As Mark Fisher warns, this book was born of the conviction that the death of Michael Jackson should be addressed by more than easy or raised taxes biographies. Its authors-a selection of cultural and music critics among which are Ian Penman, Simon Reynolds, Steven Barney Hoskyns and Shaviro- agree that his work and his life are a symptom that needs to be interpreted, and that his death just after the last financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, it marked the end of an era that he more than anyone had helped define.

Dolls, zombies, giants, cyborgs, fetish objects and fantasy characters such as Peter Pan or Mickey Mouse, that obsessed entirely to Michael Jackson, inhabit these trials not only as testimony of enchantment and sorcery with which permeated all his work, or as a harbinger of personal disasters that eroded his career, but above all as hieroglyphics on the surface of the fabric that connects Jackson to the expansion of neoliberal, globalized and hyper-mediatized world in which we live today is reflected. This process, which began in the eighties and involving the commodification of all aspects of life, found in the King of Pop -the most absolute and universal to most enacting merchandise. His body-body post-racial, post-human and androgynous embodied the will of planetary domination of capital, its relentless ability to abstract it all while libidinal invest it with irresistible force. As compelling as the performances with the Jackson dazzled us throughout our lives, and against which the authors of this book give up again and again as if it were a fascinating, disturbing and completely unattainable mystery.

Selected by Mark Fisher, with the following critical items:
Ian Penman - Simon Reynolds - Steven Shaviro David Stubbs - Alex Williams - Evan Calder Williams - Joshua Clover - Geeta Dayal - Sam Davies - Mark Fisher - Dominic Fox - Jeremy Gilbert - Owen Hatherley - Charles Holland - Ken Hollings - Barney Hoskyns - Reid Kane - Paul Lester and Suhail Malik.