On Race, Sexuality, Fame, and Michael Jackson

 

It’s impossible to not have Michael Jackson on the brain.

 

And not just his music. He’s a mishmash of signifiers of race, gender, sexuality. It’s almost like American fame, American ambition, and the complexities of American identity politics have been grafted upon his ever-evolving (disintegrating) face.

 

Some online research unearthed that an MCM-style (for you Brown folks out there) book has already been written, pondering the cultural significance of Michael Jackson (then and now). The author, Margo Jefferson, a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times critic, conducted several interviews about the book when it was released in 2006. They are especially fascinating now.

 

But first a summation from the author:

I first wrote about Michael Jackson in 1984, partly because (like so many people here, I’m sure) I had been a big fan. I was 20 or 21 in 1969 when he and his brothers first had an album. They were adorable. He then turned out to be a major performing talent, one of popular cultures great entertainers. He will be remembered as an original dancer, a crack singer, and just one of these performers who has this incandescent self-containment.

When I approached him in the 80s, we were already—“we” meaning observers, fans, dissenters—engaged in questions like: “Who is he? What is going on?” You know, his skin was lightening, it was said he had a skin disease in which pigment changes, half the people in the world didn’t believe him, he was starting to feature some make-up, was feminized and yet engaged in this elaborate masculine crotch-clutching drama in his videos. So the first piece that I wrote was actually an attempt to challenge the tendency on all of our parts, including mine, to be very sociological. We wanted to say, “This is all about racial self-hatred. He’s probably gay, and he doesn’t want to admit it.” I just decided that I could not pretend that this was not unsettling. The fact is: this is a sophisticated artist who lives by borrowing, by appropriating, all sorts of styles. What’s that great line from “I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang”… “How do you live? I steal.” And that’s what performing artists do all the time; Michael is a master at it.

And secondly, we’re living in the era of (and Michael was a little ahead of them): Madonna, who is being paid everyday for these capsulated self-transformations, and the artist Cindy Sherman, whose work I’m sure a lot of you know. She would photograph herself in all sorts of scenarios, insert herself in classical paintings. Let’s think about transformation itself: this remaking the self as art object. This is not completely satisfying to me. Madonna, whether you cared about her or not, always seemed completely in control of what she was saying and what she was doing. With Michael, there was this curtain, often, between what he said and what he did. You know: “Well, honestly, I just had two operations on my nose,” and you think, “this is not possible.” So there was still this child [in him] who would say, “No, this is just the way things are,” and there would be this adult who was rather relentlessly, and with a curious kind of stubborn valor, transforming himself before our eyes into something—something that he had to know many people were very rattled by—and he was going to do it anyway. So there was a mystery that intrigued me.

 

And finally, American mass culture since the 20s has been the most powerful in the world. That is terrifying and interesting. Michael Jackson for about 20 years was probably the most powerful entertainer in pop music. And pop music, along with movies, is the mass culture forum that is at the center of world culture. So this was formidable.

When I started talking about this with an editor, about five years ago, one crucial impulse was, “You know, he looks like he’s about to self-destruct in some way or another. What about a short book that gives him his dues as an artist, [a book] that reminds people of all the innovations, of what it still there on film, and puts him in context with many aspects of our culture? Let’s do that before he self-destructs.” Then a friend of mine said that as usual, Michael was ahead of us.

 

And then when I had gone on to do other things, the second round of sexual molestation charges came, and the editor called me and said, “Look I still want the book. We have to, obviously, take the trial and all of that into account.” That was now part of this cultural landscape, this fantasia, that includes fantasies and dramas of racial and gender transformation, sexualization of children—and by that I mean on several levels. Michael, sexualized from the age of five by American and by world culture, the sexualization of child stars: Michael is from that generation of Brooke Shields, Tatum O’Neil, Michael Jackson, little Jodie Foster, and the little perky children on TV, the Brady Bunch. There was a cultural obsession. And then there is our horror at the emergence of facts about the sexual abuse of children, and again, in that classic American popular cultural way, the way we turn it into a form of entertainment. I’m thinking particularly of a show I watch a lot, “Law and Order: Sexual Victims Unit.”

 

All of that was very interesting to me, and the fact that he contained so much of entertainment history in his body; [his] videos, which really are short films, make their postmodern way through so many landscapes: horror films, old fashioned romances, Peter Pan, Edgar Allen Poe, all of that. You can find so many styles in his work. To me, he seems the end-product of one hundred years of our wildly complicated, ever-moving popular culture, made more and more complicated by the fact that it is now a 24-hour, 7 day a week, multi-media pastime obsession information industry. Oh, and of course our obsession with making ourselves over, from body dysmorphia, plastic surgery: he’s always there. We’re here with our obsession, and he’s already there or he’s about to be.

 

If that sparks your interest, here’s a fascinating interview she did. (I’ve already hit Amazon and bought the book myself)

 

The Writers Institute Blog

February 2, 2006; from the Writers Institute Archive: http://nyswiblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/from-our-archive-margo-jefferson-on.html

 

And here are some more interesting thoughts from Michaelangelo Matos, an author and critic who points out that Michael Jackson was the last true, global music superstar (I’d argue Madonna still fits the bill somewhat). He was a star from the day when we all got our music from few sources (radio/MTV) and a #1 song was truly a binding cultural foce. Now, our listening habits and avenues for music consumption are fragmented into a zillion different channels and blogs. And #1 songs don’t cross generations they way they once did.

 

 

MJ sold 30 million albums in about a year—and instant global phenomenon. The pressure and the hubris must’ve been unbearable.

 

Here’s his full comment:

It’s easy to forget, watching the music industry disintegrate, that it was ever endangered before file sharing came along. But 30 years ago, the record biz nearly collapsed thanks to coke-fueled overspending and the disco backlash; sales were notably weak during the early ’80s. The Nov. 21, 1981, debut of MTV helped turn things around by fueling a Top 40 resurgence that made the mid-’80s the greatest time period for hit radio since the ’60s or, I’d argue, ever.

But “Thriller” had a lot more to do with it. Everyone knows it’s sold 50 million copies worldwide, but the more telling statistic is that it sold 30 million of them within 15 months; after the Feb. 28, 1984, Grammy Awards, it was shipping an estimated million copies every four-and-a-half days. It may be an exaggeration to say that Jackson single-handedly revitalized the music business, but it isn’t much of one. Pop music has been living in his shadow ever since. Not specific artists — though his stamp is over more artists than I have room to list here — but the music biz itself.

“Thriller” invented the modern-era mainstream pop album as assuredly as the Beatles’ 1965 “Rubber Soul” invented the golden-age rock album. Aiming for a hit single with every song and achieving it with all but two, it radically reshaped the way musicians conceived their works. But both “Thriller” and its hit-filled predecessor, 1979’s “Off the Wall,” are more than hit machines; they’re indelible wholes. For Jackson, all-the-songs-are-hits meant that all the songs should be great — and if they aren’t, they should sparkle just as brightly as the ones that are. “Off the Wall” was my first album in as many ways as you can twist the phrase. It taught me how to listen to music — how to phrase on the beat, how to pace an album, what it meant to give yourself utterly to a performance.

Flipping between CNN and MSNBC during the agonizing wait between TMZ’s claim-jump and the L.A. Times’ confirmation, then calling a good friend to break the news (he had to go; he felt the way I had for a couple of hours), and with the parallels between Jackson’s death and Elvis Presley’s growing sadder and more obvious by the minute, I listened to “Off the Wall” again. It hasn’t lost anything. We have. What we’ve lost, in a word, is monoculture. Michael Jackson is the final pop star of seeming consequence to everyone — not just people who don’t normally care about music, but people who don’t care about culture, period. Obviously, it’s been a quarter-century since that was unequivocally true. But he’s the last pop musician for whom it was even equivocally true. The fact that the business he saved has been crumbling for some time was given a brutal underlining by Jackson’s sudden, unexpected death, the question of what’s-next now punctuated with what-will-never-be-again.