Vocal Minority: His U.S. fanbase from 1994 onward, best summed up by the throngs that hung out around the courthouse during his 2005 trial and the small, stunned crowd which gathered outside the hospital where he died shortly after it was reported that he was there (and before it was announced he had a heart attack, was in a coma or dead).
• Wangst: "Childhood" is just one example, and it comes complete with the lyrics "No one understands me"! Even his friends remember how prone he was to wangst.
• The Woobie: He never had a normal life, had an abusive dad, and had his public image ruined forever due to possibly-false accusations (reading the account of the trial on Wikipedia will make that apparent), so many (if not most) of his fans regard him as this.