The public definition of Michael Jackson is undergoing a paroxysm of sorts – it’s just not quite the fugue state detailed in this meditation by British journalist, broadcaster and prose stylist Paul Morley. Though an otherwise entertaining exercise in unravelling the meaning of a 20th-century celebrity in the 21st, his book flounders in the wake of recent events.

The world is still adjusting to the revelations aired on Leaving Neverland – a gooseflesh-inducing documentary aired a fortnight ago in which two of Michael Jackson’s child-friends detailed their experiences behind closed doors. The programme was timed to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of Jackson’s death.

Faber had a similar idea in putting out The Awfully Big Adventure, a long pamphlet about the ongoing significance of Michael Jackson. From its title on in, Morley’s book cannot help but feel behind the curve, even as Morley agonises about how he – and we – should feel about Jackson and his works now. The “now” of the book is a very different one to the actual present, however, in which so many of us have very much left Leaving Neverland with jaws agape. In the US, Oprah Winfrey hosted a special after-programme about abuse.

In these pages, “Michael Jackson” is known to all, but still a cypher, a cultural lodestar whose meanings flicker the more you try to nail them down. Who the hell was “Michael Jackson” anyway, Morley wonders – the child-man who survived an abusive father and dedicated his life to healing the world? A simpering wraith, enacting frailness? Or a powerful entertainer who owned the Beatles’ catalogue and used his perfectly normal voice in private? He then shrugs off the notion that Jackson enjoyed any sort of objective reality independent of all the other subjective realities encoded of him by image-makers, fans and his team. Writing in an effusive style, Morley’s riffing on the theme dates from a very recent past when discussions of Jackson’s most questionable proclivities had to dance around the subject, wary of libel lawyers. In 2005, Jackson had been cleared by a court of all the counts put to it regarding the teenage Gavin Arvizo. Now, after Leaving Neverland, the narrative has shuffled off its previous strictures.

Leaving aside Leaving Neverland, Morley’s book makes valuable points: that Jackson was an avatar for so many things that have come to pass, not least the troubling normalisation of plastic surgery. He proved that art made by an African American could be utterly mainstream in the US.

Had Jackson lived, Morley muses in the second person, “you’d have sung some frosted gospel at the wedding of a new mixed-race American duchess…. You’d be completely at home in a post-truth 21st century teeming with surgically modified human brands.”

Timing aside, there are further flaws. Jackson is “the missing link between the elegant, troubled Marvin Gaye and the boorish, aggrieved Kanye West”. “Jackson is” becomes a tiresome refrain – a tactic that jars even more when Morley lists Google search results over several pages. If you are sympathetic to his tactics – that of unfocusing the eyes and allowing in fractured, contradictory shards, crowd-sourced from the collective 21st-century hive mind – it’s of a piece with his intent. To the cynic, however, quoting Google pads out a long thinkpiece into something that can sit semi-honourably between two hard covers.

Back in the real “now”, The Simpsons have taken down an episode in which Jackson featured; more recently, a children’s museum in Jackson’s native Indiana removed his artefacts from display. “Cancelling” is, of course, the searing hot topic of 2019, as fans and media outlets reassess their relationships with everyone from Woody Allen to R Kelly. Morley does address the difficulty in cleaving a complex artist from their art, but not in light of the current debate.

As a wordsmith who came of age in an era where intellectual play roamed more freely, he scatters playful ‘what-ifs” among his more trenchant thoughts. “You’d have formed a virtual super-group… with Taylor Swift, Grimes’n’Musk, Guardians of the Galaxy’s Groot, Pikachu and a clone of Mahalia Jackson…” is the kind of idle grandstanding that doesn’t help anyone. By contrast, pointing out that “[Jackson] played a vital role in directing a long, courageous history of dissident black music towards it being smothered in capitalist drag” is a hugely rich topic for analysis.

Morley actually leans hard on that cancelled episode of The Simpsons, and the 1970s Jacksons cartoons, as context for Jackson’s fluidity. The singer, he theorises, had a desire to become a kind of drawn, rewritable, almost post-human emblem to whom the rules of physics theoretically did not apply, much less a moral compass.

Morley could have mentioned, but does not, how Jackson’s moves lent themselves to what became gifs in the digital age: curt, staccato metonyms. He doesn’t quite spend long enough on how this vitiligo-afflicted child-man began dissolving binary certainties – a very 2019 state of affairs. His book dwells on the cognitive dissonance, pre-Leaving Neverland, of loving the art but being troubled by the man, without being able to say that this very state of cognitive dissonance is exactly how we live now on so many levels.

It is far from clear where the pieces are going to land after Leaving Neverland. Marketers, academics and lawyers have pontificated about the damage that could follow to the earnings of Jackson’s estate. Ads proclaiming his innocence are now being removed from the sides of London buses out of respect for sufferers of sexual abuse.

Recent analysis of Jackson’s streaming numbers, however, reveals that his music hasn’t suffered any significant boycott since Wade Robson described how Jackson persuaded him to dispose of an article of clothing that could have incriminated the star. Can Michael Jackson be cancelled? That would be the book to commission right now.

• The Awfully Big Adventure: Michael Jackson in the Afterlife by Paul Morley is published by Faber (£10). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99