Do me a favor. Go on YouTube and find the footage of Michael Jackson singing “Who’s Lovin’ You” on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He is eleven years old. It is one of his first times on national television. In the intro, he looks and sounds like . . . well, like an eleven-year-old with a decent ability to ham it up. He does a jokey spoken preamble about how kids can understand the blues, too, because he once fell in love with a girl in the sandbox, toasted their love during “milk break,” and broke up during finger painting. Halfway through, he forgets his lines and freezes, looking back at his older brothers for help. It’s an alarmingly vulnerable moment, one only possible in the era of live television. You feel bad for him. It suddenly doesn’t seem right that a kid should be made to perform live in front of an entire country. Yet he somehow finds his way back and stumbles through.

When the music starts, we see something else entirely. The first note he sings is as confident, sure, and purposeful as any adult could ever be. He transforms from nervous child at a talent show into timeless embodiment of longing. Not only does he sing exactly on key but he appears to sing from the very bottom of his heart. He stares into the camera, shakes his head, and blinks back tears in perfect imitation of a sixties soul man. And it feels, for a moment, as though there are two different beings here. One is a child—a smart kid, to be sure, and cute, but not more special than any other child. He is subject to the same laws of life—pain, age, confusion, fear—as we all are. The other being seems to be a spirit of sorts, one who knows only the truest expression of human feeling. And this spirit appears to have randomly inhabited the body of this particular mortal kid. In so doing, it has sentenced him to a lifetime of indescribable enchantment and consummate suffering.

The details of that life are well covered in Steve Knopper’s new book, “MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson.” Knopper, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, takes a journalist’s approach to the story, chronicling M.J.’s journey from a working-class family, in Gary, Indiana, to unequalled fame and riches and, finally, to a deformed, reclusive, and obsessive middle age, hemmed in by leeches and ne’er-do-wells. In its broad outlines, the story doesn’t deviate from the standard rock-biopic script: man with a gift becomes man with a burden. But, unlike the rags-to-riches tales of Hollywood, Jackson never finds redemption. There is no long walk down the hallway to adoring fans chanting his name at a final show. Instead, he sinks lower and lower, until death finally finds him, millions of dollars in debt, battling a crippling addiction to painkillers, attended to by a shady doctor who administered the insane doses of anesthesia that Jackson came to rely on in order to sleep.

The banality of his demise is striking. All that really happened is that he was great, and those around him became fixated on how much money he could make. Having never learned how to be a responsible adult, he made terrible choices about how to handle his otherworldly power. The bigger he got, the more people he cut out of his life, until about 1990, when, in Knopper’s telling**,** everyone who genuinely cared for the young, pre-“Thriller” Jackson had been forcefully denied access to his life. “Michael began to run perilously low on people who could tell him what not to do,” Knopper writes.

Perhaps this set of circumstances is what allowed some of Jackson’s more dubious behaviors to continue unchecked. Everyone knows about his pathological relationship with plastic surgery, which turned him from classic man to plastic man right before our eyes. It is estimated that he underwent dozens of procedures, many of which were botched or of shoddy quality. He lightened his skin and, over the years, his public explanations for doing so varied. He claimed to suffer from vitiligo, which causes skin to lose its pigment in patches—a condition his autopsy confirmed, though that explanation had always been met with skepticism from the black community. (Vitiligo can arise spontaneously or be inherited; it can also be triggered by bleaching.) Whether or not the disease was behind the dramatic change in his skin color, Jackson surely was motivated, at least in part, by a belief common to Americans: that light skin, thin lips, small noses, and straight hair represent the most perfect example of beauty.

This is the complexity of Jackson’s relationship with blackness. He had most physical evidence of it sliced out of his body—but his music and work are filled with an abiding appreciation for the music, art, and deeply powerful soul of black folks. From the “Nigeria 70”-inspired breakdown in “ABC” to his 1991 solo album, “Dangerous,” on which he eschewed the jazz and melodic direction of his earlier work in favor of Teddy Riley’s urban R. & B. club beats, to outright pro-Africa songs, like “Liberian Girl,” Jackson’s debt to African and African-American culture was always clear. “Of course he loved being black,” Riley told Rolling Stone. “We'd be in sessions where we'd just vibe out and he'd say, 'We are black, and we are the most talented people on the face of the Earth.' I know this man loved his culture, he loved his race, he loved his people.” Perhaps even more surprising for the casual M.J. fan is the clear-headed speech he delivered, in 2002, to a majority-black crowd, at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, in Harlem. “I know my race,” he said. “I just look in the mirror—I know I’m black.” The crowd erupted.

Your blackness is not a result of your skin but of the experiences that that skin brings to you. It is deepened when you watch Rodney King get beaten nearly to death on television by police officers, as Jackson must have, along with the rest of us, in March, 1991. It is awakened again when you start to think about how many of the black artists who enriched your employer died broke and forgotten (something Jackson spoke about in the Harlem speech). M.J.’s blackness was something that he couldn’t escape. This may be why black people continued to accept and root for him despite what, on the surface, appeared to be his rejection of us. No matter what he became, we knew the struggle and pain that made him so. We knew the mid-century racism, and the desperate, dominating father. We knew the whoopings that were part discipline, part violent and selfish abuse, and part twisted grooming for a world that would do its best to deliver an even more savage psychological beatdown. We know that American racism creates such a vast array of insanity among its victims that even Michael Jackson, twisted, bizarre, and impossible to comprehend, makes perfect sense in its context.

But there is more about Jackson that we did not know. You can’t write about him without acknowledging that he was an accused child molester—indeed, this sometimes seems to be all that people under the age of thirty know about him. Knopper does his best to examine every piece of evidence in the public record, and concludes that it is more likely that Jackson did not commit the crimes he was accused of. But Knopper’s judgment is far from conclusive. No matter how it is read, this part of the story is sordid and sickening. One of the parents who levelled charges against Jackson demanded payment and a three-picture screenwriting deal by way of settlement. The mother of another child continued to encourage her son to stay with Jackson long after she claimed to have become suspicious.