Eyes without a face

The advertisement campaign for Michael Jackson's Essential greatest hits album is a thing of wonder. What you get is a series of blank images with just snippets of songs playing over them.

It's not even clear until the very end what the ad is all about. Jackson's music just echoes around, in a weird decontexualised manner. Then, in the final few moments, a picture of Jackson is flashed up - an out-take from the Thriller photo sessions.

Given Jackson's media ubiquity (especially this year), the image is striking. It shows a young black man, a bit glammed up but not much, just before he embarked on an odyssey of plastic surgery clinics. He is at a considerable remove from the image we are now confronted with.

What the ad is doing is asking us to erase all of what can only be called prejudicial information about the singer. We are being drawn back to his golden era, the time when the Thriller album re-wrote the sales record books, a time when pop and r'n'b merged splendidly to produce an enduring and significant musical artefact.

All that happened after is excluded from the frame. We are spared those hideous white- skinned, wonky-nosed images, spared that freaky visage from the recent court case. The ad wants us to forget and remember: forget all the bad things about Jackson but remember the good things.

Somewhere out there some people have spent a lot of time messing around with powerful computer programmes to come up with an image of how Michael Jackson would now look if he hadn't mutilated his features (see below). The image shows a good-looking fortysomething black man. It's a shocking sight. Shocking in that it shows "what might have been" in contrast to the latex monkey in a bad wig that he is now.

It's telling that in the UK - where Sony Marketing ran this particular no-image ad - the Essential album debuted at No 2 in the charts and has held up over the following weeks. In the US, with a different marketing campaign, the album sold just 8,000 copies in its first week of release. To someone who once sold 60 million copies of one album, this figure is disturbing.

Despite the fact it's yet another Jackson Greatest Hits, the amount of completists/anoraks out there (fans who buy anything, any- where, anytime by their hero) couldn't even propel this into the top 100 - it slumped into the album charts at a career low of No 128. The No 1 album in the US when Essential was released was CD Now 19, which shifted almost half a million copies in its first week. Very, very few of the songs on the CD Now compilation come anywhere near even the weakest songs on Essential.

In America, the explanation from Jackson's anxious record and publishing companies is that this was the first release after his sordid trial; it's not a new release; it's only a stopgap throw-together album, etc.

All of the above factors surely should have applied to European sales. But they were pushed out of the picture by a marketing team who knew exactly what it is we want and don't want to see and hear from Jackson. We don't want any images from the last 20 years - they disturb us; we don't want statues of Michael Jackson floating down the rivers of European capitals (as the marketing folk did with Jackson's last studio album, the lamentable Invincible); we don't want anything from Thriller onwards - even on Bad he was beginning to look like a drunk transvestite.

Meanwhile, the entire HIStory of Michael Jackson's face in all its transmogrified tragedy can be pored over at the truly essential site: www.anomalies-unlimited. com/Jackson.html.