Michael Jackson: "Billie Jean"

by Mark Asch • July 21, 2009

Michael Jackson's best song—and I can say that it is with certainty, now, in the ecstatic hindsight that his death has brought, following weekends of car speakers and barrooms full of young, dancing Brooklynites and barbecue boom boxes—is also, in hindsight, his most poignant. "Billie Jean", aside from being his breakthrough hit, and unprecedented floor-filler once again, is almost eerie in the way that its lyrics seem to have predicted the torments that would define the subsequent second half of Jackson's life. I mean, what is "Billie Jean" if not, first and foremost, a not particularly believable protestation of sexual innocence?

Pop songs, representing, as they do, the art of seduction in 200 seconds or less, are rife with unreliable narrators. Even before his teens, Jackson was compromised and duplicitous (as well as sexualized): The narrator of "I Want You Back" has already betrayed his love (at least) once. Who's to say he won't do it again? But Jackson-the-narrator has never been a more unreliable narrator than in this song, based on his and his brothers' own experience with crazily devoted fans. Surveying the consequences of such an intense engagement with the audience, Jackson came up with a song in which he admitted: Sure, she looked like a beauty queen; sure, she caused a scene; sure, they danced, on the floor, in the round; sure, she came and stood right by him with her sweet perfume; sure, he went to her room; and sure, the baby's eyes look like his—but, no, Billie Jean is not his lover, and the kid is not his son. Suuure.

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