From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell. Welcome to the treatment.

On Michael Jackson's more than just a loaded phrase, it is the title of an amazing book-length essay by the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times book critic, Margo Jefferson, who is my guest. I'm thrilled to have her here. Margo, thanks so much for doing this.

Elvis, I am delighted. Thank you. What's amazing about the book to me is that it is like a bullet in a very specific kind of way.

And it closes with an amazing section about the trial, the lawsuit, and everything, all

the legal, basically all the ramifications of the legal part of his life.

I'm wondering what made you decide to write this book.

Where did that come from?

It started in the 80s when I wrote a piece about Michael. It was just around the time of

bad when everyone was beginning to say, oh, God, you know, the skin, the femininization, and yet

the crotch clutching, you know, these scenarios of Michael being

more sensitive than all the boys in the hood, but also besting them.

I wrote a piece and which I said, could we not think about him as not merely a, quote,

you know, racially, sexually,

troubled person. Why don't we think of him as working with,

struggling with himself as a kind of piece of art?

But that piece you mentioned, which is basically the through line of this book,

that he was a work in transition.

Exactly.

Then as the decade went on, it was clear that Michael was beginning to lose his territory, if you will, as a genius of a performer.

You know, the originality, he began to be imitated, but the originality just began to be taken for granted. And even his

reputation as a real, a real groundbreaking in terms of the music video started to get lost

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