How Michael Jackson Beat Babylon at Its Own Game

By Winston Brown | Babylon Decoded

Let me say this plainly before Babylon starts clearing its throat, adjusting its little PR tie, and trying to turn this into another cheap argument about sequins, surgery, sleepovers, weirdness, allegations, moonwalks, gloves, gossip, and whatever else the culture industry throws into the blender whenever Michael Jackson’s name comes up. I am not here to write a sainthood application. I am not here to pretend the man’s life was simple, clean, uncomplicated, or wrapped in some Disney Channel innocence with a sparkly bow on top. I am here to talk about power. I am here to talk about strategy. I am here to talk about the part of Michael Jackson’s genius that Babylon has spent decades trying to hide under the fog machine, because if ordinary people really understood what Michael did, especially Black people, especially artists, especially anyone still confusing fame with freedom, the whole damn plantation would need new locks by morning.

Right now, there is all this smoke around the new Michael movie, and smoke is the right word because Hollywood loves smoke. Smoke is what they use when they do not want you to see the architecture. Smoke is what magicians use when the trick is actually theft with lighting design. The biopic Michael, directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Jaafar Jackson, finally arrived in April 2026 after delays, controversy, legal issues and expensive reshoots. Reporting has said the film was restructured after legal concerns linked to a past settlement involving Jordan Chandler, with scenes dealing with the 1993 allegations reportedly removed and the story reshaped to end before that era. People reported that the removal was tied to a settlement clause and that the estate covered additional reshoot costs, while Entertainment Weekly also reported that the finished film avoids the later allegations and ends in 1988.

Now, let’s not play stupid in the theatre lobby. A Michael Jackson biopic was always going to be a battlefield dressed as a jukebox. Some critics were always going to call it sanitised. Some fans were always going to call it overdue justice. Some people were always going to watch the trailer like it was the Second Coming in loafers and white socks. Some people were always going to say the whole thing is a corporate resurrection machine powered by nostalgia, denial and premium popcorn. And in the middle of all that noise, Babylon gets exactly what it wants. Everybody argues about whether the movie shows enough scandal, enough sadness, enough weirdness, enough trauma, enough courtroom fog, enough family dysfunction, enough accusations, enough spectacle. Meanwhile, the thing that made Michael terrifying to the system gets reduced to background furniture.

Because the real Michael Jackson story is not just that he became the biggest entertainer in the world. That is the nursery version. That is the bedtime story they tell consumers so we can clap at the dancing and miss the knife work. The real story is that Michael Jackson studied Babylon’s machinery, learned where the money lived, then walked into the vault and bought himself a weapon. That is the part they never want to sit with for too long. They will give you Thriller. They will give you the glove. They will give you the fedora. They will give you the Pepsi burn, the tabloids, the oxygen chamber nonsense, the circus, the caricature, the late-night jokes, the haunted mansion energy, the whole ghoulish media buffet. But they rarely give you Michael the strategist. Michael the asset accumulator. Michael the corporate guerrilla. Michael the Black man who understood that Babylon does not fear talent. Babylon rents talent. Babylon fears ownership.

That is the lesson.

Michael looked at the music industry and realised the stage is not where the empire keeps the treasure. The stage is where they let you sweat. The stage is where they let you shine. The stage is where they let you become a god for ninety minutes so long as the publishing company, the label, the lawyer, the manager, the distributor, the lender and the tax structure get to eat before you even sit down. The stage is the shop window. The catalogue is the deed. The masters are the plantation records. The publishing is the oilfield. The copyright is the land title. And Michael, for all the ways people tried to infantilise him, ridicule him, exoticise him and turn him into a permanently strange little boy in the public imagination, understood this with the cold clarity of a general.

In 1985, Michael bought ATV Music for about $47.5 million, a catalogue that included publishing rights to around 251 Beatles songs alongside thousands of other compositions. Biography.com summarises that John Branca helped Jackson purchase ATV after Michael learned how valuable music publishing could be, and that the catalogue included songs such as Hey Jude, Yesterday and Let It Be.   That was not some cute celebrity investment. That was not Michael buying a fancy toy because he had Thriller money burning a hole in his rhinestone pocket. That was a strategic strike. That was Wakanda buying vibranium from under the coloniser’s castle while the coloniser was still busy laughing at the accent. That was Killmonger in the museum, except instead of saying “How do you think your ancestors got these?” Michael basically said, “Lovely collection. I’ll take the whole damn room.”

And let us stay with the historical irony because it is delicious enough to serve with rum cake. The Beatles were brilliant, yes. Nobody sensible needs to deny that. But they were also children of a musical universe built by Black people. Rock and roll did not fall from the sky wearing Chelsea boots. It came through gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, Black church, Black pain, Black joy, Black hips, Black drums, Black survival, Black people taking misery and turning it into electricity. The Beatles knew that. They covered and adored Black artists like Little Richard and Chuck Berry. British pop in the 1960s was deeply indebted to Black American music. So when Michael Jackson, a Black artist from Gary, Indiana, bought the publishing rights to much of the Lennon and McCartney songbook, history did one of those cinematic slow turns like Darth Vader realising the little man with the green ears might actually be dangerous.

Babylon hated that move because it reversed the usual traffic. Normally, Black creativity gets mined, refined, repackaged, whitened, sold back to the world, and then studied by some academic in corduroy who calls it cultural hybridity while the descendants of the originators are still trying to get health insurance. Normally, Black people invent the sound, white institutions own the catalogue, and everybody calls it the market. Michael flipped the table. He did not just sing on the plantation. He bought a slice of the big house furniture and charged rent.

That is why the Paul McCartney part still fascinates people. Paul reportedly helped Michael understand the value of publishing, and Michael took the lesson seriously enough to buy the catalogue when ATV came up for sale. People love to frame that as betrayal, and maybe emotionally it was. I get why Paul would feel a type of way. If you teach someone the game and they buy your childhood back before you can get to the cashier, you are going to be vexed. But business is not nursery. Babylon itself teaches this lesson every day. If a Black artist does not buy, somebody else will. If Michael had passed politely because he did not want to offend a Beatle, some other corporate shark would have swallowed the catalogue and nobody would have called that betrayal. They would have called it market efficiency, with a little Bloomberg smile and a glass of sparkling water.

This is where Michael’s genius gets hidden under all the smoke. He understood that sentiment is not strategy. Love does not secure publishing. Respect does not secure masters. Friendship does not secure rights. Vibes do not secure equity. In Babylon, the paperwork is the prophecy. You can be adored by millions and still be owned by twelve men in suits who could not find middle C with a torch and a search party. Michael saw that. Prince saw it too, later, and wrote slave on his face because he understood that a gilded contract is still a shackle if you cannot control your own work. But Michael’s move was different. Prince went to war over his cage. Michael bought the jailhouse blueprint.

Then, ten years later, Michael levelled up again. In 1995, Sony and Michael merged ATV with Sony’s publishing business to create Sony/ATV Music Publishing. Reports from the time and later summaries state that Jackson received more than $100 million and retained a 50 percent stake in the combined company. Pitchfork later described the deal as Michael selling a 50 percent share to Sony for over $100 million, creating Sony/ATV.   Read that again slowly. The man bought ATV for around $47.5 million in 1985. A decade later, he turned that asset into a joint venture with one of the biggest corporations on earth, took a huge payment, and still kept half the company. That is not eccentric. That is not childish. That is not the behaviour of some clueless pop puppet wandering around Neverland with a llama and a dream. That is boardroom violence with a soundtrack.

And the long game kept paying. In 2016, Sony closed its purchase of the Jackson estate’s remaining 50 percent interest in Sony/ATV. Sony’s own press release announced the closing of the purchase, and another Sony release stated that the memorandum of understanding called for total payments of $750 million.   So let us do the maths without the industry perfume. Michael bought a major catalogue for about $47.5 million. He later monetised half through the Sony deal, retained half, and after his death, that remaining half sold for $750 million. That is not a business move. That is a heist movie where the heist is legal, the getaway car is copyright law, and the driver is wearing one glove.

And yet, what does Babylon prefer to talk about? Everything else. Everything. The glove. The face. The voice. The ranch. The animals. The rumours. The allegations. The oxygen chamber. The jokes. The late-night punchlines. The Wacko Jacko branding, which was always disgusting, always racialised, always a way of turning a Black genius into a circus exhibit for people too lazy or too invested to ask why the most famous man on earth might also have been the most hunted. Again, this is not me asking anyone to suspend moral judgement or ignore difficult questions. It is me saying Babylon has a pattern. When a Black figure becomes too powerful to comfortably contain, the machine does not merely critique them. It cartoonises them. It makes them ridiculous before it makes them disposable.

They did it to Muhammad Ali. Loudmouth. Draft dodger. Troublemaker. Then later, when the empire needed a soft-focus saint, they turned him into a postage stamp with Parkinson’s and courage quotes. They did it to Malcolm. Dangerous extremist until he was dead, then suddenly everybody wanted the poster. They did it to Serena. Angry, muscular, intimidating, lacking grace, until the receipts became too heavy to ignore. They do it to every Black person who touches too much power without asking permission from the old gatekeepers. Babylon does not mind Black excellence when it performs. Babylon gets nervous when Black excellence owns.

That is why the movie smoke matters. A biopic about Michael can easily become another piece of brand management, another nostalgia machine, another argument trap. The Guardian has written about how sanitised music biopics have become a profitable Hollywood staple, with access to music catalogues often tied to estate involvement and narrative control.   That is not just about Michael. That is the whole industry now. Hollywood has discovered that dead or unreachable icons are intellectual property vending machines. You feed in a catalogue, an estate, some wigs, a childhood trauma scene, a third act triumph, a tearful parent, a recreated concert and a closing title card, and out comes a global event. The truth gets negotiated like a licensing fee. Complexity gets trimmed to fit the running time. Genius gets reduced to aesthetics because aesthetics are easier to monetise than structure.

The new Michael movie may give audiences the music, the moves, the pain, the family machinery, the abuse by Joe Jackson, the Motown grind, the Thriller explosion, the Pepsi fire, the loneliness, the spectacle. Fine. Some of that matters. But if it does not show Michael as a strategist, then it is hiding the engine inside the car. It is giving us the moonwalk and refusing to show us the map. And that is the theft I care about here, because the most useful Michael for the living is not the supernatural performer. Most of us cannot sing like that. Most of us cannot dance like gravity owes us money. Most of us cannot make a stadium scream by standing still in sunglasses for three minutes like a human software update. But we can learn from the strategy.

The lesson is ownership. Own the thing behind the thing. Own the rights. Own the platform if possible. Own the data if you are in tech. Own the building if you run the community group. Own the freehold if you can. Own the brand. Own the mailing list. Own the archive. Own the intellectual property. Own the templates. Own the process. Own the relationship with the audience. Own the damn receipts. Because Babylon’s favourite scam is to pay you for labour while quietly taking control of the asset your labour creates. That is the old plantation logic in a new blazer. You pick the cotton, somebody else owns the land. You sing the song, somebody else owns the publishing. You build the community, somebody else owns the database. You create the culture, somebody else owns the platform. Same demon, different app.

Michael’s war was strategic because he did not only try to be loved. He tried to be unfuckwithable. And there is a difference. Love is emotional. Leverage is structural. Fans can love you and still not save you. Applause cannot refinance debt. Screams do not protect your catalogue. Flowers do not negotiate contracts. Babylon loves giving Black people applause in exchange for ownership. It will let you be the face, the sound, the flavour, the heat, the cool, the soul, the vibe, the moment, the algorithm, the quote card, the trending topic. But when the cheque clears, the question is always the same: who owns the backend?

That is why Michael’s catalogue move remains revolutionary. Not because buying the Beatles publishing solved racism. It did not. Not because it made him morally perfect. It did not. Not because it protected him from the media. It absolutely did not. But it proved that Black genius did not have to remain trapped in performance. It could become capital. It could become architecture. It could become a shield, a weapon, a bargaining chip, a kingdom. Michael understood that Babylon does not respect innocence. It respects leverage. It respects contracts. It respects control. It respects the person who can say no and survive the silence after.

And that is the part that burns. Michael waged war on Babylon using Babylon’s own weapons. He did not stand outside the castle begging them to be nicer. He bought keys. He did not only ask the industry to recognise his genius. He made them account for his ownership. He did not just make content. He bought rights. He did not just chase fame. He acquired assets. That is the kind of war Babylon hates because it cannot easily dismiss it as anger. It cannot call it a riot. It cannot call it uncivil. It cannot call it reverse racism, though God knows some columnist somewhere probably tried. It was capitalism done back to the capitalists by someone they preferred as entertainment, not competition.

That is why the public destruction of Michael’s image always carried that extra smell. Once he became too powerful, the machine became increasingly invested in making him seem too strange to be taken seriously as a businessman. The weirder they made him look, the less people studied the strategy. The more they laughed at him, the less they understood the ledger. The more they obsessed over the face, the less they noticed the filings. The more they screamed about the circus, the less they saw the estate planning, the publishing, the catalogue, the Sony deal, the long game.

This is Babylon’s old trick. Turn the threatening Black mind into a spectacle. Make the rebel into a meme. Make the strategist into a freak. Make the owner into an eccentric. Make the wounded into a joke. Make the complicated into a caricature. Then sell tickets to the caricature and call it culture.

But history always repeats, because apparently humanity keeps failing the same exam with different stationery. Look at today’s artists fighting for masters. Look at Taylor Swift rerecording albums and turning ownership into mainstream dinner-table conversation. Look at Prince’s war with Warner. Look at Anita Baker telling fans not to buy certain recordings until she had her masters sorted. Look at young creators building massive audiences on platforms they do not own, then crying when the algorithm changes like a landlord changing locks. Look at Black creators making the internet funny, musical, stylish and linguistically alive while brands harvest the language, clean off the fingerprints, and sell it back as youth engagement strategy. Michael’s lesson is sitting right there, wearing a red jacket and staring at us like, “Are you lot still doing this?”

And yes, we need to talk about community too, because this is not only for celebrities. This is for Black organisations. This is for social entrepreneurs. This is for writers. This is for photographers. This is for activists. This is for community groups applying for funding while councils and commissioners talk partnership but keep the power in their own filing cabinets. Own your work. Document your model. Protect your intellectual property. Keep your data clean. Build your independent audience. Do not let every good idea leave your organisation as a workshop handout and come back three years later as someone else’s funded programme with a consultant’s logo slapped on it. That is how Babylon moves. It smiles, admires, extracts, repackages, and invoices.

Michael’s genius was that he saw extraction and answered with acquisition. That is the lesson. Not simply be talented. Talent is the bait Babylon uses to lure you into bad contracts. Not simply be visible. Visibility without ownership is just unpaid advertising for your own exploitation. Not simply be excellent. Excellence without leverage makes you the best-paid servant in the mansion. The lesson is to move from talent to control, from performance to infrastructure, from applause to assets.

So when the Michael movie discourse starts doing what discourse does, running around the internet like a drunk pigeon with a ring light, remember what is being hidden. The smoke is not the story. The scandal is not the whole story. The spectacle is not the whole story. The real story is that Michael Jackson, this Black child star raised inside one of the most brutal entertainment machines ever built, grew into a man who understood that the machine had gears, ledgers, rights, catalogues, lawyers and pressure points. Then he touched those pressure points.

He waged strategic war on Babylon by learning its language. Not the language of politeness. Not the language of respectability. The language of ownership. The language of copyright. The language of asset value. The language of long-term control. The language of “you thought I was just the product, but I have been reading the manual.”

And did he win? In the ways that matter to this argument, yes, he bloody well did. He won because the catalogue deal outlived the jokes. He won because the asset appreciated beyond imagination. He won because the estate later sold its Sony/ATV stake for a figure that made the original purchase look like Michael had robbed a bank with a smile and a publishing lawyer. He won because decades later, we are still discussing the move as one of the smartest plays in music business history. He won because Babylon wanted a dancing boy and got a copyright assassin.

The tragedy is that Michael himself did not get to live inside the peace of that victory. The machine never lets people like him rest. It fed on him, mocked him, sued him, worshipped him, doubted him, copied him, pathologised him, monetised him, and now keeps trying to resurrect him in cinema form like a Marvel franchise with unresolved trauma. But the lesson survived. The ledger survived. The strategic blueprint survived.

So watch the movie if you want. Argue about it if you must. Cry when the Jackson 5 harmonies hit if your spirit requires it. Side-eye the sanitising if your conscience demands it. Hold complexity, because adulthood is not for cowards. But do not miss the damn point. Michael Jackson’s deepest genius was not merely that he moved like no one else. It was that he learned where Babylon hid the money, walked into the room everyone assumed he was too strange or too childish to understand, and bought a piece of the empire that had spent generations feeding off Black sound.

That is the lesson for all of us. Do not just sing for Babylon. Do not just dance for Babylon. Do not just trend for Babylon. Do not just consult for Babylon. Do not just let Babylon clap while it quietly keeps the deeds. Study the machinery. Follow the rights. Read the contract. Own the work. Build the asset. Keep the receipts. Buy the catalogue if you can. And if you cannot buy the catalogue yet, at least stop giving your own away for exposure, vibes and a branded tote bag.

Michael did not beat Babylon by being innocent. He beat Babylon by being strategic. And that, right there, is why they would rather keep you arguing about the smoke than studying the fire.

#BabylonDecoded #MichaelJackson #OwnershipIsPower