Jackson’s Off-the-Wall Ebony Interview

Bulletin: The King of Pop, Rock, Soul and Big-Screen (just kidding about that last one) has broken his eight-year silence and actually talked with a representative of the media.

About the closest thing to an interview Michael Jackson has done in the last decade was let himself be photographed walking arm-in-arm last fall with sycophantic TV correspondent David Sheehan, who was allowed the privilege of paraphrasing what few comments the pop superstar made during their special time together.

But now the shyest man in show business has granted Robert E. Johnson of Ebony magazine a rare interview, which runs in the May issue as a Q&A; sidebar to the cover story on Jackson’s recent visit to Africa. Ebony calls it Jackson’s first published interview in eight years. Most readers will call it strange.

Divine destiny is the main theme running through Jackson’s comments, in which he discusses: * Songwriting: “I’m just the source through which it comes. I can’t take credit for it because it’s God’s work. He’s just using me as the messenger.”

* His latest album, “Dangerous”: “I wanted to do an album that was like Tchaikovsky’s ‘Nutcracker Suite.’ So that in a thousand years from now, people would still be listening to it. Something that would live forever. I would like to see children and teen-agers and parents and all races all over the world, hundreds and hundreds of years from now, still pulling out songs from that album and dissecting it. I want it to live.”

* Providence: “I really believe that God chooses people to do certain things, the way Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci or Mozart or Muhammad Ali or Martin Luther King is chosen. And that is their mission to do that thing. And I think that I haven’t scratched the surface yet of what my real purpose is for being here.”

* Scientific theory: “In one of the pieces of the ‘Dangerous’ album, I say: ‘Life songs of ages, throbbing in my blood, have danced the rhythm of the tide and flood.’ This is a very literal statement, because the same new miracle intervals and biological rhythms that sound out the architecture of my DNA also governs the movement of the stars. . . . the migration of birds, the ebb and flow of ocean tides. . . . And my goal in life is to give to the world what I was lucky to receive: the ecstasy of divine union through my music and my dance.”

* Strained media relations: “You know, that’s the most I’ve said in eight years. . . . You know I don’t give interviews. That’s because I know you (Johnson), and I trust you. You’re the only person I trust to give interviews to.”

But though Ebony offers a strenuous defense of Jackson and his controversial trip to Africa (“It was a triumph in which he drew more spectators in Gabon than Nelson Mandela and more in the Ivory Coast than the Pope”), the pop star isn’t quite the ruler of all lists in the magazine’s pages. In the same issue’s ranking of “The 100 Most Influential Black Americans,” the man who would be King is nowhere to be found.