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To this day, “Man In The Mirror” seems to stand apart from the increasingly troubling legend of Michael Jackson. It became a kind of self-improvement folk song, a gospel standard. “Man In The Mirror” overwhelmed any and all talk about Michael Jackson the public figure. If that’s what Jackson thought, he was right. Maybe he just knew that the song was powerful enough to shut everyone up, at least for a little while.
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So maybe it was brave for Jackson to release “Man In The Mirror,” the song about taking a long look at yourself and making a change, as a single in 1988. In the late ’80s, Michael Jackson was one of the most visible people in the world, and people definitely talked about how his features were changing. Jackson’s vitiligo caused blotches on his skin, and he wore makeup to cover it up. Through the ’80s and beyond, Jackson’s face changed. Later on, he said he’d gotten a nose job so that he could breathe better and hit higher notes. Michael had his first rhinoplasty surgery in 1979, reportedly after he’d broken his nose while falling during a dance rehearsal. When Michael was a kid, Joe would call him “Big Nose.” Michael hated it.
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Michael was a shy and sensitive kid by nature, and constant hectoring from his father didn’t make him any more confident. Michael was the focus of the Jackson 5, and he was also the youngest member of the group, at least until baby brother Randy joined up years later. Jackson was five years old when Joe Jackson, the abusive taskmaster patriarch of the Jackson family, organized five of his sons into a singing group. There was plenty of context, even if that context wasn’t known at the time. A song like “Man In The Mirror” practically invited people to notice that changes were being made. The Michael Jackson of 1988 did not look like the Michael Jackson of 1983, and the Michael Jackson of 1983 did not look like the Michael Jackson of 1979. Plenty of them seemed to think that he was a weirdo. But for weird kids who read the gossip columns of local newspapers, like me, it was pretty apparent that plenty of adults did not look at Michael Jackson the way that I did. He came off more as a walking miracle, a manifestation of flash and dazzle and magic. To a kid in the ’80s, it didn’t make sense to look at Michael Jackson as a fallible human being. “Man In The Mirror” is the fourth of five consecutive No.1 singles from the album making Michael the first artist to achieve this milestone.In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Rolling Stone praised the short film in 2014 as “a powerful statement to deliver to personality-driven MTV” and included it on the list of Michael’s 20 greatest short films. In keeping with the lyrical message of the song, which is strongly identified with Michael Jackson and reflective of his own philosophies, the short film tells a story through powerful images of oppression, homelessness, hunger, police brutality and other ills of the world as well as events and leaders of the 20th century whose work embodies the song’s message to “make that change.” Michael is only featured briefly in a crowd shot toward the end of the film.
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“Man In The Mirror” is the third of nine short films for the “Bad” album. Official Video for “Man In the Mirror” by Michael Jackson