Michael Joseph Jackson Jr., also known as Prince Jackson, shared some stories about his childhood with his world-famous father, Michael Jackson, during a new interview.
During a conversation on Fox Soul’s The Mix, the eldest son of the King of Pop shared how he learned his father was one of the biggest pop stars to ever exist. Instead of one defining moment, he remembered a trail of clues.
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“It’s really more like there was little seeds, as I was growing up and getting older, and I saw that people would follow us around, people would just want to reach out and touch my dad,” he said.
He continued, “He was performing outside and you just see this sea of people, and there’s people fainting in the audience. I asked my dad I’m like, ‘Why were they fainting? I see you every day and I don’t faint.'”
Prince Jackson also shared some words of advice he received from his father who died in 2009 when Prince was only 12-years-old.
“You know, there are so many nuggets there that are just so close to my heart that I feel like they’re applicable at all times,” Jackson shared. “But the one that is my guiding principle is that you never stop learning. I graduated, and that doesn’t mean that I stopped learning.”
The 24-year-old continued, “and my father also would say something along the lines of, ‘The minute that you stop learning is the minute that you’re going to start dying.'”
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The “Thriller” performer introduced his children to different genres of music including classical work such as Mozart and Beethoven, but they also grew up around their father’s music.
“He was an artist and he had an appreciation for his craft,” he said of his father. “My favorite memory I have [is] one with my sister [Paris Jackson], my brother [Bigi Jackson] was in the room, but it was my sister and we were worked up about like, saving the animals, and we did a protest in our bedroom listening to ‘They Don’t Care About Us.'”
Paris Jackson used her father’s musical influence to launch her own career as an artist. During a March interview with PAPER, the 22-year-old opened up about her debut solo album Wilted which was released in November.
“Because that is so deep-rooted in me, literally from birth, I think that’s always going to have an influence and help me create. I grew up listening to the Motown kind of stuff, as well as R&B and soul, but my father also raised us listening to old school jazz, classical music, symphonies, movie soundtracks and old soft rock. We really listened to everything, growing up. So, I feel like that’s always going to influence me in some form or another, whether it’s a little bit or a lot of it,” she shared when asked about her dad’s direct impact on the project.
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