Norton University

College of Arts, Humanities, and Languages

II.

Core English 2
Year II, Semester II

Historical Research

Michael Jackson

Born in August 29, 1958 Gary, Indiana USA, Michael Joseph Jackson known as Michael
Jackson was a king of pop music in 1980s.
Michael's father, Joe Jackson, was a crane operator during the 1950s, in Gary, Indiana a place
in which, according to Dave Marsh's Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream, quotas
were imposed on how many black workers were allowed to advance into skilled trades in the city's
mills. Michael's mother, Katherine Scruse, was from Alabama but was living in East Chicago, Indiana,
when she met Joe. She had grown up hearing country & western music, and although she entertained
her own dreams of singing and playing music, a bout of polio had left her with a permanent limp. Joe
and Katherine were a young couple, married in 1949, and began a large family immediately. Their first
child, Maureen (Rebbie), was born in 1950, followed by Sigmund (Jackie) in 1951, Toriano (Tito) in
1953, Jermaine in 1954, La Toya in 1956 and Marlon in 1957. Michael was born on August 29th,
1958, and Randy was born in 1961. Janet, the last born, wouldn't arrive until 1966.
Michael and his siblings heard music all the time. Joe had a strong inclination toward the
rowdy electric urban blues that had developed in nearby Chicago, and also for early rock & roll. Along
with his brothers, Joe formed a band, the Falcons, and made some modest extra income from playing
bars and college dances around Gary. When the Falcons folded, Joe retired his guitar to a bedroom
closet, and he guarded it jealously, just as he did everything in his domain. Katherine, though,
sometimes led her children in country-music sing-alongs, during which she taught them to harmonize.
Soon Joe was working all his sons into an ensemble. Though Joe was at heart a blues man, he
appreciated that contemporary R&B Motown and soul was the music that attracted his sons. Joe
groomed Jermaine to be lead singer, but one day, Katherine saw Michael, just four at the time, singing
along to a James Brown song, and Michael in both his voice and moves was already eclipsing his
older brother. She told Joe, "I think we have another lead singer." Katherine would later say that
sometimes Michael's precocious abilities frightened her she probably saw that his childhood might
give way to stardom but she also recognized that there was something undeniable about his young
voice, that it could communicate longings and experiences that no child could yet know.
Michael was also a natural center of attention. He loved singing and dancing, and because he
was so young such an unexpected vehicle for a rousing, dead-on soulful expression he became an
Group: English M12

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Lecturer: Eng Sokkheng

Norton University
Core English 2
College of Arts, Humanities, and Languages
Year II, Semester II
obvious point of attention when he and his brothers performed. Little Michael Jackson was cute, but
little Michael Jackson was also dynamite.
By Joe's own admission he was unrelenting. "When I found out that my kids were interested in
becoming entertainers, I really went to work with them," he told Time in 1984. "I rehearsed them about
three years before I turned them loose. I saw that after they became better, they enjoyed it more." That
isn't always how Michael remembered it. "We'd perform for him, and he'd critique us," he wrote in
Moonwalk. "If you messed up, you got hit, sometimes with a belt, sometimes with a switchI'd get
beaten for things that happened mostly outside rehearsal. Those moments and probably many more
created a loss that Jackson never got over. Again, from Moonwalk: "One of the few things I regret most
is never being able to have a real closeness with him. He built a shell around himself over the years,
and once he stopped talking about our family business, he found it hard to relate to us. We'd all be
together, and he'd just leave the room."
Michael and his brothers began to tour on what was still referred to as the "chitlin circuit" a
network of black venues throughout the U.S. (Joe made sure his sons kept their school studies up to
date and maintained their grades at an acceptable level.) In these theaters and clubs, the Jacksons
opened for numerous R&B artists, including the Temptations, Sam and Dave, Jackie Wilson, Jerry
Butler, the O'Jays and Etta James, though no one was as important to Michael as James Brown. "I
knew every step, every grunt, every spin and turn," he recalled. "He would give a performance that
would exhaust you, just wear you out emotionally. His whole physical presence, the fire coming out of
his pores, would be phenomenal. You'd feel every bead of sweat on his face, and you'd know what he
was going throughYou couldn't teach a person what I've learned just standing and watching."
The most famous site on these tours was the Apollo in New York, where the Jackson 5 won an
Amateur Night show in 1967. Joe had invested everything he had in his sons' success, though of course
any real recognition or profit would be his success as well.
In his childhood, Jackson had a sweet, dark-skinned countenance; many early Jackson 5 fans
regarded him as the cutest of the brothers. J. Randy Taraborrelli, author of Michael Jackson: The
Magic and the Madness, has written, "[Michael] believed his skin'messed up my whole personality.'
He no longer looked at people as he talked to them. His playful personality changed and he became
quieter and more serious. He thought he was ugly his skin was too dark, he decided, and his nose too
wide. It was no help that his insensitive father and brothers called him 'Big Nose.'?" Also, as Jackson
became an adolescent, he was horribly self- conscious about acne. Hilburn recalled going through a
stack of photos with Jackson one night and coming across a picture of him as a teenager: "'Ohh, that's
horrible,' [Jackson] said, recoiling from the picture."
The face Jackson displayed on the cover of Thriller had changed; the skin tone seemed lighter
and his nose thinner and straighter. In Moonwalk, Jackson claimed that much of the apparent
Group: English M12

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Lecturer: Eng Sokkheng

Norton University
Core English 2
College of Arts, Humanities, and Languages
Year II, Semester II
renovation was due to a change in his diet; he admitted to altering his nose and his chin, but he denied
he'd done anything to his skin. Still, the changes didn't end there.
Over the years, Jackson's skin grew lighter and lighter, his nose tapered more and more and his
cheekbones seemed to gain prominence. To some, this all became fair game for derision; to others, it
seemed a grotesque mutilation not just because it might have been an act of conceit, aimed to keep
his face forever childlike, but more troublingly because some believed Jackson wanted to transform
himself into a white person. Or an androgyny somebody with both male and female traits.
Jackson had 2 wives Lisa-Marie Presley married in May 18, 1994 and divorced in January 18,
1996 and another Debbie Rowe married in November 15, 1996 and divorced in October 8, 1999. He also
have 3 Childrens: Prince Michael II (aka Blanket), 2002; with Debbie Rowe: Paris Michael Katherine,
April 3, 1998; Prince Michael Joseph Jr., February 12, 1997.
He is the winner of 13 Grammys and 23 American Music Awards and is estimated to have sold
750 million albums in his career. His album, "Thriller," is the worldwide best-selling album of all time,
selling more than 50 million copies.
When Jackson died on June 25th, 2009, of apparent cardiac arrest in Los Angeles at age 50, the
outpouring of first shock, then grief, was the largest, most instantaneous of its kind the world had ever
known, short of the events of September 11th, 2001. What immediately became obvious in all the
coverage is that despite the dishonor that had come upon him, the world still respected Michael
Jackson for his music for the singles he made as a Motown prodigy, for the visionary disco he made
as a young adult, for Thriller, a stunningly vibrant album that blew up around the world on a scale
we'll never see again, for his less impactful but still one-of-kind later work, even for his cheesy ballads.
In 2009 Jackson was the biggest-selling artist in the world.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/artists/michael-jackson/biography#ixzz3YhuBxUTB

Group: English M12

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Lecturer: Eng Sokkheng

Norton University
College of Arts, Humanities, and Languages

III.

Core English 2
Year II, Semester II

Translation

No One Knows Why Theyre There

The world is full of wonderful places, both natural and man-made. Some of the man-made
places are still unexplained. Here are two.
The Nazca Desert, Peru
The Nazca Desert is a high plain about 90 kilometres long and 8 kilometres wide on the coast
of Peru, about 4000 kilometres south of Lima. And it is covered in lines.
A long time ago, travelers in the Nazca Desert noticed the strange and obviously artificial lines
on the ground. They wondered what the lines were and why they were there, but the lines were
meaningless at ground level. Then, in the 20th century, people flew over the Nazca lines for the first
time, and they realized that the lines formed special patterns. There are enormous figures of animals,
people and plants and lines that look similar to runways at modern airports.
It is known that these drawings are at least 1,500 years old. But no one is sure exactly when
they were drawn, and, more importantly, no one knows why they were drawn. After all, why would
anyone draw figures that you can only see from the air, in a period of history when there were no
planes?
Easter Island
Easter Island, about halfway between Chile and Tahiti, is the worlds most mysterious island.
Discovered in 1722 by a Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggeveen, the island is famous for the Moai:
hundreds of strange statues made from the islands volcanic rock, with faces that either look out to sea,
or towards the local villages. Many have fallen over; some are incomplete. We dont really understand
why they are there or who made them. People still wonder how the statues were moved from where
they were made to their present positions on the island. A writer called Erich von Danken suggested
that the Moai were built and moved by aliens. There are several other theories, but the answer has not
yet been found.

Group: English M12

Page 1

Lecturer: Eng Sokkheng

Norton University
College of Arts, Humanities, and Languages

Core English 2
Year II, Semester II

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Group: English M12

Page 1

Lecturer: Eng Sokkheng

Norton University
College of Arts, Humanities, and Languages

Core English 2
Year II, Semester II

Group: English M12

Page 1

Lecturer: Eng Sokkheng