"We are all looking for something to worship"

A conversation with Vanessa Kisuule about abusive artists, parasocial relationships and her new book on Michael Jackson

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Vanessa Kisuule, for the third instalment of RefReads, my book club for Reformation. A slam poet who has worked with The Royal Academy, the Tate, The British Library and Glastonbury, she was the Bristol City poet from 2018-2020 and has published two poetry collections. And now she has written her first non-fiction book, Neverland: The Pleasures and Perils of Fandom, which I absolutely inhaled.

A deep-dive into her life-long obsession with Michael Jackson - and what to do with that fandom when she learned about his abuse - Neverland also looks at parasocial relationships, how we talk about and metabolise abuse as a society, the nature of “problematic faves” in art, and the urgent need for sticky conversations that are not black and white, in a contemporary culture which is adept at tearing down, but has not yet learned how to re-build.

Neverland is what I hope for every time I open a book of non-fiction: it's knotty, curious, compassionate and unsurprisingly, poetic. I am so grateful for Vanessa’s willingness to write into the grey areas - to encourage us to think more expansively about social rot and how it calcifies - and I wanted to share our conversation here, as I thought you might also find it interesting. I’d love to hear your thoughts below - so hit me up in the Comments section!

For clarity, this conversation has been condensed and edited. Please note that the below contains discussion of sexual abuse.

---

Vanessa, hi!

Hi! Hi.

I am delighted you have moved from poetry to prose, as you write so beautifully. Why did you choose to write about what you describe as, “the literary equivalent of a squirm”?

I think you should write about the things you’re obsessed with and I’ve been obsessed with Michael Jackson my whole life. That’s the nucleus from which a lot of things about my personality sprung. It’s why I’m an artist, for one. He made me want to do something real good and real shiny, to be big and undeniable. The book started as a couple of essays about various childhood obsessions I had and the journey I took acknowledging the allegations about Michael and his abuse from the place of being such a big fan.

I wanted to look honestly at how obsession can compromise our morals and values. A poem wasn’t going to cut it. Poems do a lot of things, but it’s hard for them to be discursive. This book deviates from itself and argues with itself. I tie myself in knots often in this book and that’s a deliberate choice!

I’ve never been a Fan (with a capital F). There were pop groups I loved, and writers I adore, but I’ve never thought about someone I’ve never met, all day every day. What does that kind of intense parasocial relationship feel like?

It’s like everything that you have to do in a day is just a distraction from THAT THING. I’d be eating a meal, or I’d be at school, and I would just be thinking, when do I get to watch the Smooth Criminal video again? Wanting to dress like him, dance like him, wondering what a conversation with him would be like. Sometimes I’d sit and feel really heavy about the fact that I was one of millions of people that loved him and I wasn’t special. 

The easiest comparison for someone who has not felt like this about a celebrity, is when you have a crush on someone. So you think about them and fantasise about them, all of the time. What was easy about sustaining my obsession with Michael is that I didn’t know him. So he could be and remain this shining beacon of perfection. There was no chink. Until, of course, there was.

You grapple with this level of worship that will forgive everything. I’m thinking of Johnny Depp’s fandom, where all the journalists I know who wrote about the trial had to deactivate their social media profiles, because they were receiving death threats.

The thing is, any dysfunctional behaviour like that speaks to larger frays in our social fabric. Of people who do not feel worthy of love or don’t feel a strong sense of their purpose and so they have to fill it with dumb shit like Googling, ‘rat faeces, next day delivery’ because someone said Taylor Swift’s music is actually quite average.

As bell hooks says, we are a deeply loveless society - we are desperately scrambling for a facsimile of the feeling of belonging, of closeness, of something bigger than ourselves. I think that’s where those perpetual unanswerable questions about the human condition come from. We’re trying to heal that conundrum. If it’s not a celebrity obsession, it’s drink, drugs, an unhealthy intimate relationship. Everyone has their poison.

Your book is predominantly about Michael Jackson and the reckoning that came after the testimonies in Dan Reed’s 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland. The abuse Jackson committed is uniquely horrific. But leading artists are being called out for abuse on what feels like a weekly basis at the moment, across every genre of art: photography, film, fashion, classical music.

If we look back into the annals of time, it can feel like almost every defining male artist was openly abusive: Picasso, Pollock, Hemingway, Roth, Kerouac, Hughes, Dahl, Sartre. This is not to say it is an entirely male problem - Doris Lessing, Joan Crawford, Enid Blyton, Lizzo all spring to mind - but it is infinitely more common/ socially expected in male artists. Genius has been conflated with abuse for so long, that I wonder what you see the process of disentanglement to be.

Controversially, I think the artists who really slap have all got a bit of wonk in them. That might be anything from a slight eccentricity to sociopathic behaviour. I’ve got this poem that I perform a lot [as yet unpublished] where I put Nina Simone, Azealia Banks and Kanye West in a field and make them smoke a spliff and basically excavate their neuroses together. The point of that poem was that I was so obsessed with these three figures, I loved all of their art. Yet they are difficult, volatile people in their own ways.

I think unfortunately, in most cases, with the really canonical people, it’s as if their undeniable brilliance as public figures and artists necessitates that they aren’t able to cultivate the qualities that make someone a decent, even-keeled person to be around interpersonally. But that’s just a loose theory of mine, I’m really interested to see if people disagree with that once they’ve read the book.

What do you think of the argument that if artists are all well-behaved, that the art will suffer?

I don’t believe in the adage that you have to suffer for your art. I always discourage that in people that I teach, particularly young people. We need a canon of joy. Joy doesn’t have to be flat or facile. What if we could write as beautifully and deeply about joy as we do the heavier emotions?

If everybody got therapy and fixed the void in their souls, would the art be a little less compelling? Maybe. I don’t think that’s going to happen, though. We make art because we are wrestling with the impossibility of the world and ourselves and our relationships to each other and that’s never going to change.

I do think there’s been a bit of context collapse where abuse is often equated with shitty behaviour. Which are not the same thing.

100%. You can’t conflate Dave Grohl [who cheated on his wife, resulting in a baby] with Roman Polanski. There’s this frustrating thing where people say “this person is not a very good boyfriend” or “this celebrity shooed me away when I asked for an autograph” and it’s spoken about with the same ire and scorn used to discuss people that do genuinely awful, abusive things. We need some gradation, you know?

I do know. I want to talk about the word ‘monster’, which is often used to describe rapists. Harvey Weinstein: monster. R. Kelly: monster. But they are not monsters, they are men. I keep thinking about the Dominique Pelicot trial in France at the moment, where people are saying, “my god those monsters”. But they are men. And ‘good’ men, at that: a civil servant, a fire fighter, a former police officer, a prison guard, a journalist, amongst others. 

It reminds me of an essay I just read in Joan Smith's 1989 collection, Misogynies, where she writes that it took the police five years to arrest the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, because they were looking for a modern day Jack The Ripper (who they called ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’) - a myth, a monster - and of course, they couldn’t find one, because Sutcliffe was 'just' a man. And one they had interviewed nine times previously.

The ‘monster’ idea is a fairytale we like to tell ourselves because we don’t want to reckon with the fact that we know these people. These people are our fathers and our partners and our sons. We don’t want to confront that. It is easier to silo them off and pretend that perpetrators are a different, alien species entirely divorced from people we have in our circles. 

And it’s just not true. They are not monsters, they are a product of society. Some of them are neurologically wired a certain way, sure, but less than 1% of the population are sociopaths or psychopaths. All of these other men come to violent behaviour because of some type of socialisation - and we all create society. Which means we are all, in a very diffuse way, complicit in the culture that creates that behaviour. We don’t want to think about that and so we just dismiss these people as MONSTERS. It’s a cop out. 

Speaking of… in Monsters (which I wrote about last year) critic Claire Dederer talks about how people have been wrestling with biographical fallacy - whether you can divorce the art from the artist - for a really long time. I believe in context. That art does not exist in a vacuum and is necessarily coloured by those who create it. What do you believe?

I think you can separate the art from the artist, I think that people do it all the time. I think the most important question is, should we.

I find my answer to that to be unintentionally arbitrary. I won’t listen to Michael Jackson and I gave away my vintage MJ t-shirt -

What do you do if he comes on in the club? Do you stop, drop and roll?

I would dance, but reluctantly and I’d feel a bit sad.

Okay fair.

And I don’t watch Woody Allen films, as he just bums me out -

Same.

But I will look at books about Picasso, I love his art - and I know him to be a terrible person.

We all have our uneven barometers for these things. We create our own labyrinth forms of justification as to why we do or don’t engage with something, which is usually  down to our own personal experiences and our depth of investment. I didn’t really care about Lost Prophets as a band, so it’s no skin off my nose to not listen to their music anymore. I don’t listen to R. Kelly, but I really loved Ignition.

That Aaliyah cover…. Where he’s glowering at her from the background, next to that queasy album title, ‘Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number’. Talk about hiding in plain sight.

I had to let that one go. No more R. Kelly for me. But you know, I still listen to Michael Jackson. So I’m not going to sit here and claim I have this clear, methodical process about who gets a green light, who gets a red light. I’ve been saying to people, it really comes down to how you feel. I don’t think denying yourself the joy of art that moves you atones for what [that artist] has done. Obviously, there are cases where removing your support for an artist might help bring around a reckoning . That’s what happened with R. Kelly. There was a strategic boycott of his music which definitely helped get him into court and then tried. But you need a clear strategy and a critical mass of willing participants for boycotts to work.

There’s a sobering fact in your book, that Michael Jackson’s estate is still making 115m a year. If you look at the definition of ‘cancellation’ as something which removes the economic and social power wholesale, then MJ - well he’s dead, so his estate - has definitely not been cancelled.

There’s a New York Times journalist called Wesley Morris who I quote in the book, who says - Michael Jackson isn’t the meal, he is more elemental than that, he’s the oil, he’s the salt, he’s the pepper. What is pop music, what is popular culture, what is our notion of dance within the commercial realm, without Michael Jackson? We couldn’t cancel him even if we tried. 

I also include a story about this anthropologist who went to this remote tribe, who had no access to media at all, and showed them pictures of the moon landing, September 11th, some pivotal moment in football and Michael Jackson. They didn’t know about 9/11 - they were horrified, couldn’t understand it; they didn’t know who the footballer was; they were perplexed by the moon landing; but they all knew Michael Jackson. These men didn’t have TVs! They were in the deepest, deepest jungle and they all knew who he was. I cannot emphasise enough how much there has never been anyone with that level of fame and influence. It’s why the reckoning is so long, I think and so hard. Especially if you are a fan.

Were you nervous writing this?

Before the book came out, I had this fansite reach out and say, “We’d love to support you and use our channels to get the word out”. I remember my heart sinking, thinking… they don’t know what’s in this book. They think it’s celebratory, or maybe even defensive of Michael. It’s certainly a book that celebrates Michael’s contribution to culture, but I’m clear on my stance that I think he did what he was accused of.

A lot of MJ fans are still ride or die and a part of me understands that. I was once there - in that place of deep defensiveness and denial that my hero could do something like this. And I don’t mean a place where I didn’t believe the victims, I mean in a place where I loved this person so much, I couldn’t bear for it to be true. But I came to terms with that. That sounds so grandiose - “Oh boo hoo, you realised a pop star did a bad thing” - but it felt like death. It was so painful. I had to grieve who I thought he was. Who I was. I hope that a book like this might be the bridge between the uber fan and a cynic that never cared about Michael.

We think of MJ as ‘problematic’ only after he died. But at the peak of his fame he was doing really dark things. He was bleaching his skin, obviously, but he was also hiring the Russian army to march with him during his HIStory tour, comparing himself to Jews persecuted during the Holocaust, equating himself to someone who has been raped. Then, of course, there was that memorable moment where he dangled his baby son, Blanket, out the window in Berlin.

Michael represents a lot of the anxieties around race and gender in modern society, taken to their greatest extreme. He was the most famous black person in the world - and we all know how society feels about black people. It kind of makes sense to me, as a poet, that the most famous black person in the world felt so ill at ease with his blackness, that the only way he could manage this, was to turn himself completely white, that his presentation was this arguably incongruent mash up of gender signals. It’s an apt metaphor for our myriad anxieties around identity and how people read and misread us.

His behaviour reminds me a lot of Kanye. The megalomania. Do you see any parallels? 

Hugely. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an amazing article about Kanye being the second manifestation of a Micahel Jackson-esque figure and how there are so many parallels between both of them being preternaturally talented and emblems for the black community to the degree that was always going to make them crumble. There’s then that point of isolation, overblown hubris, having a bunch of ‘yes men’ around you, this belief that you are literally above others.

You see this a lot with these artists who have been held to account, like P. Diddy. They’ll use the rhetoric of “they don’t wanna see us winning, they wanna take a black man down” and that’s where it gets really dicey, because they weaponise a very real phenomenon of black men being persecuted and use that as a way to try and curry favour, particularly among their fandom. And unfortunately for some fans, that angle can be very effective.

Both MJ and R.Kelly experienced a lot of childhood abuse and trauma. We know poverty and neglect shapes a person, but how much - and this is obviously a grey area, but this is a book about the grey areas - do you think this context contributes to our understanding of them?

This was one of the hardest things about writing this book. Because I really didn’t want my desire to understand people who do abhorrent things - how and why they come to do them, the circumstances which might lead them to do these terrible things - to read as an excuse, or a minimising, or spitting in the face of survivors’s pain. The motivation for me in writing this book, is that I want abuse to happen less, and I don’t think that happens unless we are looking at the root causes. It’s deep work and it’s work most of us are loathe to do.

I wanted to look at the factors that intersect with instances of abuse. How can we address that? How can we find people at the cusp and steer them away from that? There are charities that do this, that try and engage with young people before things tip over into pervasive, perpetual violent behaviour. You can course correct. But by the time someone has gone to jail for something, you’re trying to get them to unlearn. And people are bad at unlearning. It’s really difficult. It’s easier to learn.

Fandom has changed a lot in the last 25 years, thanks to the internet. People used to get a couple of red carpet pictures a year, one or two interviews. Now of course you can get daily photographs on social media and in the tabloids and on fansites and Reddit etc. Has that made parasocial relationships more pernicious?

You can look at Insta lives now and get this false sense of proximity to these artists that we didn’t have growing up. It makes me crotchety. You aren’t working for it these days ! You aren’t licking a stamp and sending a fan letter! But joking aside, I do think the ease of access we have now exacerbates the intensity and the sense of entitlement.

As a now even-keeled adult with a bit of shame, I can offer a bit of compassion for obsessive young fans - I remember that animal craving for closeness with the object of my fascination. I felt very possessive of Michael, and if I’d had the money to have more access, I probably would have engaged in more extreme displays of allegiance. The only thing that stopped me was I had an African mum and I didn’t have any money at my disposal. Thank god, in hindsight.

Another thing in the defence of megafans: we are all, I believe, looking for something to worship in a society that no longer values religion nearly as much as it once did. You need something that makes you crane your neck up in awe. If it’s not religion, then it’s a celebrity or a sports team. We all want to feel like there’s something bigger than us.

Not for nothing is it called the cult of celebrity. Speaking of obsessions, I laughed out loud at your notes on the modern day obsession. I used to fall foul of this - still do, in fact - of pronouncing myself obsessed with things that I had only a recent and entirely manageable enjoyment of. Is this because we live in a time where we define ourselves by our preferences and our tastes?

This constant need to define one’s self and aesthetics and specific playlists and items of clothing is the apex of neoliberalism. Clean girl, feral girl summer and what have you - can you tell I’m a millennial? The internet hasn’t invented behaviours, but it makes it so much easier to observe trends. We all fall foul, as you said. We’re all just trying to feel something. We reach for hyperbolic language to feel something. But so often, when we proclaim strong feelings for something or someone that we’ve engaged with quite passively, our actual feelings are a lot more muted or transient than how we’re expressing them. 

You look at how individualism and a breakdown in local community not only protects abusers, but can also act incubator, can foster it. You use the example of your neighbour who shouts at her kids. Is it within the acceptable limits of parental frustration, you wonder, or is it abuse? You wish you could see if she needs help, but you don’t know her well enough to go over - you don’t think your intervention would be welcome. So she’s lonely and isolated, with no-one to help her, and that could lead her to a place where she might behave in ways that she wouldn’t have, had she had ‘the village’ it takes to raise kids, around her.

That’s where the slippage can happen, you say. When there is no intervention, just isolation and stress and it slips into abuse. Unless, of course, the social services are involved - but by then things have reached the end, the apex. It’s a chick and egg situ, the way you illustrate how easy the slippage is - I can’t stop thinking about it.

It’s really hard, because communities are not supposed to be as large as the ones we find ourselves in. Way way way back when, before they built modern cities and societies, people lived in these communities of 40, 50, 60. That’s what we are built for. That’s our limit for building profound bonds. We live these transient lives - I’ve moved so many times. Our sense of responsibility and care - our ability to repair and support - for the people outside of our nuclear families is almost completely gone.

I believe that a deeper sense of responsibility and attentiveness for people who aren’t your partner and your kids, is crucial. I often think about how much less of a burden there would be on social services, if we took up the mantle for each other. It’s like that film, Zone of Interest. Living next door, knowing that horror that goes on next to us and not doing anything. We all, in our own way, do this every day. 

You put this into action when you run a poetry workshop in a prison. I imagine you are still wrestling with some of what you experienced.

It wasn’t just a poetry workshop in a prison, it was a poetry workshop with sex offenders. When they asked me to do it, I was like… what? Why? I’ve been a staunch feminist my whole life; I volunteer for charities who work with survivors of sexual abuse. And then I thought, my response to this is exactly why I should do this.

It was the most bizarre experience of my life. I was so disarmed. They were so normal. They weren’t snarling in the corner. They were just dudes. They were attentive and wrote interesting things and shared things about their lives. And it’s like, well what does that mean Vanessa? What does that mean? Do we just unlock the door and let these men go free? No. But I think the way we think about them needs to change, if we want to properly tackle abuse.

You note that writing Neverland broke your brain a bit. Were you seeking cognitive decimation? To break things apart, so you could rebuild?

Day to day, sitting with these themes, was heavy. There were many days when I felt like a husk of a person. But I needed to feel like that, to write the thing that I wrote.

Well, thank you for writing it and for talking about it with me. I hope people approach it with the same curiosity and care that you wrote it.