Beneath the headlines.
Behind the timelines, there is a story no one wants you to find.
Welcome to some unapproved thinking where forgotten truths, buried patterns, and
invisible systems rise to the surface.
You weren't crazy, you were just early.
Let's begin.
They called him the king of pop, but kings who forget their place
have a way of losing their crowns.
I remember the first time I really understood how the music industry
worked, not the sanitized version they sell to aspiring artists,
but the real machinery underneath.
It was during my corporate days sitting in a conference room where
we were discussing how to manage a client who'd started asking too
many questions about their contract.
The language was clinical and of course professional, but
let's be honest, what they were really talking about was control.
Michael Jackson didn't just own the music, he owned the masters.
He didn't just entertain the masses, he started warning them.
And when the most valuable artist in history became the most
dangerous, the industry had a problem that money couldn't solve.
In 1985, Jackson bought the Beatles catalog for $47.5 million, making him
one of the most powerful men in music.
By 2009, he was dead in a mansion surrounded by handlers with a personal
physician who became the perfect fall guy.
Tonight we ask what happens when the artist becomes more powerful
than the industry that created him.
This is some unapproved thinking.
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Now back to the show.
We live in an age where artists are brands where creativity is content,
and where the most successful musicians often become the most controlled.
The music industry has perfected the art of creating stars who shine
brightly, but own nothing who generate billions, but remain dependent on
the very system that made them.
But Michael Jackson represented something different.
He wasn't just successful, he was autonomous.
He didn't just perform.
He owned.
He didn't just entertain, he educated.
And in an industry built on control, autonomy becomes the ultimate threat.
The official story of Michael Jackson's death is medical misadventure, a troubled
star, prescription drugs and a negligent doctor clean, simple case closed.
When you examine the timeline, the business interests, and the
systematic character assassination that preceded his death, uncomfortable
questions begin to emerge.
Questions that by some get dismissed as mere conspiracy theories before
they can be properly investigated.
Understanding what happened to Michael Jackson isn't just about one artist.
It's about recognizing what happens when creative independence
threatens corporate control.
When ownership becomes more valuable than the owner, and when the puppet
tries to cut its own strings.
Let me walk you through the transformation of Michael Jackson from
industry asset to industry threat.
The turning point wasn't his music, his performances, or
even his personal struggles.
It was November, 1985.
When Jackson outbid Paul McCartney and acquired a TV Music Publishing for $47.5
million in one single transaction, he gained control of over 4,000 songs,
including the entire Beatles catalog.
This was the most valuable music library in history.
This wasn't just a business deal, it was a complete shift in power.
Jackson now owned the songs that had shaped popular culture for decades.
Every time a Beatles song played on the radio in a commercial or in
a movie, Michael Jackson got paid.
He had become the landlord of rock and roll instead of being just another tenant.
The industry's response to this was immediate and systematic.
The same media engine that had celebrated Jackson as the King of Pop began a
systematic character assassination campaign that would last for decades.
Shifting him from the eccentric genius to the weird recluse,
moving him from the innovative artist to the troubled celebrity.
This once powerful businessman became the unstable star,
according to their narrative.
But Jackson's real crime wasn't buying the Beatles catalog.
It was what he started saying publicly after he owned it in interviews and
public statements, he began warning about industry manipulation, media control, and
the systematic exploitation of artists.
He spoke about history books being lies about the media being
manipulated and about powerful interests controlling the narrative.
The minute I started telling the truth, they called me crazy.
Jackson said in one interview, that wasn't just entertainment industry drama.
That was a man who had gained enough power to see how the system really
worked and who was now starting to talk about it openly and publicly.
I've seen this pattern before in different industries.
When someone moves from being controlled to being in control, they start seeing
the machinery that was hidden from them, and sometimes they start talking about it.
That's when they become a problem.
The pattern of Jackson's final years reveals the systematic
nature of his elimination.
The 2005 trial, which ended in complete acquittal, destroyed his reputation
regardless of the legal outcome, the financial pressure that forced him
into the, this is it, concert series.
The isolation that made him dependent on handlers and medical
professionals that he could not trust.
One of those medical professionals was Dr. Conrad Murray, who effectively
became the perfect fall guy.
He was a doctor with financial problems, a history of poor judgment, and no
powerful connections to protect him.
When Jackson died, Murray took the blame while the real beneficiaries of Jackson's
death completely remained invisible.
Within a very short period of time, after Jackson's death, some say within hours,
Sony music began preparing to acquire his share of the Sony a TV catalog.
The same company that had been his business partner became the primary
beneficiary of his elimination.
They gained full control of the Beatles catalog and Jackson's own master
recordings for a fraction of what they would've cost if Jackson had lived.
The speed of the business transactions after Jackson's death reveals the level
of preparation, catalog, acquisitions, remaster releases, and licensing
deals that should have taken months to negotiate were completed within weeks.
The infrastructure for profiting from Jackson's death appears to have been
already in place before he even died.
Here's the most disturbing aspect.
Jackson had predicted his own elimination in the months before his death.
He told friends and family members that they were trying to kill him.
He spoke about powerful interests that wanted him gone.
He understood that his ownership of the catalog made him a target.
When the most valuable artist in history starts warning about industry
manipulation and predicting his own assassination and then dies under
suspicious circumstances that immediately benefit the same industry he was exposing.
You're not looking at coincidence.
You're looking at outright elimination.
Okay, here's the thing.
The pattern of eliminating artists who become too powerful or too
independent has deep historical roots in the music industry and beyond.
Sam Cook provides us with a pretty direct parallel to Jackson's situation.
In the early 1960s, cook wasn't just a successful artist.
He, like Michael was building an independent music empire.
He founded his own record label publishing company and management firm.
He was creating a model for black artists to express their musical creativity, own
their work, and control their careers.
Cook was also becoming politically active, supporting the Civil
Rights movement and using his platform to address social issues.
He was scheduled to meet with civil rights leaders and was planning
to use his business empire to support the movement financially.
Then on December 11th, 1964, cook was shot and killed at a Los Angeles motel
under circumstances that never made sense.
The official story involved a prostitute, a motel manager, and a case
of mistaken identity, but the evidence suggested something more systematic.
The elimination of an artist who had become too vocal, too independent,
and too politically dangerous.
This same pattern extends beyond individual artists to
inherent industry practices.
The payola scandals of the 1950s revealed how record companies controlled radio
play and manipulated public taste.
But the real scandal was not in the bribes.
It was the pervasive exclusion of independent artists and labels that
couldn't afford to pay to play.
The British invasion of the 1960s wasn't just about musical innovation,
it was about corporate consolidation.
American record companies used the imported British acts to break the
power of independent American artists and the labels that supported them.
The same companies that had struggled to control diverse American music
scenes found it easier to import support and control the British acts.
The pattern has been traced through decades of music history.
Even the disco era's sudden collapse in the late 1970s followed a similar script.
When disco became associated with independent black and gay artists who were
building their own networks and venues.
The industry orchestrated a backlash that destroyed the entire genre overnight.
Yep.
That's right.
The whole disco sucks movement wasn't organic.
It was engineered to regain control.
Then there was hip hop's evolution from independent street culture to corporate
commodity that revealed the same dynamic.
The most real, authentic and independent voices were comprehensively marginalized.
While far more corporate friendly artists were promoted and pushed to the masses.
The culture that had emerged from community empowerment
became a tool for community.
Suppression control and exploitation.
Now, this pattern is not just limited to music in other industries,
individuals who gain too much independence, too much control or
threaten established power structures.
Face structured elimination.
Howard Hughes in aviation and film, Nikola Tesla, and in technology independent
journalists who expose powerful interests all have fallen prey to the same pattern.
While the methods used may vary, the overall outcome will remain consistent.
The entertainment industry has particular advantages which easily enables these
types of elimination operations.
The lifestyle provides cover for drug related deaths.
The pressure creates plausible explanations for mental health crises.
The isolation makes artists vulnerable to handlers, medical professionals
and nefarious actors who often do not have the artist's best interests
at heart for one reason or another.
These historical patterns suggest that Michael Jackson's death wasn't
an anomaly, but rather just the latest example of a structured approach to
eliminating artists who become too powerful, too independent, or too
willing to expose industry manipulation.
So let me show you the recurring mechanisms of artist elimination
and how they can be applied to Michael Jackson's situation.
The pattern always seems to begin with the artist gaining real
power, not just fame or money, but real ownership and independence.
Jackson's acquisition of the Beatles catalog represented the kind of power
that threatens industry control structures because when artists own their masters
and control their catalogs, they cannot be so easily manipulated or replaced.
Then the structural character assassination tends to
follow predictable stages.
First, the eccentric genius is framed as the weird recluse.
The personal struggles are turned into public spectacles.
And last but not least, very legitimate business disputes are turned into evidence
of instability or even criminality.
The goal of all this is to destroy their credibility before the elimination
of the threat is carried out.
Financial pressure creates vulnerability and dependence.
Even wealthy artists can be made financially desperate through legal costs,
business disputes, and comprehensive exclusion from their revenue streams.
Jackson's forced participation in the, this is it.
Concerts wasn't just an artistic choice, it was financial necessity
created by all the systematic pressures.
Now, as I mentioned before, isolation makes artists vulnerable to nefarious
actors, handlers, and medical professionals who may serve interests
other than the artist's health and safety.
Jackson's final years were marked by increasing isolation from family
and longtime associates, replaced by handlers with questionable
loyalties and financial motivations.
The medical angle provides perfect cover for eventual elimination, prescription
drug dependency mental health issues, and the pressures of celebrity lifestyle
create plausible explanations for deaths that might otherwise raise suspicions.
Dr. Conrad Murray became the perfect fall guy visible enough to take blame,
powerless enough to be sacrificed.
Ultimately, the near immediate business benefits reveal the potentially true
motives behind any artist's elimination.
Jackson's death allowed Sony to acquire full control of the Sony A TV catalog
eliminated a powerful negotiating partner and created opportunities for
posthumous exploitation that wouldn't have been possible while he was alive.
Then.
The speed of posthumous business transactions tend to indicate
preparation and coordination, catalog acquisitions, remaster releases, and
licensing deals that should have taken months were completed within weeks.
The infrastructure for profiting from Jackson's death appears to have
been already in place when he passed.
Sadly, the legal proceedings served to legitimize the elimination while
also protecting the real perpetrators.
Murray's conviction provided closure and accountability, especially to the
public, while still ensuring that deeper questions about motives and coordination
were never really investigated.
The fall guy takes the blame while the beneficiaries remain shifting
about quietly in the shadows.
The posthumous narrative management ensures that the artist's warnings about
industry manipulation are forgotten by the public while their commercial
value is maximized to the fullest.
Jackson's statements about media control and industry corruption disappeared
from public discussion while his music became more profitable than ever.
The pattern extends to how other similar cases are handled when other
artists face similar circumstances.
Financial pressure, isolation, medical dependency, suspicious deaths.
The same explanations are offered and the same business interest benefit.
The template?
Yeah, it gets recycled and reused because it works the most
concerning aspect to all this.
Is how the pattern seems to have been normalized.
Artists deaths from prescription drugs, medical misadventure and handler
negligence are treated as inevitable consequences of celebrity lifestyle rather
than potential elimination operations serving larger business interests.
The Michael Jackson case seems to represent the fine tuning
and perfection of this model.
Systematic character assassination, financial pressure, isolation,
medical vulnerability.
Convenient elimination, immediate business benefits, scapegoat, prosecution,
and finally, narrative management.
Every element serves to protect the real perpetrators while maximizing the
commercial benefits of the artist's life of hard work at the time of their death.
Now, not everyone in the music industry participated in or accepted this level
of elimination of independent artists.
Throughout the industry's history, individuals have chosen integrity over
profit and truth over convenience.
Some industry insiders have recognized the pattern of artist elimination
and have tried to warn or protect our beloved and even vulnerable artists,
managers, producers, and executives who understood how the system worked,
sometimes risked their own careers to expose or resist elimination operations.
Independent journalists have investigated the suspicious circumstances
surrounding any given artist's death, despite facing professional
retaliation and even legal threats.
Afterwards, their work often revealed evidence of coordination and motive
that official investigations have ignored or perhaps even suppressed
family members and close associates.
Of the eliminated artists have maintained that the official
explanations don't match the evidence they observed despite facing character
assassination and legal pressure.
Some have even continued speaking out about what they experience
and witnessed firsthand.
Some legal advocates have challenged the official narratives and pushed
for far more thorough investigations.
They have interned faced systematic resistance from institutions
that prefer simple explanations to complex investigations that
might expose industry practices.
Some artists have recognized the dangers of gaining too much independence and
have taken steps to protect themselves.
They've maintained family connections, avoided isolation, and been careful
about medical professionals and handlers with questionable loyalties.
Some have even gone so far as stepping out of the spotlight of mainstream media.
As always, there are alternative media platforms that have provided
a safe space for information and analysis that their mainstream
outlet counterparts seem to avoid.
These alternative platforms have hosted investigations, interviews,
and evidence that challenges official narratives about artist deaths.
International observers have noted the patterns and American entertainment
industry deaths and have documented similar operations in other countries.
Their outside perspective helps reveal patterns that might be
invisible to those within the system.
Academic researchers have studied the business dynamics of the music
industry and have documented how financial interests can create
motives for eliminating artists who become too powerful or independent.
But I think that the most important resistance comes from the people who
refuse to accept convenient explanations for suspicious deaths when the
evidence suggests more complex motives and coordination they, or should I
say, we understand that protecting artists requires acknowledging the
threats they face from the industry that profits from their work.
These outliers demonstrate that the elimination of independent artists
isn't inevitable or necessary.
Every person who speaks out about suspicious circumstances, every
investigation that reveals hidden motives, every effort to protect
vulnerable artists helps maintain accountability in an industry that
often operates beyond public oversight.
Understanding this pattern of artist elimination should change how you evaluate
celebrity deaths, industry practices, and the relationship between creative
independence and personal safety.
When successful artists die under suspicious circumstances, especially
those who had gained significant ownership or independence, you
start asking different questions.
Who benefits from their death?
What business interests are served?
What threats to industry control are eliminated?
The phrase, troubled artist should become a red flag when
it's used to explain deaths that serve obvious business interests.
Real artistic struggles don't typically align so conveniently with
corporate profit motives or eliminate specific threats to industry control.
Medical explanations for artist deaths take on new significance
when you understand how medical professionals can be used as tools
for elimination, prescription drug dependency, negligent care, and
convenient medical emergencies can serve interests other than patient health.
The real importance of artistic independence begins to become clear when
you understand the risks it creates.
Artists who own their masters control their catalogs.
These same artists can then maintain autonomy from the industry and
its handlers, thus leading them to face dangers that dependent
artists don't experience because they just go along to get along.
Industry consolidation becomes recognizable as a strategy for
preventing artist independence.
It's not just all about business efficiency, when fewer companies
control more of the industry.
It becomes easier to coordinate responses to threats and thus squelch, defame, or
completely eliminate artists who become too powerful in their independence.
Here, the value of real friends, family connections, and trusted
associates increases when you understand how isolation can make
artists vulnerable to elimination.
Maintaining relationships with people who have the artist's true
interest at heart really becomes a valuable survival strategy.
Once again, pattern recognition becomes more important than each individual
case analysis, because when similar circumstances, motives, and outcomes
appear across multiple artists' deaths.
Recognizing the pattern helps you understand what's happening,
even when specific evidence is limited within a given case.
Most importantly, you realize that the entertainment industry is not
just simply about entertainment at its core, it is about control, not
always the control of the populace, as we have discussed in other episodes.
But instead, the structural elimination of independent artists serves to maintain
the industry's power structures, not to mention preventing the emergence
of alternative models that could, when proven successful, threaten the overall
music industry's corporate control.
Look.
The goal is not to become paranoid every time a celebrity dies.
No, I want you to understand that creative independence can be dangerous
when it threatens powerful interests and that the industry has both the motive
and the means to eliminate threats to its power base as well as its control.
They called him the king of pop, but the very moment he actually started acting
like a king by owning his kingdom, questioning his subjects, and warning
about the power behind the throne.
That is when the kingdom decided it needed a new ruler.
Michael Jackson's crime wasn't his music, his performances, or even his
personal struggles, his crime was gaining enough power to see how the system
really worked, and then starting to talk about it publicly When he bought
the Beatles catalog, he didn't just acquire songs, he acquired Leverage
and leverage in the wrong hands becomes a threat that must be dealt with.
The pattern is as ancient as time itself.
The application now is far more modern.
The same techniques used to eliminate political threats.
Business rivals and inconvenient witnesses are deployed against amazing
artists that we come to know and love simply because they became too
independent, too powerful, or too willing to expose industry manipulation.
The minute I started telling the truth, they called me crazy.
Jackson said.
The crazy part wasn't what he was saying.
It was that he was saying it at all.
In an industry built on control, truth telling becomes the ultimate rebellion.
They didn't just kill the king of pop.
Nope.
They killed the idea that artists could own their work, that they
could control their careers, or even speak truth to power.
They replaced independence with dependency, ownership with rental
agreements and truth telling.
With brand management, the official story is, well, a bit of a medical misadventure.
The real story is a business necessity when the most valuable artist in
history becomes the most dangerous.
The industry has a problem that money alone cannot solve, so they
solved it the way many powerful interests have always solved.
Inconvenient problems.
Yeah, they eliminated it.
The official story is rarely the whole story and the story of what
really happened to Michael Jackson is written in the business transactions
that followed his death, not the medical reports that proceeded it.
They got their catalog back, they got their control back.
They even got their king back, albeit dead profitable, and
of course, permanently silent.
Tracy out
if this story didn't sit right with you.
Good.
You are not here to be comforted.
You are here to see what others overlook.
Thanks for exploring some unapproved thinking.
Learn more@someunapprovedthinking.com.
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And next time we're going deeper.