Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon! Sign up to our newsletter for the latest and greatest from your city and beyond. By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. I was DJing on the night Michael Jackson died. In the basement of The Social near Oxford Circus. Around 8pm, friends and punters started giving me rumours from the hospital via TMZ.
It seemed fitting at the time. To turn a blind eye to the colossal depravity alleged in it. To continue to stifle the hunch many of us have about him β based on decades of rumours and allegations, evidence from investigations and a trial, plus his very public, unashamed interest in children. How can there be any debate here? He allegedly used it to dazzle parents with opportunities and wow children to the point of devotion.
But like democratic power, fame is something that we the people bestow. And we can take it back. Carrying on partying to his music sends out the message that we as a society are cool with allegations of child abuse.
Victims of abuse need our solidarity. Put simply: if an artist fucks up, the scene will shun you. Techno producer Ten Walls never got a gig again after he made outrageously homophobic comments. Ditto, arena-packing DJ Jackmaster after he admitted to being abusive at a festival. And so on. With respect to my fellow Time Out section editors, this kind of decisive moral activity is still rare in the worlds of food, bars, comedy, movies and art. After this film, you will not want to listen to Michael Jackson on the dancefloor, at a wedding, at a club, anywhere.
Yet outrage itself is a complicated issue in If we censor X, then surely we should censor Y and Z too? When conversations around abuse and morality explode and become newsworthy, they genuinely have the ability to affect the way the world thinks.
