GQ magazine has put a younger Michael Jackson on the cover of their new issue in tribute to the days, as they put it, when he was cool. Here is MJ on the cover of GQ along with a portion of the coverstory article titled Back in the Day:

Begin not with the miniseries childhood of father Joseph’s endless practice sessions but with the later and, it seems, just as formative Motown childhood, from, say, 11 to 14—years spent, when not on the road, most often alone, behind security walls, with private tutors and secret sketchbooks. A dreamy child, he collects exotic animals. He likes rainbows and reading. He starts collecting exotic animals now. His eldest brothers were at one time children who dreamed of child stardom. Michael never knows this sensation. By the time he achieves something like self-awareness, he is a child star. The child star dreams of being an artist. Alone, he puts on classical records, because he finds they soothe his mind. He also likes the old southern stuff his uncle Luther sings. His uncle looks back at him and thinks he seems sad for his age. This is in California, so poor, brown Gary, with its poisonous air you could smell from leagues away—a decade’s exposure to which may already have damaged his immune system in fateful ways—is the past. He thinks about things and sometimes talks them over with his friends Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross when they are hanging out. He listens to albums and compares. The albums he and his brothers make have a few nice tunes, to sell records, then a lot of consciously second-rate numbers, to satisfy the format. Whereas Tchaikovsky and people like that, they didn’t handle slack material. But you have to write your own songs. Michael has always made melodies in his head, little riffs and beats, but that isn’t the same. The way Motown deals with the Jackson 5, finished songs are delivered to the group, from songwriting teams in various cities. The brothers are brought in to sing and add accents. Michael wants access to the “anatomy” of the music. That’s the word he uses repeatedly. Anatomy. What’s inside its structure that makes it move? When he’s 17, he asks Stevie Wonder to let him spy while Songs in the Key of Life gets made. There’s Michael, self-consciously shy and deferential, flattening himself mothlike against the Motown studio wall. Somehow Stevie’s blindness becomes moving in this context. No doubt he is for long stretches unaware of Michael’s presence. Never asks him to play a shaker or anything. Never mentions Michael. But Michael hears him.

After the jump, read the rest of this excerpt …

His art will later depend on his ability to stay in touch with that childlike inner instrument, keeping near enough to himself to hear his own melodic promptings. If you’ve listened to toddlers making up songs, the things they invent are often bafflingly catchy and ingenious. They compose to biorhythms somehow. The vocal from Michael’s earlier, Off the Wall-era demo of the eventual Thriller hit “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” sounds like nothing so much as playful schoolyard taunting. He will always be at his worst when making what he thinks of as “big” music, which he invariably associates with military imagery. 1979, the year of Off the Wall and his first nose job, marks an obscure crisis. Around the start of that year, they offer him the gay lead in the film version of A Chorus Line, but he declines the role, explaining, “I’m excited about it, but if I do it, people will link me with the part. Because of my voice, some people already think I’m that way—homo—though I’m actually not at all.” … On the Internet, you can see a picture of him near the end of his life, juxtaposed with a digital projection of what he would have looked like at the same age without the surgeries and makeup and wigs. A smiling middle-aged black guy, handsome in an everyday way. We are meant, of course, to feel a connection with this lost neverbeing, and pity for the strange, self-mutilated creature beside him. I can’t be alone, however, in feeling just the opposite, that there’s something metaphysically revolting about the mock-up. It’s an abomination. Michael chose his true face. What is, is natural. His physical body is arguably, even inarguably, the single greatest piece of postmodern American sculpture. It must be carefully preserved. It’s fascinating to read the interviews he gave to Ebony and Jet over the past thirty years … He spoke differently to black people, was more at ease. The language and grain of detail are different. Not that the scenario was any more journalistically pure. The John H. Johnson publishing family, which puts out Jet and Ebony, had Michael’s back, faithfully repairing and maintaining his complicated relations with the community, assuring readers that, in the presence of Michael, “you quickly look past the enigmatic icon’s light, almost translucent skin and realize that this African-American legend is more than just skin deep.” At times, especially when the “homo” issue came up, the straining required could turn comical, as in Ebony in 1982, talking about his obsessive male fans:

Even so, to hear Michael laid-back and talking unpretentiously about art, the thing he most loved—that is a new Michael, a person utterly absent from, for example, Martin Bashir’s infamous documentary, in which Michael admitted sharing his bedroom with children. It’s only after reading Jet and Ebony that one can understand how otherwise straightforward-seeming people of all races have stayed good friends with Michael Jackson these many years. He is charming; his mind is alive.

Of the tribute articles written about Michael Jackson and his life, this article from GQ is the most surprising for me. I had no idea he was offered the lead role in A Chorus Line back in the day. To read the way MJ worked to create his music in this context is so enlightening … I really think the author of this piece, John Jeremiah Sullivan, really hits the nail squarely on the head. The full online version of the article can be read HERE and, of course, the print version in the issue when it hits newsstands this week. MJ fans and detractors alike should read this article, I think everyone will learn something new about the late King of Pop.

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