2.
Understanding Michael Jackson/center>
Michael Jackson’s new face stares right in you from the cover of his album Bad, looking lost and
accusatory. In the Martin Scorsese music film for the single Bad, it has even frightened grown
children who screamed their outrage in the international press. But Michael's face may be outside
the legitimate realm of music and film criticism. As he says on “The Way You Make Me Feel”, the
album's most infectious cut, “Ain't nobody's business but mine and my baby.”
Only the intimates of Jackson's life have a right to complain- or be surprised- at the physiological
changes he has made of himself. The skin lightening, eye widening, nose sharpening, chin clefting,
plus hair weave and processing are mad-scientist variations on the ethnic grooming and image
creation that have long been part of the Black performer's understood contract with the white controlled
world of show business.
Most artists submit to it to some degree. Jackson's only gone the Jewish entertainer's nose-job
ritual- known as the 'Hollywood circumcision'- several organs better.
Almost a hundred years after minstrel shows, Jackson has engineered the ultimate critiques/reversal
of the blackface tradition. His plastic surgery answers the exploitation and humiliation that have
always loomed ambiguously before Black performers who were ready to give the marketplace the
face or hairstyle it demanded.
Jackson has speculated on the possibility of becoming the perfect model entertainer. He has cribbed
notions of showbiz decorum from that mist desperate integrationist, Diana Ross- specifically in
terms of music and vocal nuance. But another important touchstone has been the pencil-thin, art deco
stylization of Fred Astaire in movement and dance. As a recombinant showbiz entity, Michael
Jackson has surpassed both of them. He's the assimilation ideal made flesh; showbiz excellence
evolved into lightning-quick speed and efficiency.
Jackson's development, his growing up in public, matters to so many people because he makes the
processes of cultural exploitation so plain. From his beginnings as a tiny tot James Brown to his
current eccentricity as the owner of a hyperbaric chamber and exotic menagerie, he has followed the
steps of previous entertainers- becoming an icon for millions, than seeking a personal refuge for his
own sensitive/fantasy needs. But the imperatives set before Jackson, structuring his maturation, are
to be an artist, an individual, and a Black person. That's one obligation more than Elvis Presley or
The Beatles had to deal with. And being Black is more complicated than the other goals.
Racial identity impinges on every move Jackson makes. So it's too simple and insensitive to say that
he's trying to be white. His new face is just a manifestation of the compromises he's forced into as
private and public person, as a naïve young man in an industry of predatory cunning, as a powerful
Black cultural presence sceptically admitted into a largely white hierarchy.
Michael Jackson has become the social and ethnic anomaly he was raised to be. Having achieved
with Thriller (1982) the greatest success of any performer in two decades (over 40 million sold,
ushering in the music video age), Jackson has fashioned himself into what the Western world has
ordained: an androgynous, uniracial creature of presumably limitless appeal.
His acceptance of this role may certainly indicate a weak ethnic and political foundation (a moral
slackening for which his parents should weep). But it's not simply the psychopathology people are
eager to cite. The Bad album shows that Jackson is in control of his various well enough for us to
understand his neurosis in a large sense.
Think of Michael Jackson's new face as “The Portrait of Dorian Gray” for a modern, racially stressed
culture. Yet the evidence of brainwashing, self-denial (rather than self-hatred), and willed
infantilism denotes more than a Black person's horror story-consider the pop-star-turned-grotesque
examples of Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, Keith Richard's, et al.
In 1973 song, “Frankenstein”, the protopunk group The New York Dolls sang about a new
generation of mutant teenagers whose only response to the contradictory, threatening-and pampering
society they were born into was to become outrageous reflections of its soullessness and
technological progress- Frankenstein monsters embodying both a warped hedonism and a moralistic
tension. Michael Jackson gave this pop myth a new, Black reading in the song “Thriller” and its
music video directed by John Landis. Jackson's career as a young-adult solo artist has proved most
original only through such paranoid expressions as the songs “Thriller”, “Billie Jean”, ““Beat It”,
and the new “Dirty Diana” and “Smooth Criminal”. These songs project a curious terror about
sexual relationships but principally a mistrust of personal interaction. The music is an outlet for the
dislocated feelings that a superstar teenager, raised to be a nice boy, has no other place to express.
Jackson distils his emotions into a representational showbiz form. That means making records that,
in style and content, link up with the mainstream traditions of Black crossover sixties pop
performers (hence Quincy Jones as producer and Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney as both
influences and guest artists). This makes Off the Wall Jackson's most satisfying and consistent
display of a Black musical aesthetic and conventional sexuality.
Thriller and Bad are mixed bags- uneven in quality, with alternating authentic and synthetic
formulations about either romance (“P.Y.T.”, “Liberian Girl”) or social consciousness (Wanna Be
Startin' Somethin', “Man in the Mirror”). None of these albums has the fierce idiosyncrasy of
Prince's work. The mainstream embraced Thriller over Prince's superior 1999 precisely because of
Jackson's more muted r&b. It's naive to award Jackson the triumph of Thriller- as some Black
critics have- without acknowledging the racial sacrifice it entailed. One was impossible without the
other.
Jackson obviously knows this as well as his strengths- there is no singer more confidently
individual than he- but conquering the world as he has means playing for high stakes. Bad is
Jackson's acknowledgement of the guises and performances he has mastered in order to be
successful.
***
Bad- the Scorsese-Jackson film televised on Labor Day- eclipsed the new movie season. For good
reason, it was all anyone talked about, but the talk was all wrong. Michael's grisly appearance was
so shocking that Richard Price's racist screenplay and Scorsese's remote stereotype characterization
of the supporting roles were ignored in favor of whipping Michael. The current anti-Jackson
backlash stems directly from his alarming countenance, which disturbed people's easy
preconceptions about Black performers and their ethnic integrity. Jackson's ascension via Thriller
was no big deal because Thriller was not a great (just okay) album. But the film Bad, by
emphasizing Michael's iconography, galvanizes the artist and his inchoate themes. It makes
Jackson's socioaesthetic phenomenon a big deal.
The film is this year's most ideologically complex: Scorsese brings proficient craft to Jackson's old fashioned
(West Side Story-derived) fantasy about gangs. Out of touch with the reality of Black
urban youth, Jackson, as Darryl, a prep school student home for holidays, acts out his distance. It's
primarily emotional, because Darryl's “normal” life is preoccupied with winning friends and
influencing people in the white world. “How many people you got proud of you?” a Latino
schoolmate asks him, trading confidences. Both of them move through the white world strategically,
deliberately.
This other-world experience has made Darryl an alien at home, but he is not alienated or insulated
from the problems that confront homeboys. A smart Black screenwriter would have known to show
cops or whites mistaking Darryl for a hood despite his upward mobility. Price doesn't root Darryl's
moral dilemma in his racial identity, and this throws the whole film slightly off. Darryl seems to be
Jackson's condescending moral example to the Black kids he was always different from (like Sidney
Portier's impertinent preaching in the films Fast Forward and A Piece of the Action).
But in fact, Darryl is Jackson's attempt at solidarity. He brings the Edmund Perry story to the world
by identifying with it. He sees himself as facing the same choices as other young Black men but is
able (lucky) to make his decision through art.
There are differences between this and the actual Edmund Perry story. Jackson, Scorsese, and Price
pull back from the complexities of the real tragedy, substituting Michael's own particular paranoid
preoccupations with masculinity, home, and Blackness. But there's sufficient grimness to the entire
seventeen-minute film to keep the circumstances of young Black men who are trapped between
ghettoized straits and the indifferent white world and its victimizing perceptions from seeming
frivolous. Jackson's/Darryl's song-and-dance championship is shown as his way of beating his
destiny in the hostile white world. It's a completely serious, but stylized, musical film.
In Bad, Jackson's face stands as evidence of the physical and emotional price he has paid to be
where he is. We fool ourselves to think that Jackson could have gotten there without heavy cost. *
In the Los Angeles Times Magazine, playwright Charles Fuller (A Soldier's Story) said, “The use of
language to overturn established values is a very positive statement. It seems that the way Michael
is using it (the word 'bad') as in 'wonderful', as in 'great', and also as in 'though', 'very brave',
courageous', 'gallant', is very positive.” But Fuller leaves out that it's also, plainly, vernacular; it's
Jackson's statement to the Black audience that “in my way I've won.” LL Cool J's juvenile attempt
to swipe this victory by recording history's first before-the-fact answer record, “I'm Bad”, failed to
capsize Jackson's onslaught because he limited himself to the usual, stereotyped meaning of the
word “bad”.
LL Cool J hadn't learned what Jackson surely knows (or intuits) about the fickleness of the media,
who overinflated Jackson and now vigorously ridicule him for believing their blandishments. It's an
old racist story- a Jim Crow irony. So when Jackson uses the word “bad” he gives it layers of
emotion and shrewdness about how Black people perceive themselves, their talent, and the white
world surrounding them. He accepts their success- now on his own terms, now in our tongue.
Jackson is richly aided in this by Quincy Jones' background and vocal arrangements, which evoke
the Black music styles that anticipated Jackson's pre-eminence.
The singing and dancing in the film are phenomenal- similar to those in Beat It and Janet Jackson's
Nasty video but more astonishingly acrobatic and mimetic. At times, Jackson's restructured face is
perfect for his atomic Tin Man movements. The wit of Jackson fondling himself as he dances
registers self-evident ghetto code (or should Iceberg Slim and MalcomX rise from their graves to
explain it?). Jackson uses the Black musician's ethnic eccentricities, as in transforming the phrase
“come on” as “sha-moan”. He realizes a non-English, sensuous expression. Even though he has
made his stage face permanent, this linguistic confidence is his artistic basis.
Jackson's appearance demonstrates the existential nature of being a Black artist in America. After
spending a whole life in the limelight, living in quotation marks, Jackson had their evidence
surgically tattooed. It's the blatancy of this act-Jackson's foolish but telling honesty- that's scary.
The substance of the album Bad proves there's still beauty and wonder in his singing and music.
And when Jackson reprises the line “The whole world has to answer right now”, his megalomania
becomes a strange political challenge. Right or wrong, no one else could dare it.
The City Sun
October 28, 1987
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