Rage in His Feet

Cross-posted from 2'23"--it's worth checking out the smart commenters there.
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One thing I've noticed about reactions to Michael Jackson's death, at least among children of the 1980s such as myself, has been the desire to recount one's initial introduction to his music. It's kind of like the opposite of the baby-boomer obsession with recounting where you were when JFK was shot. For them, the death of a president, for us the birth of the King of Pop.

My story is that I was about five years old, I think, so about 1985 or so, and I was at a neighbor's house, hanging out with my best friend. He had, presumably through his parents, a cassette tape of Thriller, and we listened to it together. The song that most stuck out for me at the time was "Beat It," Jackson's groundbreaking collaboration with Eddie Van Halen. Little five-year-old Phil went toddling around singing "Don't wanna see no blood, don't be a macho man, just beat it" for weeks afterward.

If you're the sort of person who cares about "periodicity," the study of how we organize history into culturally thematic lengths of time, or periods, a fairly simple argument to make is that Michael Jackson was one of the first great postmodern musicians in popular music. At least, that's true in the sense of postmodernism most often used in musicology, where it is largely characterized by mixing different stylistic characteristics and historical periods. Michael Jackson's work in the early 1980s took the always-already postmodernism of 1970s soul and added heavy metal, horror movies, and science fiction fantasy.

There might also, in Jackson's work, be what Fredric Jameson influentially called a "waning of affect," or a decline of the "aesthetic of expression." I don't mean this in a bad way at all. It's not that there is no expression in Jackson's music, it's that there is too much of it, so much that emotions are presented over-simplified, almost parodied, and iterated to the point of exhaustion. For example, if you or I were to grab our crotch while dancing, that gesture would most likely be read as having some sort of sexual meaning. But when Michael Jackson grabbed his crotch, the grab was so fluid and stylized, and repeated so often, that it ceased to have meaning. Or, to go back to Jameson, consider Jackson's last great hit, the 1995 duet with his little sister, "Scream."



(The video is still the most expensive music video of all time; they don't call it late capitalism for nothing.)

Consider Jameson's description of Edward Munch's Scream:

"a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alientation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolate, a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety. It will here be read as an embodiment not merely of hte expression of that kind of affect but, even more, as a virtual deconstruction of the very aesthetic of expression itself, which seems to have dominated much of what we call high modernism but to have vanished away—for both practical and theoretical reasons—in the world of the postmodern."

That's a fair description of the Jackson/Jackson scream as well, I'd say.

On the other hand: I was watching the endless loop of Michael Jackson commentary on the BBC today, and one random news anchor related a quote from Fred Astaire regarding Jackson I had never heard before. Jackson, Astaire supposedly said, danced with "rage in his feet."

There is indeed so much rage in Jackson's music, dance, and imagery. So much so that it threatens to spill out of its neat postmodern boxes. What is its source, and what does it mean? It has to do with Jackson's own body, I'd say, which more than any other performer I can think of has always been the source of constant speculation and analysis. It's hard to say anything new about it, but I do think it is fair to say that Jackson had an unusually visible relationship with his own body. Many have called it a case of body dysmorphic disorder (the same diagnosis often given transpeople, by well-meaning-or-not psychiatrists.) I couldn't say if that's true or not, or if that Jackson's situation is even particularly unusual; who doesn't have body issues? But Jackson did have a fairly spectacular response to whatever issues might have been there. There was on the one hand the constant sculpting and re-sculpting of the flesh itself: surgery, chemicals, dieting, working out, who knows what else. And then there was that dancing. Invariably described as "fluid," it articulates a vision of the human body unlike anything else I have seen. It's not Merce Cunningham, who uses a rigid anti-expressionism to force the body into new situations. A move like the moonwalk takes a recognizable element of corporeal vocabulary, and transforms it as if mechanically produced. And yet, of course, it wasn't, it's still just Michael Jackson on stage with a pair of shoes. I'm not very sophisticated at dance criticism, so I don't even know what to say beyond that. But it blows my mind, and although it might not be a product of the aesthetic of expression, I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is missing an affect.

After all, bodies, and performances, have been at the heart of many critiques of Fredric Jameson's work on postmodernism. Mandy Merck, for example, has pointed out the unnecessary binary between "real" and "artificial" that underlies much of his essay, especially when offering up the famous Van Gogh versus Warhol comparison. Judith Halberstam goes so far as to call Jameson's approach homophobic for its implicit privileging of modernism/materialism/heterosexuality over Warhol's queer critique. I don't agree all the way with Halberstam (and I like Jameson a lot as you can probably tell), but I do think he underestimates the potential of the performing human body, if he reads it at all.

What I admired most about Jackson was his sense of agency, at least at the height of his career. He made his body do what he wanted it to do,and that's no easy task under postmodernism. The sadness I feel now is that ultimately he lost that agency, just as it looked like he might have been on the verge of taking it back.

I Want You Back: A Musiceulogical Inquiry

(expanded from a post I wrote on the AMS list-serv)

While I have ended up working on Romantic music, I nonetheless grew up in a pop cultural world that was very much shaped by Michael Jackson. "Thriller" was the first album I ever owned (an Easter present!), and, like many millions of people, some of my earliest memories of being excited about and inspired by music and performance are tied to Jackson. In ways both intriguing and disturbing, he changed the way pop music is conceived of, presented, packaged, and performed. He is the first artist I can think of who achieved a kind of transcendent global fame--the first (and maybe only) artist who is known basically everywhere in the world, from America to rural villages in Africa. His extreme physical virtuosity changed the way people dance, and inspired my generation at a level that continues to surprise me (since his death, I have talked to so many people who remember taping his 1983 live performance of "Billie Jean"--the world premiere of the Moonwalk--and watching it obsessively to try to learn his moves).

There are those who scoff at the presumption of we who refer to Jackson as an "artist." While it is of course not only acceptable but preferable that not everyone appreciate an artist or a style of music, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of dismissing a 40 year career that had so much far-reaching influence just because someone was weird (and Jackson was, undeniably, very, very weird), or made music we might not personally enjoy. The racial boundaries he broke--and the fact that he clearly meant so much to so many people, especially to so many African American people, as coverage of his death has demonstrated--seems in itself enough to make a case for at least acknowledging his important and iconic status in the world, even if his music has never been meaningful to some of us.

In the days since his death, I've encountered many people who dismiss Jackson's career with a disgusted remark about how he was a "child molester." Without defending unequivocally all of his actions, I do think it's important to point out for the record that not only was MJ never convicted of any of the child molestation charges, the prosecution's case against him (which took ten years for them to finally bring to court) was so flimsy and weak and pock-marked with self-serving B-list celebrity preening that the whole case inspired disgust in more than one journalist who covered the trial. Furthermore, it is disturbing to me that other artists who are perhaps less weird in their personal identity constructions are let much more off the hook in in the collective perception when they do terrible things (R. Kelly (who was also accused of sexually abusing children, and tried for child pornography), Led Zeppelin, and Motley Crüe's Vince Neil spring to mind, not to mention Beethoven, who drove his nephew to attempt suicide after getting his sister-in-law publicly branded a 'slut').

I've also encountered those in my own discipline who insist, with varying degrees of stridency, that Jackson's music is unimportant and uninteresting. First of all, I have no idea what it takes for music to become "important." If it influences a newly-global genre of musical performance at every possible level, I would call it "important," but many people would disagree with me, so I'll leave it to the experts (whoever they are) to define musical importance. Some of these same people grudgingly allow that MJ may have been important for his skills as a "businessman," or possibly as a dancer (if you can call that dancing (where are the tutus?)), but his music? Mindless beats and thoughtless wailing. I have been frankly very surprised at the hostile reaction of so many of my peers and colleagues when MJ's contribution to music history has of late been raised. This unexpected difference of opinions has forced me to really figure out what I personally find interesting in the "Music Itself With Capital Letters" of Michael Jackson (I am truly not sure why it's so important we talk about the Music Itself and not the myriad other fascinating, ground-breaking, inspiring things about what that music did in our culture or how that music broke all kinds of boundaries or how that music was danced to by the greatest physical virtuoso pop music has ever known).

What I discovered, weirdly, is that the way I feel about his music is in some (not all, okay) senses the same way I feel about a lot of 18th century instrumental music, like a lot of Vivaldi's concerti, which I love. This pre-Romantic music is generally predictable and outlines no really profound struggle, it is repetitive, it was intended as "use-music" (music people heard in the 18th century while eating dinner or hanging out (or, you know, dancing)), and its composers, unlike the later, more privileged instrumental genre composers like Beethoven, were incredibly prolific, churning out concerto after concerto after concerto, not necessarily thinking of any of them as particularly "masterpieces." For me, none of these things diminish the music's beautiful affect or make it less interesting--either in itself, or as a cultural phenomenon. It was what it was because of its time and place, and that is fascinating to me.

In a lot of ways, the pop music of Michael Jackson is very similar. It's concerned with layers and textures, it's repetitive, it's catchy, and there's lots of it. It is intended to please and excite, not (necessarily) to intellectually challenge. And, I think it serves a similar function for its listeners. It benefits from being heard live. You're supposed to dance to it, communally, at parties.

When I listen to Michael Jackson's Music Itself--the dance hits, the Jackson 5's upbeat anthems--I am most struck by its exuberance. Its exploitation of tight, crisp percussion, very prominent basslines that are often highly complex (or "sick," as we kids call them), and surprisingly triumphant choruses that manifest an explosion of the tension built up in the verses ("Billie Jean!" "Bad!" "Beat It!" even "Man in the Mirror!")--all of these elements combine to make a powerful, purely musical, impression. I defy anyone to hear that bassline from "I Want You Back" and not be filled with joie de vivre. It's obviously not unrelated that he worked with some of the greatest producers in America, like the awesome Quincy Jones. To this day I find it difficult to LISTEN to MJ--what he makes me want to do is dance, joyfully.

But of course the most powerful element of Jackson's music was Jackson himself. That voice! What was astounding in childhood became ever-weirder and more incongruous (more "interesting," if you will) as the child aged. To many a trained musicologist's eye, he exhibited all the signs of being a castrato, and in fact it is a commonly-held theory that his father, the abusive, exploitative Joe Jackson, chemically castrated little Michael in childhood to save his amazing voice (more shades of past music history!). Poor Michael! And yet, if true, wouldn't this be at least one irrefutable proof that the Music Itself of Michael Jackson is interesting? A living castrato, singing not opera, but androgynous love songs danced to by kids. What weird feats that voice was capable of! How strangely it sounded when singing of grown-up love affairs!

Michael Jackson's voice is astonishing in its timbre and register, but also for the tight control he exercised over it. His trademark "ooh"s and "ow"s were as deliberate and precise as those crazy triplets from the "Queen of the Night." Furthermore, his voice was aligned constantly and inextricably with his body--not only because of the dark shadow of possible castration, which would make his strange voice manifestly tied to a man-made physicality--but because of the way he used his two instruments--voice and body--together. Each "ooh," each "ow," each strange mid-verse utterance, was accompanied by similarly precise and deliberate physical moves or poses. Resting abruptly on the tips of his toes like a ballerina, mic held ritualistically in front of his face; precisely-calibrated spins that exactly fill the tiny space in between two words; head-tosses; crotch-grabs. Since MJ's music grew up with MTV, and since his videos are inextricable from his music, we can all picture these poses, and feel them happening even when we listen to a recording. Thus his vocal performances became profoundly physical, linked always with his very particular and unique body.

To me, all of this is interesting. Most interesting of all is the fact that I, a trained musicologist who studies Romantic-era instrumental music, somehow continue to be intensely moved and excited by Michael Jackson's music. As I learned more about Beethoven, Jackson's music did not diminish in comparison, but rather became enriched with my increasing knowledge of music history--the beautiful, vastly-varied field of humanity's musical expression stretching all the way from Beyoncé back into the lost darkness of history...all the myriad influences that led to Jackson, all the myriad influences he continues to have on the rich, living world I inhabit.

Maybe you had to grow up listening to MJ's albums, copying his dance moves, getting your mind blown at "Captain Eo" when you were eleven, and tacking that cool tiger poster from "Thriller" up on your closet door to really appreciate the impact he had on so many people. If so, I can understand it. But I don't think anyone can (or should) argue that Michael Jackson was unimportant, or that his Music Itself was uninteresting.

A Michael Jackson Blog Compendium

An incomplete list of academic-y blogging about Michael Jackson. I'll be updating this continuously; if you know of good posts put 'em in the comments.

• Matthew Guerrieri at Soho the Dog.
  
• Karen Tongson at Oh! Industry
  
• Jason King at Passed the Curve
  
• Ryan Banagale at Amusicology.
  
• Steven Shaviro at The Pinocchio Theory.
  
• Texas Tech Music Theory Department
  
• Uncle Dave Lewis
  
• Richard Kim at The Notion
  
• Claire Potter at Tenured Radical
  
• Brent Reidy at Happy Cover Thursdays
  
• John Meyers at Popular Songs and Breakfast Foods
  
• Dan Blim at ThoughtLights
  
• Rebecca Marchand at Musically Miscellaneous Mayhem.
  

The Musicological Michael Jackson

Your loyal hosts here at Musicology Matters would like to propose a sort of blog colloquium. The subject is Michael Jackson. The importance of Jackson, to those of us who care about music in the late twentieth century, is difficult to overstate. Few other figures have been at the center of so many fundamental changes in our relationship with popular music.

So although a surge of actual musicological scholarship on Michael Jackson, of the published, tenure-gettin' kind is no doubt lurking in the near future, it seems worthwhile to get some preliminary thoughts out there, informed (hopefully) by the critical thinking and analytical detail that musicology ideally might be able to offer to the discussion. For examples of what we mean, see excellent recent blog posts by Jason King and Ryan Banagale.

We're aiming for a post a day, from ourselves and from some friends, continuing until we run out. If you're interested in contributing something yourself, get in touch! Or, write it on your own blog, and we'll link.