I Know I Am Someone:

Michael Jackson, Thriller, and American Identity

by Sara Tenenbaum

B.A. in American Studies, May 2006, Brandeis University

A Thesis submitted to

The Faculty of
the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences
of George Washington University
in partial fulfillment of the degree requirements
for the degree of Master of Arts

May 15, 2011

Thesis Directed by

James A. Miller
Professor of English and American Studies
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ii
 Abstract of Thesis

"I Know I Am Someone: Michael Jackson, Thriller, and American Identity"

This thesis addresses the cultural phenomenon surrounding Michael Jackson's 1982 album
Thriller and uses it as a lens through which to view and analyze the development of a distinct
American, primarily youth, identity in 1983 and 1984. It is structured using a three-prong
approach that first analyzes the sonic work of the music of Thriller, second explores the
characteristics of Michaelmania and the youth identity being constructed within the Michael
Jackson pop explosion, and third analyzes the backlash from both the white and African
American communities against Jackson in that time to illuminate his subversion and danger to the
status quo. I argue that Jackson's act of profound crossover during the Thriller era triggered
within the American youth an equally profound act of identity formation that transcended racial
stratification in America's past and created a foundational part of our contemporary identity that
moves slightly beyond America's troubled racial history. Using both the voices of his fans and his
critics to tease out the work his person and his music did in the early 1980's, I advocate we keep
Jackson and his work foregrounded in our study of popular culture in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries, as his pop explosion fundamentally and permanently effected how Americans
understand ourselves and our relations with each other.

iii
 Table of Contents

Abstract of Thesis iii

Introduction: You Gotta Be Startin' Something 1
Chapter One: Help Me Sing It - The Music of Thriller 8
Chapter Two: This One's for the Girls in the Back – Michaelmania 38
Chapter Three: Sissified Man-Children and Reconstructed Noses – The Backlash 79
Conclusion: Yes I Believe in Me, So You Believe in You 100
Bibliography 107

iv
 You Got To Be Startin' Something

On February 27, 1980, Michael Jackson sat at home watching the Grammy Awards on
television. He watched the flickering screen as a parade of white artists and white presenters gave
awards and praise to each other, only registering mild pleasure when "Don't Stop 'Til You Get
Enough" won for Best R&B Vocal Performance – Male. He recalled in his 1987 autobiography,
"Although Off The Wall had been one of the most popular records of the year, it received only
one nomination... I remember where I was when I got the news. I felt ignored by my peers and it
hurt. People told me later that it surprised the industry too."1 As he watched himself win that
night, anger and hurt coalesced into determination. "I said to myself, 'Wait until next time' – they
won't be able to ignore the next album," he recalled. There's no doubt the perceived brush-off by
his industry peers lit a fire under him, but we can also only imagine the frustration he felt after his
most ambitious and exciting work to date was once again shoved into the stifling box of "black
music" and left there to gather cobwebs. For, even with the spectacular string of number one hits
that had introduced Michael Jackson to the American public as a child musical prodigy, and the
decade of success and artistic growth that followed, he was still powerless to stop himself from
being dismissed and relegated to the subgenre of "black music," cast out of the mainstream and
back to the margins because of the color of his skin. Sitting in his house that night, Jackson
decided once and for all that it was time to break through to the American mainstream in a way
that could never be denied him. He would do it for himself, and for the other artists he admired
and watched run into the insurmountable wall of race over and over again. It was time for the
walls to crumble; he would be the one to break them down.

He did with Thriller. That it should be the breakthrough at all is astonishing. It's as lean
and lithe an album as the young man who made it. Thriller is nine songs long and clocks in at just
over 42 minutes. Of those nine songs, seven were released as singles. Of those seven singles,
three were given videos. All seven singles reached the top ten. Two of them – "Billie Jean" and
"Beat It" – reached number one and made themselves comfortable there. All three of the music
videos are considered to be pioneering examples of the genre. By the summer of 1984, the album
had sold over 30 million copies worldwide.

As scholars we try to resist grand, sweeping narratives because they elide the nuances of
the complicated processes through which culture changes. That's often to our advantage, but

1
Jackson, Michael. Moonwalk. New York (Doubleday, 1988): 175-176.

1
sometimes we're so focused on making sure we're paying attention to the details that we are blind
to the bigger picture. The record-breaking numbers associated with Thriller are sometimes
dismissed as quantifying influence; assuming that just because a lot of people bought it or
listened to it, its cultural impact is being magnified disproportionately. In this thesis I argue the
opposite, almost to the extreme: that Thriller and Michael Jackson in 1983 mark the third and
most recent pop explosion experienced in America and, as such, a singular and rare moment of
identity creation and reformation. The pop explosion, as coined and defined by Greil Marcus
talking about the Beatles, is
"…an irresistible cultural upheaval that cuts across lines of class and race (in terms of
sources if not allegiance), and, most crucially, divides society itself by age. The surface
of daily life (walk, talk, dress, symbolism, heroes, family affairs) is affected by such
force that deep and substantive changes in the way large numbers of people think and act
take place. Pop explosions must link up with, and accelerate, broad shifts in sexual
behavior, economic aspirations, and political beliefs… Enormous energy – the energy of
frustration, desire, repression, adolescence, sex, ambition – finds an object in a pop
explosion, and that energy is focused on, organized by, and released by a single, holistic
cultural entity. This entity must itself be capable of easy, instantaneous and varied
imitation and extension, in a thousand ways at once; it must embody, suggest, affirm and
legitimize new possibilities on all fronts even as it outstrips them. This is a fancy way of
saying that the capacity for fad must be profound."2
My intention is to use Marcus' framework of the pop explosion to explore the effects of Michael
and Thriller in 1983, configuring it not as a total break with the past but as a powerful eruption of
African American culture into the American mainstream. Though he does not utilize the tropes of
Black Nationalism or civil rights explicitly in his lyrics, Jackson in both sound and image
conjures black history and culture while simultaneously transforming them into a product so
compelling that the white mainstream was helpless to resist it.

At the time of Thriller's release the popular media was engaged in a debate about the
future of the music industry. Sales declined steadily after the disco explosion in the late 1970's,
radio had become noticeably more segregated than twenty years before, and in all the chaos MTV
was ascending to cultural importance. Jackson and Thriller had an immediate impact on both. The
sales of Thriller have been credited with reviving record sales industry-wide; the singles released
crossed the color line onto Album-Oriented Radio (AOR) and obliterated the line between black
and white music on charts, radio, and MTV. The television station, which had been steadily rising
in popularity since its debut in 1981, had previously refused to air videos by black artists by
saying they were the wrong musical format, R&B and not rock. Bob Pittman, the channel's

2
Marcus, Greil, "The Beatles" in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll ed. Jim Miller et. al.,
New York (Random House, 1976): 214.

2
founder and head, had relied on extensive market research of widespread, largely white consumer
markets and determined that white suburbanites between the ages of 14 and 34 (MTV's target
demographic) were not interested in black music, and would be more likely to stop watching if
they saw a black face on their TV. There were very few exceptions, mostly for established acts
like Tina Turner, and also for one Prince song that was deemed to have enough guitars to make it
rock 'n' roll. "Billie Jean" became the first black video made for a black song put into heavy
rotation by MTV despite the fact that it didn't fit the channel's supposed format. These boundary-
busting moments were not unnoticed by the American people, who had been engaged in the
debate about racism in the music industry along with the industry itself. The overwhelming
popularity of Thriller made it an irresistible force, to borrow from Marcus; an undeniable cultural
product that made arcane discussions of musical format and radio tradition seem hopelessly
outmoded. The power of Jackson's performance, on television for the Motown 25: Yesterday,
Today, Forever special, in music videos, and on stage, made him an object of desire and worship.
Though by modern standards Thriller exploded almost without promotion – seven singles, sure,
but only three videos and a meager handful of public appearances by Jackson – it and the artist
behind it saturated every aspect of American life without dampening or compromising his racial
expression.

This should not imply that Jackson was somehow the first African-American artist to
bring an aggressive blackness and consciousness of black history and traditions to their music and
presentation. In fact, Jackson was helped along in his development as an artist and a black man by
a great number of musicians and performers with evident black pride and the ability to elegantly
vocalize that pride, including idols Jackie Wilson and James Brown and early Motown label-
mates Marvin Gaye, Richard Pryor and Stevie Wonder. Jackson was extremely perceptive from
early childhood, and he studied the physicality and expressive talents of these performers,
synthesizing them and using them to form his own unique style. But Jackson is by far the most
popular and successful artist to engage in this conjuring, and does so in an especially subtle way.
His music, sonically and lyrically, does not overtly recall the civil rights struggle or the Black
Nationalism movement, but their presence is there in less intuitive ways. Lyrics refer obliquely to
black word games like the dozens, dancing becomes a reflection of class and race struggle
(sometimes more explicitly, as in "Beat It"), his voice and music channel emotions personal and
communal, and employ techniques from all over the long history of black music. To better
understand Jackson as a performer, and to better understand why the overwhelming assault by
Thriller on American culture is more important than just being a massively popular record, it is

3
important to contextualize him as a young black man, a product of American history and culture
and black history and culture. Viewing him on this continuum and in its intersection with race
will help expose the work his popularity, presence and performance is doing to young Americans'
self-construction and identity. Through sound, style and performance, Jackson bestows upon his
fans a subversive message that breaks down the remaining walls between black and white
cultures irreversibly.

The ultimate goal of this paper is to take a close look at what comprised the public
conversation about Michael Jackson in the moment of his greatest popularity and importance, and
glean from that conversation the ways in which Americans, especially American youth,
reconfigured their identities to place Jackson, black superstar, at the center of a natural American
identity. As a pop explosion his influence on the youth is profound. His mere existence
challenges deeply ingrained notions of race and gender and changes them in irreversible ways. As
a black man who did not conform to the neat stereotypes of black masculinity, Michael was able
to broaden notions of race, gender and acceptability in ways previously futile. Rock critic Dave
Marsh wrote in1985, "…the idea of a black man performing such a massively successful and
enticing act of unification has to be nipped in the bud. Somebody must have feared that otherwise
people might get the idea that the things that hold them separate but equal are either bullshit
or…visited upon them for reasons other than the obvious. There are a lot of suburban kids out
there who are going to have a hard time believing that their white skin is an automatic sign of
superiority after spending the happiest years of their childhood trying to be just like you."3 It is
this profound crossover that is the site for the work Jackson's music, dance, and image are doing
to our consciousness, the site of the pop explosion, the site the explosion of the color line in pop
music once and for all.

To identify every way in which this album and this man reconfigured American identity
would be a near-impossible task. In order to get at the most visible and important of these, I will
take a multi-pronged approach, giving the three most important sites of change close attention.
First I will examine the music that started it all. Giving Thriller a close reading in lyrics and most
crucially in sound, I will be able to identify the ways the album is both a product of the long
history black music in America, as well as a new interpretation of the pop form that is able to
shatter walls segregating the music industry once and for all. It is important to note now that
Jackson did not write all the songs on Thriller, though he did write the most consequential:

3
Marsh, Dave. Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream. New York (Bantam, 1985): 9.

4
"Wanna Be Starting Something," "Billie Jean" and "Beat It." He also had direct input into the
lyrics and music for every song he did not write, changing tempos, beats and harmonies to his
liking, as well as changing lyrics when he thought it necessary.4 Because Jackson did not write
the entire album himself, direct lyrical analysis is ruled out; we cannot assume the words he is
singing reflect deep personal narratives and beliefs. As such, musical and sonic analysis becomes
more important than usual. Jackson's intent is more easily gleaned from the structure of his sound
than from the message of his lyrics because the sound is where he was able to exert influence
over songs he did not write. The way he manipulates his voice in melodies and harmonies, where
he and producer Quincy Jones placed the beat and bass, and the way they sequenced the album
will be able to tell us more about Thriller's musical impact than just a close reading of the lyrics.

Second, transitioning from a focus on Jackson personally to a focus on American culture

and youth culture at large, I will examine the cadence and content of Michaelmania as it was
represented in the press and on television as Thriller took over. The hysteria, widespread
imitation, and near-instant devotion Jackson and Thriller inspired in American youth both black
and white is the core of the pop explosion, and easily the most important work Jackson does in
this moment. The transgression of boundaries in archaic industries like the music industry, which
is controlled by a handful of mostly-white elites known for eliding blacks and women since the
beginning of recorded music, is important, but not as important as the breaking of boundaries
between black youth culture and white youth culture in such ways that subsequent generations no
longer think to separate their culture into black and white categories. Jackson makes black music
and presents it with black style, all things that typically excluded full participation and admiration
by white Americans in line with the segregated culture and values of the past. Instead, white
youth lay claim to Jackson with the same ease that Americans laid claim to the British-born-and-
bread Beatles, as if he is naturally one of us. Imitation is widespread and colorblind, and extends
from the cooption of Jackson's personal style to the way it sparks wider interest by white youth in
black culture. It is not a mistake that artists like Prince, who have had their own measurable
success but are still relegated to the margins of popular music, are suddenly catapulted to national
popularity after Jackson releases Thriller. It is true that Prince makes some of his best albums
after 1983, but it is equally as true that the way in which Jackson's popularity sanctions a deep
personal love of his black music also sanctions his legions of fans to explore and love all black

4
"Thriller," for instance, was originally called "Starlight Sun" and was a straightforward and predictable
love song. It was Michael's idea to change the topic to horror movies, though original composer Rod
Temperton rewrote the lyrics. It was also Michael's idea to write a rap for Vincent Price to perform.

5
music and black culture. By looking at the people most affected by Jackson and Thriller, the
American youth, I can get at the ways in which Jackson's unprecedented popularity and success
work to break down the barriers between black and white youth culture and produce a new
American identity that underlies the way Americans have thought about themselves ever since.

Finally, I will take a close look at the backlash against Jackson that begins to build in late
1983 and comes to a head in the summer and fall of 1984. It is not surprising that Jackson
inspired critique from the older generations, both in the public and in the industries that he
revolutionized. Anyone who is challenging and successfully overturning the prejudices and
barriers built into the infrastructure of our culture and our identity will be seen as a threat by those
wishing to uphold the status quo. A figure in such a marginal space as Jackson occupied – young,
urban black man – is especially threatening because this transgressions are on long-standing
taboos and systemic practices meant to keep entire groups of Americans from claiming full
cultural citizenship. But the ways in which Jackson upset the stereotypes of the young, urban
black man make the tenor of the inevitable backlash unique. The stereotypes of black men as
sexually aggressive, violent, disrespectful and dangerous are negated by Jackson's personality; he
is shy, religious, seemingly chaste, sexy but safe (as Time Magazine calls it, "eroticism at arm's
length"5), polite, and androgynous. The typical critiques about the dangers of blackness cannot be
deployed against Jackson because he defies them. As such, in order to at least try to combat his
influence new tropes about the dangers of this other kind of blackness must be created and
deployed. Curiously enough, they come from both white and black critics, as Jackson's new
model of blackness and black masculinity in particular present challenges to the paradigms
forwarded by those seeking to further the political project of African American equality and uplift
through the model of Black Nationalism that has persisted since the late 1960's. Analyzing these
critiques, I can illuminate the American identity being constructed against Jackson. It will also
allow me to highlight the most subversive aspects of Jackson's takeover, as it is these
characteristics that spur on the backlash as it reaches its highest pitch.

The elements of Marcus's pop explosion are scattered throughout these three sections. By
the end of this paper I hope to have proven Jackson's inexorable influence in the development of
our modern American identity, an identity that has allowed for cultural integration which has
continued in his wake to challenge reified notions of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship even
after Jackson lost his place in the national spotlight. The work he did at this time, and continued

5
Jay Cocks, "Why He's a Thriller." Time Magazine, March 19, 1984: 59.

6
to do as he dominated pop culture and music in the 1980's, has forever changed the way
American youth view each other and themselves, and the ideals they wish to impart to each
subsequent generation.

At the end of "Wanna Be Startin' Something," the first track on Thriller, after the song
breaks from its tight, tense structure and just before it opens up into the ecstatic African chant that
brings it to its close, Jackson lets his soulful tenor loose and sings: "So hold your head up high /
and scream out to the world / I know I am someone." He sings with abandon and elation, his
voice whooping and soaring with pride and confidence and the promise of something new,
something better. It's the sound of a young black man taking the world and all it has to offer for
himself without reservation, and it is the sound that millions of American youths took seamlessly
into their hearts and sang and screamed right back at him. It is not the someone we were, but the
someone he turned us into that I have come to discover.

7
 Chapter One
Help Me Sing It: The Music of Thriller

There are essentially two ways to approach Thriller as a musical album. The first is to
discuss it purely in terms of sound, composition and performance. The second, and far more
common approach is to discuss it in terms of the seemingly endless number of records it
shattered. Thriller remains, to this day, the biggest-selling album of all time. The Recording
Industry Association of America estimates that it has sold, to date, roughly 30 million copies in
the United States and about 110 million copies worldwide.6 It became the biggest-selling record
ever, surpassing the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, in March of 1984, when CBS Records
reported it had sold 30.9 million copies internationally and 19.4 million in the United States.7 In
October of 1983 it became CBS Records' biggest-selling record, and that December magazines
like Billboard breathlessly reported that over a year after its release it had "topped the 12 million
mark in the U.S., and is selling at a clip of more than 600,000 a week. It reportedly sold 225,000
copies last Monday alone."8 It didn't just break sales records; all seven singles released off the
album reached the top ten in the Hot 100, the most top ten singles ever gleaned off one record.
The gap between the end of "Billie Jean's" run at number one and the beginning of "Beat It's" run
at the top, just one week, was the shortest gap between number one singles since the Beatles
replaced themselves at number one in 1964.9 And the album enabled Jackson to become the first
artist in Billboard history first to simultaneously occupy the number one spot on the pop albums
and singles charts and the black albums and singles charts10 (with "Billie Jean") and then to
simultaneously have the number one album in both the United States and Great Britain, while
maintaining his dominance of the US pop, black and dance/disco charts11. And all of that just
barely scratches the surface; I haven't even mentioned the record-breaking number of awards he
received, places claimed in the Guinness Book of World Records, the history-making music
videos, and the fact that "Beat It" broke the color barrier on Album Oriented Radio (AOR) before
it or "Billie Jean" was ever released as a single.

6
"Michael Jackson's Thriller Set to Become Top Selling Album of All Time," MTV.com, accessed on
January 12, 2011. http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1616537/20090720/jackson_michael.jhtml
7
"All-Time Best Seller: 'Thriller' Album Breaks 'Fever'," Billboard Magazine, March 19, 1984.
8
"'Thriller' Album Returns to the Top," Billboard Magazine, December 24, 1983.
9
"Chartbeat: Jackson, Prince: Royalty," Billboard Magazine, April 30, 1983.
10
"Chartbeat: Jackson and Q in View," Billboard Magazine, March 5, 1983.
11
"Chartbeat: Michael Jackson Tops All Charts," Billboard Magazine, March 12, 1983.

8
 It's not hard to see why Thriller is so often only discussed in the context of its mind-
blowing achievements. And it is not surprising that once the ball got rolling, the press in 1983 and
1984 often had a hard time talking about anything besides the mountains of awards, records and
distinctions piling up at Jackson's feet. But to see Thriller as only the sum of its industry
accomplishments fatally misses the most compelling thing about this album: that all of this
hubbub, this breathless admiration and frenzy, was inspired by nine songs that run for just over 42
minutes. One must assume that these songs carry immense power within their tight frames, for
how else could such a small amount of music create such big waves?

In this chapter I want to give Thriller its due in its own context as an album, a collection
of songs, and look at how those songs trigger its immense impact on our culture. We shouldn't
seek to alienate these two perspectives from each other, because they exist in a causal
relationship: Jackson records Thriller, releases it, and it changes the world. Clearly the first part
must be related to the second. But too often our elision of Thriller as a potent album of songs –
choosing, instead, to boggle at its efficacy in garnering accolades – results in an inability to
understand why this mania was sparked in the first place. Without the music of Thriller, Jackson
would have never ascended from his already-high perch of fame to the untouchable realm of the
iconic superstar, and he achieved that ascension because he wrote and recorded the album with
the intent of making a record so undeniable that no achievement would ever be out of reach again.
Frankly, the only surprising thing about the story is just how right he was. My intention in
providing a close reading of Thriller as an album is to illuminate how it acts as a tool for Jackson
to communicate with his audience, old and new, and establish the bonds of admiration and
identification which will create and solidify his superstar status.

Thriller is also a more complex album to listen to and understand than it initially seems.
Pop music as a genre has a complicated relationship with songwriting. Since The Beatles
exploded in 1964, it had become a standard marker of authenticity that rock artists and bands
write their own music; to do otherwise was suspect and called one's rock 'n' roll credibility into
question. Where rockers in the 1950's like Elvis Presley were comfortable recording songs
written by others or covering Brill Building standards with a rock 'n' roll edge, rockers post-
Beatles rejected wholesale the notion that anyone else should write songs for their albums (with
the exception of the occasional loving cover). Collaboration with outside musicians or other
bands was perfectly fine, but your name had to be on the writing credits. Pop, R&B and soul all
have a less-straightforward relationship to outside songwriters. R&B and soul both encourage

9
musicians to write their own music, and the genres have turned out some of the most talented
songwriters in music history, but artists in these genres also openly record songs written by
professional songwriters, or have their most accomplished singer/songwriters write for other
performers and groups (Stevie Wonder is an excellent example of this). Pop is even more open to
using the wares of professional songwriters, and to great effect. The model set up by the Beatles,
in which authorship determines authenticity, has permanently complicated our reading of albums
as texts. Artists like Michael Jackson who were trained in the genres of pop, R&B and soul, do
write their own music, but also include tracks written by professional songwriters or musician
friends without hesitation. As such, one cannot engage in the simple correlative relationship
between the songs on the albums and insight into the artist's frame of mind and intended message,
because the words they are singing are not words they penned. We can, of course, engage in that
relationship on tracks they did write if we wish to, and we can also gain information about intent
and message through an examination of what songs were chosen to be included, their relationship
with the tracks on the album the artist did write, and about the choices made in how the song is
sung, orchestrated and recorded. An outside force may have determined the skeleton of the song
but the artist and their producer are ultimately in charge of how it sounds when it reaches the
public's ears. With an artist like Jackson, who composed music more easily than lyrics, the
control they exerted over the sound of each song can be very telling indeed.

It is important here to take a moment to discuss Jackson's method of songwriting. There

are two basic ways to approach writing a song: You can start with the lyrics, or you can start with
the music. Many musicians and songwriters will switch back and forth between the two
approaches, depending on how inspiration hits. Michael Jackson worked almost exclusively by
composing music first. A song or part of a song would pop into his head – a rhythm, a bass lick, a
melody, a harmony – and he would build on it until he had a finished track. The pieces of the
song were recorded into hand-held tape recorders or Dictaphones as he heard them in his head.
Then he would record his first demo (usually with the help of his siblings Randy and Janet while
they still lived in their family home), and then bring that rough cut to his producer. They would
record a series of demos with fleshed out music and eventually fleshed out lyrics, and then go to
work on the final production to be considered for the album. We can use the home demo of
"Billie Jean" that has been available for some years now on the Internet12 to demonstrate.

12
The source I accessed for this analysis is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0p530q9-
4Y&feature=fvst

10
According to Jackson13 in outtakes from his 2007 interview with Ebony, he enlisted Janet and
Randy's help to lay the song he composed in his car one afternoon onto tape. Already present is
the iconic beat and bass lick (sounding like it's being played on a live bass guitar, probably by
Randy) and the haunting synthesizer punctuation. In fact, the musical track is very similar to how
it will appear on the album, albeit simpler – the addition of brass, strings and the subtle flourishes
added by Quincy Jones are not there yet, and there are also instruments that get dropped or moved
around by the final cut. The lyric, however, is what one would kindly call incomplete. Jackson
mumbles through the first verse, mostly nonsense words to hold the melody: "She told me I was a
lonely man / and I felt sad / [unintelligible nonsense] / all those who died / all right you see all
right," sung in the rhythm of the verse. The pre-chorus, perhaps the most affecting part of the
finished song, is actually quite funny in this fetal state: "It seems that you dun-dun-ber-ber-ber-lee
/ Har-har-thin walla-man." It means nothing, and it's not meant to; the lyrics aren't the point now,
though they become more central later. The chorus contains the only lyrics that will make it into
the final version of the song. This should help us understand how crucial music, melody,
harmony, beat, bass, and sound are to Jackson's creative process. He composed sonically and
musically almost exclusively, and the strength of that music is what eventually moved him to
complete any composition. "What I do when I work," he told Ebony in 2007, "is to do a raggedy,
rough version just to hear the chorus and see how much I like the music. If it works for me in that
way when it's raggedy than we can really go forward with it."14 As an artist grounded in sound
and not in words, we can really look to the sound of the album as a whole to give us insight into
Jackson's intentions and message, even when talking about songs he did not write. Because lyrics
are not the pathway to insight it doesn't fully matter if the words he's singing are his (obviously,
the words he wrote for himself to sing are important and will be considered seriously, however
the fact that the majority of songs are not written by Jackson does not mean we cannot learn from
them); as the album's title artist, his hand is in every note and beat whether they came from his
brain or not, and as such the music offers us a way to read him and the parts of him he is
committing to vinyl.

Jackson wrote four tracks on Thriller: "Wanna Be Startin' Something," "Billie Jean,"
"Beat It," and "The Girl is Mine" (with Paul McCartney). Rod Temperton, a professional
songwriter most famously a member of funk/disco group Heatwave, wrote three: "Baby Be

13
"Michael Jackson Talks to Ebony" (audio interview outtakes, 2007), accessed February 3, 2011:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvK4RkvqFhI at 1:16-1:20
14
Ibid, 1:05-1:15.

11
Mine," "Thriller" and "Lady in My Life." Steve Porcarco, a member of the band Toto, and lyricist
John Bettis wrote "Human Nature," and Quincy Jones and soul singer James Ingram wrote
"P.Y.T (Pretty Young Thing)," rounding out Thriller's nine tracks15. "Human Nature," an
unfinished snippet originally composed for Toto, was finished in the studio for Jackson under his
watchful eye; "P.Y.T." was similarly composed while the album was being recorded. Jackson
entered Westlake Studio in Los Angeles, California, in April of 1982 with Quincy Jones, who had
also helmed Off The Wall (1979) under a tight recording schedule. They spent the next five
months writing, recording and mixing dozens of songs for the album. Recording time was even
more stressed because Jones and Jackson were simultaneously recording Thriller and the E.T.
Storybook album in conjunction with the blockbuster film. In the fall, the record company
drastically increased the pressure finish the album, setting a hard release date and demanding
finished music. "Eventually we came under tremendous pressure…to finish Thriller," Jackson
recalled in his 1988 autobiography, Moonwalk, "When a record company rushes you they really
rush you, and they were rushing us hard on Thriller. They said it had to be ready on a certain
date, do or die."16 But when they completed the first mix, it sounded terrible. Bruce Swedien, the
lead sound engineer on the album (as well as for Off The Wall and the six subsequent solo albums
Michael would release for Epic and Sony), recalled:
"When we first thought we had finished mixing Thriller, the album, we had much too
much playing time on the sides of the LP…I knew it was over 25 minutes per side. Of
course on LPs, if you have too much time on a side, it minimizes the volume level, and
low frequency response, that you can put on the record during mastering. In those days,
18 minutes per side on an LP was just right for good sound. We were way over! … I
played the reference LPs in the control room. We listened, and the sound on the LP was
dog doo. It was horrible…The Epic dudes were popping corks, but out of the corner of
my eye, I saw Michael sneak out of the control room, and go to the other studio, across
the hall. Quincy saw him too and followed him. I was next. Then Rod and Freddy. I
remember Michael was crying; he was heartbroken."17
Jackson recalled the same: "Thriller sounded so crappy to me that tears came to my eyes…We
sat there in the studio, Westlake Studio in Hollywood, and listened to the whole album. I felt
devastated…Finally I realized I had to do the whole thing—mix the entire album—all over
again."18 So that's what they did. They took a couple days off, then returned to the studio and re-
mixed the album, devoting one day to each track. At the end of those nine days they turned the
album in to Epic. Less than a month later, it was released.

15
Songwriting credits from the Thriller liner notes.
16
Jackson, Moonwalk, 198.
17
Bruce Swedien, In The Studio with Michael Jackson. New York (Hal Leonard, 2009): 30.
18
Jackson, Moonwalk, 198-99.

12
 Initial reviews of Thriller were good, very good. Billboard was impressed and speculated
that "this album could repeat the four-single attack19 that led 'Off The Wall' to its multi-platinum
heights,"20 and People raved, "Willingness to experiment and a flawless sense of rhythm make
this an album that lives up to its title."21 Rolling Stone puts the album in perhaps the best
perspective in terms of its relationship with the music industry and pop music scene at the time.
The magazine was known to be critical of simple pop and disco especially, as it was the child of
the 1960's rock explosion and had long held rock 'n' roll as obviously superior to other genres of
music. But their review of Thriller is excited and filled with praise for the album's depth
("uptempo workouts don't obscure its harrowing, dark messages"22), the artist's new maturity
("[Jackson's] dropped the boyish falsetto…and chosen to address his tormentors in a full, adult
voice with a feisty determination that is tinged by sadness"23), and close their review by
enthusing:
"His talents, not just singing but dancing and acting, could make him a perfect
mainstream performer. Perish the thought. The fiery conviction of Thriller offers hope
that Michael is still a long way from succumbing to the lures of Vegas. Thriller may not
be Jackson's 1999, but it's a gorgeous, snappy step in the right direction."24
Rolling Stone's review offers us a glimpse of how the music world and public at large was set up
to receive Thriller upon its release in 1982. There was still a strict segregation imposed upon
black music; it was expected to conform to certain styles, primarily R&B and soul with
occasional sanctioned forays into rock (as with Prince), and it was released and marketed through
its own radio stations and record stores. Black artists and black music had found popularity with
white audiences for decades but the two kinds of music, with white music represented primarily
through rock and pop and black music through soul and R&B (and, soon, rap), were seen as a sort
of oil and water. You could like both, but they would not mix. This is why Rolling Stone, a
magazine that admired rock music to the point of fetishization, saw Prince's 1999 – a brilliant and
ambitious album in its own right, and one that existed firmly in the accepted black rock mold – as
a greater triumph than Thriller. Thriller gives the listener every facet of pop, from the maudlin
"The Girl Is Mine," to the vicious dance tracks "Wanna Be Starting Something" and "Billie Jean,"
to its intersection with rock on "Beat It," to the bubblegum of "Baby Be Mine," to the very
essence of crooning soul on "The Lady In My Life." It presents us with pop writ large, imagined
and composed within its totality not its subgenres. Its unfamiliarity would have made it difficult

19
Off The Wall tied Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album for most top-10 singles off one album (four) in 1980.
20
"Spotlight: Michael Jackson—Thriller," Billboard Magazine, December 11, 1982.
21
"THRILLER: Michael Jackson," People Magazine, January 24, 1983.
22
Christopher Connelly, "Thriller: Michael Jackson," Rolling Stone, January 20, 1983: 46.
23
Connelly, "Thriller," 46-47.
24
Connelly, "Thriller," 47.

13
for reviewers at the time to know how to judge its trajectory; either it would stand as Jackson's
second Epic solo album, an improvement from the first and a sign of greater things to come in the
future, or it would be a groundbreaking record that would destroy the barriers of segregation
between black and white music. They can hardly be faulted for not anticipating the latter, as such
intense pop explosions happen so rarely. But by listening to and examining each track closely we
can start to hear what drove a million American teenagers straight into Michaelmania.

"Wanna Be Startin' Something" opens Thriller with three pert raps on a synthetic-
sounding snare drum and immediately launching into a driving and instantly catchy syncopated
rhythm. The taps on the hi-hat and a persistent shaker add to the tension, as does the low, tight
bass line. A few measures in, the bass plays a higher lick and Jackson's voice doubles the quick
melody. A few measures more and the pre-chorus taunts are introduced, "So you wanna be startin'
something / You gotta be startin' something / Said you wanna be startin' something? / You got to
be startin' something!" Jackson's voice is multi-tracked on each "startin' something," and those
vocal tracks become part of a call-and-response in the chorus: "Too high to get over (yeah yeah) /
too low to get under (yeah yeah)…" When the first verse starts it blows open with a high tenor
wail that carries within in the same tension permeating and propelling the rhythm track. Jackson's
arrangement places the beat and the bass right up front for the listener, and the otherwise sparse
instrumentation (horns and electric guitars are used for effect, not consistently through the
entirety of the song) just refocuses the listener's attention on the grain of Jackson's voice. Known
for his sweet ballads and smooth, sensual disco tracks, Jackson's voice on "Wanna Be Startin'
Something" is a surprise; it is strained, rough, with hints of the hoarse growl that would become
his signature style on later albums. He sounds like a man at the end of his rope, fed up with
everything and everyone around him, and the sentiment is reflected in the lyrics, which seem to
directly address the myriad aggravators in his life. "I took my baby to the doctor / with a fever but
nothing he found," he complains in the first verse, "By the time it hit the streets / they said she
had a breakdown! / Someone's always tryin' to start my baby cryin' / Talkin', squealin', lyin' /
Sayin' you just want to be startin' something."

There is naked aggression in Jackson's voice and musical arrangement. The sound is
unrelenting, refusing to stop pushing the listener forward even when Jackson isn't singing;
angular guitar solos and occasional brass announcements jar us out of whatever trance the
otherwise looping rhythm lulls us into, mimicking the rude and unexpected intrusions Jackson
experiences in his life. The song's bridge is sung with spite and bile as he draws out his insults,

14
"You're a vegetable, you're a vegetable / Still they hate you, you're a vegetable / You're a buffet,
you're a vegetable / They eat off of you, you're a vegetable." The verses get angrier and move
from internal ("I took my baby to the doctor") to external critique ("You love to pretend that
you're good / When you're always up to no good"), and from amorphous in subject to specific.
"Wanna Be Startin' Something" is the only song on Thriller that is self-referential, as it introduces
the listener to Billie Jean for the first time: "Billie Jean is always talkin' / When nobody else is
talking / Tellin' lies and rubbin' shoulders / 'Til they call her mouth a motor!" The listener, having
not yet heard the song named for her, can and probably should take Billie Jean, in this instance, as
representative of a larger group of personal acquaintances or friends who Jackson feels have
betrayed him in the interest of selling stories and garnering fame of their own. "Wanna Be Startin'
Something," like Jackson's other compositions for the album, is rife with paranoia and anger
towards vague and indefinable groups: the press, gossipmongers, dangerous women, two-faced
friends. "Billie Jean," still five songs away, is as specific as he gets, but the rage and frustration
simmer and explode all over the record. In the final, seemingly ad-libbed verse Jackson
practically shouts, "If you can't feed your baby / Then don't have a baby! / And don't think maybe
/ If you can't feed your baby!" Frustration with tensions and pressures in his own life erupt into a
critique of society at large, turning the anger outward to his audience and condemning them for
their bad decisions. But then Jackson, releasing the last of his frustration in the final chorus,
unexpectedly takes a turn towards the inspirational.

The final minute and a half of "Wanna Be Starting Something" is probably the best-
known part of the song. Immediately on the heels of the final chorus the bass line adds a major
key harmony, opening the song up from some of the minor tension it's been laboring under to this
point, and Jackson's voice rings out in clear, true tenor as he sings "So keep your head up high /
And sing out to the world / I know I am someone / And let the truth unfurl / Don't wanna hurt you
now / Because you know what's true / Yes I believe in me / So you believe in you!" It's an
exhilarating shift; the song suddenly feels more open, less claustrophobic, and the ease with
which Jackson navigates the high tenor exhortation makes the listener's heart race. And then, with
Jackson whooping and hollering with joy, the song explodes with a massive spectrum of vocals
(Jackson stacking his own harmonies along with singers Julie Waters, Maxine Waters, Oren
Waters, James Ingram, Bunny Hull and Becky Lopez25) chanting "Mama-se / Mama-sa / Ma-ma-
coo-sa" for over a minute until they fade out and the track ends. The chant releases "Wanna Be
Startin' Something" from the weight of its anger and in turn it becomes positively buoyant and

25
Thriller liner notes.

15
infectious. The chant is a phonetic bastardization of part of Camaroonian saxophonist Manu
Dibango's unlikely 1973 crossover hit "Soul Masooka."26 Originally recorded for a compilation
called Soul Power, "Soul Masooka" became a popular dance hit in Africa and also in New York
City, where DJs added into their party playlists and artists recorded cover versions. Music writer
Nelson George speculates that Jackson was first exposed to "Soul Masooka" when the Jackson 5
took a trip to Africa in 1973, but no definitive tale of how Jackson decided to use that particular
snippet of the song seems to exist in the public record. The effect this choice has on the final
product, however, is absolutely crucial. "When you compare Dibango's superfunky original, 'Soul
Masooka…and the final version of Michael's song, you get a deep insight into Michael's
musicality," George observes.
"He arranges the words in a much higher key and at a faster rhythm, turning Dibango's
monotone delivery into a high-spirited chant. Up until the last bridge, the song's lyrics
present a paranoid vision of the world. Michael reshapes Dibango's old hook, turning the
fear in the song's first two-thirds into an inspired celebration."27

"Wanna Be Startin' Something" is a bold choice to open Thriller a number of reasons: its
confrontational lyrics, its tense and dark sound, its palpable anger, its sparse arrangement, all
things that go against Jackson's musical and personal presentation thus far in his life. He begins
by defying all listeners' expectations of him. But "Wanna Be Startin' Something" does something
else as well, something subversive and deeply transgressive: it marks Jackson, the song, and the
entire album to follow as aggressively, confrontationally black music. Using "Mama-se / Mama-
sa / Ma-ma-coo-sa" for the final minute and fifteen seconds of the track, Jackson is openly
engaging in the music of the African diaspora, connecting directly the sound of a Camaroonian
musician to the sound of an African-American musician, "signal[ling]," to his listeners as Paul
Gilroy says, "through the transnational power of black musics [sic] which have reached out
beyond the boundaries of the nation state."28 If we understand music as Gilroy does – as a
conduit through which the African diaspora and especially the part of the diaspora comprised by
the Atlantic triangle of the United States, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom, is able to
construct aspects of black identity that transcend the specificity of location and class – then what
Jackson is doing by not just sampling but appropriating and rearranging the chant of "Soul
Masooka" is defining himself, musically, as rooted in that diaspora. While his image is still
theoretically up for grabs, his music defines itself as inescapably black and closed to overt

26
Nelson George, Thriller: The Musical Life of Michael Jackson, Cambridge (Da Capo Press, 2010): 89.
27
George, Thriller: 92-93.
28
Paul Gilroy, "Wearing Your Art on Your Sleeve: Notes Towards a Diaspora History of Black
Ephemera," Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent's Tail, 1998), 501.

16
attempts at crossover. It is not "whitened" for radio; if there is crossover it will be on its own
decidedly black terms.

Jackson's opening musical statement is bold and aggressive, but Thriller was not
conceived of as an aggressive, confrontational album, and its second track affirms for the listener
that an all-out pop assault is not being mounted. "Baby Be Mine" is a light, bopping post-disco
pop tune that is melodically compelling while allowing us a few minutes to decompress from the
intensity of "Wanna Be Startin' Something." Bouncing synth-bass propels the song at a medium
pace, fast enough to be danceable without being overwhelming, and is complemented by
synthesizer flutes and keyboards. The melody engages soulful rise and fall, each line ending with
a higher note held long enough for the rougher grain of Michael's voice to come through fully.
These longer phrases are additionally complemented by nimble backing vocals in three-part
harmony flitting through the gaps between them ("There'll be no more reasons to change your mi-
i-ind / (I can't sit still you thrill me baby be mine)"). Temperton penned an uncomplicated love
song – promises of eternal love and happiness that can only come from youth – paired with an
uncomplicated composition that is both vastly enjoyable and quite forgettable. In the context of
the album as a whole it seems a bit of a throwaway song, and since Thriller is only nine songs
one filler piece (and it is not Thriller's only potentially unnecessary inclusion) can seem like a
waste. But Jackson's voice shines with unexpectedly gritty soul through it, and it serves its
function as follow-up to the explosive "Wanna Be Startin' Something" exceedingly well.

If there is a genuine oddity on Thriller it's the third song on the album and first single
released, a duet with Paul McCartney titled "The Girl Is Mine." The problems with the song are
not because the pairing of McCartney and Jackson's talents was somehow incompatible. They had
first worked together when McCartney sent Quincy Jones a song called "Girlfriend" he'd written
with Michael's voice in mind in 1978, and subsequently recorded with Wings for their album
London Town, released the same year. Jones suggested Jackson record it as well for 1979's Off
The Wall. It's a fantastic version, and charted well as a single; Jackson decided to write a duet for
he and McCartney to sing on Thriller in thanks. That gesture grew into two more collaborative
projects, the duets "Say Say Say"29 and "The Man" for McCartney's 1983 album Pipes of Peace.
Of those four songs, "The Girl Is Mine" stands out as the most staid, regressive adult
contemporary pop song to come out of their friendship. In the context of the rest of Thriller it

29
"Say Say Say" was released as Pipes of Peace's first single and went to number one. McCartney and
Jackson filmed and released a successful music video for the song as well.

17
sticks out like a sore thumb, a song for parents amongst a taut, explosive expressions of youth and
independence.

Set at an easy listening tempo with an airy electric piano- and bass-heavy sonic
landscape, the lyric describes a simple and juvenile competition between two suitors for one
woman's affections. Each tries to claim her through the insistence that they met her first and they
love her more, adapting an almost musical theater-like structure as they address each other, the
audience, and the girl all in the name of the rather facile story. It was a hit because it's Michael
Jackson and Paul McCartney, not because of any particular musical merit. And perhaps in some
ways it served to lull the public a bit before unleashing the two best and most potent songs on
Thriller. But more than anything else it sounds like Jackson retreating one last time into the safety
of his past as darling child of show business. Unlike the rest of the album, which boasts some of
Quincy Jones' glossiest, most sophisticated pop production, "The Girl Is Mine" feels slick and
superficial like the ballads Motown had used to initially feed the young Jackson to the public.
There's no substance, no urgency to it; it's not exactly insincere but there's no genuine feeling
behind it. It ends up as the song that needs to be justified and excused; as Rolling Stone puts
bluntly, "[Jackson's] raw ability and conviction make material like 'Baby Be Mine' and "Wanna
Be Startin' Something' into first-class cuts and even salvage 'The Girl Is Mine.' Well, almost."30

That "The Girl Is Mine" is a subpar pop effort on a stunningly brilliant pop album should
not warrant its dismissal, especially since Jackson's creative process was extremely deliberate. He
resented being rushed and viewed his albums through the dually ruthless eyes of an artist and a
businessman. Jackson equated quality and quantity in his view of the world and his place in it.
His goal in making Thriller was to make the best album in the history of pop music, and his way
of measuring quality was by sheer volume of albums sold. Therefore, for Thriller to be judged as
a success in his eyes it would have to sell more records than any album before it. This goal was
openly stated during recording, and Quincy Jones has commented upon it many times since then
in interviews. The 8 million copies Off The Wall sold was considered to be an extraordinary feat,
especially for a young black solo artist, and Jones was among those who openly doubted
Jackson's assertion that he would make an album that would easily outsell it. The amount of
pressure Jackson put on himself has much to do with the tone of the album, the deep ribbons of
tension that run through it as a whole and Jackson's original work especially. Thriller, for him,
was about establishing independence – from his family, from his past, from his previous career. It

30
Connelly, "Thriller," 47.

18
was about wanting freedom and being fettered at every turn by family, fans, girls, boys, hotel
rooms, inhibition. The internal struggle comes through the sound if not always the words, and it's
what drew teenagers from every racial and class background to the record. Liberation inspires
excitement and longing, but it also inspires fear, and not every reaction to fear aids in liberation.
Sometimes the most natural thing for anyone to do is to run back to the safety of the past, and that
is what "The Girl Is Mine" sounds like. Jackson takes one last turn as the golden child with the
golden voice, performing a song every mother could love with yet another industry veteran. And
yet the act of releasing it first, though it seems like a bait-and-switch, is also a liberating act.
Jackson shows the public the side of him that wants to hide from all this change, to cling to the
past, and then simply lets it go.

A third of Thriller is over. The listener at this point, having fully come down from the
attack of "Wanna Be Startin' Something," is ready for their heart to race again. The fourth track is
the eponymous title track and the song perhaps most difficult to separate from its seminal music
video. But the song reaches listeners' ears months before there is even talk of a short film, a year
before a Michael Jackson video is even played on MTV for the first time. "Thriller" opens with a
creaking door and spooky synthesizers, overlaid with a cartoonish howl from a wolf31. Though it
is as different from "The Girl Is Mine" as it gets, they are connected by their theatricality. The
sound effects build until "Thriller" cracks open with its iconic synthesizer salute. The groove
drops instantly, a funky synth bass-driven gem by Rod Temperton punctuated by handclaps and
generous high-hat work. Jackson's playful vocal slides into the first verse with a slick "Ooh." The
lyric had originally been vaguely about love but after recording a demo version Jackson had a
better idea. He and Temperton worked to change the lyrics to be about horror movies and scared
dates. Jackson also came up with the admittedly brilliant idea to have Vincent Price, a personal
friend, record a rap for the bridge. Jackson sings the verses like a boyfriend telling scary stories to
his girl with a flashlight under his chin, sometimes narrating and sometimes taking on the persona
of the characters. His voice is clear, without the rough grain present in "Wanna Be Startin'
Something," and when he gets to the chorus his tenor soars to the top of his full-voice register.
When he belts, "Cuz this is thriller!" he does it with excitement not intimidation, turning the
listener into a fellow traveler. Jackson uses his innate and unique ability to flirt with his singing
voice outside the context of a love song to achieve a level of intimacy with the listener that most
songs about scary movies are not able to reach. The listener feels like he is singing to them, like if

31
According to Swedien, they tried to get his dog to record that howl and, when they failed, Michael
himself recorded the effect. (In the Studio with Michael Jackson, 33)

19
they turned around he'd be right there on the couch pointing to the television screen. That is an
ability that cannot be taught, a talent that you either have or you don't. The most talented singers
all have this ability, and that’s no surprise, but the easy, unstudied nature of Jackson's intimacy
make it all the more compelling. As a Motown artist it would have been nurtured and groomed to
maximum efficiency, but here he uses it without the artificial sheen of that training. It is
especially helped along by the "oohs" before each verse.

The structure of "Thriller" on the album is different from the version used in the music
video, which was lengthened and edited so that Price's rap takes the place of the original bridge.
On the album the bridge is comprised of gleeful descriptions of the entrapment of a horror movie:
"Night creatures crawl and the dead start to walk in their masquerade / There's no escaping the
jaws of the alien this time / It's the end of the line! / Oooh!" If "Thriller" is the aural embodiment
of a great Halloween haunted house, the bridge is the moment halfway through when you take
your first full breath, sure you're almost out of harm's way. Jackson relishes that momentary false
relief; swept further into the spirit of the song, he ends the next chorus by promising "Girl, I could
thrill ya more than any ghoul could ever dare try." It's not a tease; the listener can hear the depth
of his desire to be given that chance. The final chorus wraps up its repeated exhortation – "So let
me hold you tight and share a killer thriller" – with a whooping "Ow!" and then dissolves into the
synthesizer's staccato vamp. The eerie sounds return, layering slowly over the catchy pop like a
thickening fog from which emerges a promise from Jackson, "I’m gonna thrill ya tonight," and
then Vincent Price's instantly-recognizable ghoulish drawl. The rap that has been written for him
is at once perfectly appropriate and hilarious. Jackson uses Price's gruesome intonation to its
fullest effect, setting the scene with Shelley-esque panache ("Darkness falls across the land / the
midnight hour is close at hand") that is then interrupted by the language of the streets ("Creatures
crawl in search of blood / To terrorize y'all's neighborhood"). The victims of this potential horror
show are uptight squares – "And whosoever has been found," Price threatens, "Without the soul
for getting down / Will stand and face the hounds of hell / or rot inside a corpse's shell." The only
way to survive this apocalypse is to get down, to get funky. It's fun and it's light, but it's also a
real notification as Jackson once again promises, "I'm gonna thrill ya tonight": Thriller is here to
take over the world, and no one stands a chance unless they join forces with it. Michael's wailing
picks up in the background as Price enters the rap's second verse, crescendoing as Price closes
with a menacing warning: "And though you fight to stay alive / your body starts to shiver / For no
mere mortal can resist / the evils of the thriller!" With a final synth flourish the song is abruptly

20
silenced and Price's iconic laugh echoes out of the speakers. As it fades away, still ringing in the
listener's ears, the creaky door that opened the song slams shut.

I am reluctant to read too deeply into "Thriller" because I think its primary appeal to
Jackson as a track to be included on the album is how well composed, catchy and exuberant it is.
It's a welcome change from the typical pop love song, and it's a welcome change stylistically
from the adult contemporary of "The Girl Is Mine" and the more traditional black pop sounds of
"Baby Be Mine" and others. It's immensely enjoyable without scratching its interpretive surface
even the tiniest bit. But its use of the tropes of horror is suggestive. Conjuring thoughts of
invasion, takeover and infestation puts "Thriller" into a different context after Thriller starts to
sell. Jackson's easy adoption of the first person and his willingness to slip in and out of monstrous
roles in the lyrics hint that it may not just be about taking a girl on a date where she's guaranteed
to bury her face in your shoulder. Though the later video makes it sound more plausible, I want to
stop short of contending that Jackson is adopting the position of the monstrous narrator as a way
of presenting himself as an invasive force about to take over America because I think that there's
no way to tell if that was truly his intent, and it's important not to put words in his mouth. But
there can be no doubt that Jackson saw in Thriller the opportunity to stage an invasion of
American popular culture unseen since the Beatles invaded 20 years before, and the record of that
invasion with all its screaming and rioting can and often does look like a scene straight out of a
horror movie.

"Thriller" starts off the album's middle third, a trio of songs that are without a doubt the
most iconic and important songs on Thriller, the songs most directly responsible for the absolute
pandemonium of Michaelmania that dominates the popular culture of 1983 and 1984. Ironically,
"Thriller" is not released as a single until late January 1984, even though the video is given a
theatrical debut in November of 1983, and the VHS The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller is
released just before Christmas and quickly becomes the highest selling home VHS release of all
time. On Thriller the song starts the album's rise to its highest peak, while out in the culture it
provided a neat cap to the most successful year that arguably any music act has ever had. In fact,
the triad of pop perfection that is the center of Thriller is released to the public in exactly the
opposite order that it is sequenced on the album. In both scenarios, though, it is the next song that
is offered between the other two and that breaks both the album Thriller and American pop
culture wide open.

21
 "Beat It" opens with six gut-shaking blasts from a synthesizer gong, ringing out with
perfect timing like the world's most ominous church bell. On the final chime, the lowest note, all
other sounds drop out except the sparse, clipped drums which also sound like synthesizer drums
until the kick of a real drum kit enters with the scorching signature guitar lick, performed by
Eddie Van Halen. The first thing the listener notices is that it is heavy. This is not rock
appropriated by pop as it has been done before and after Thriller, in which the motifs of rock
music like the electric guitar and prominent bass are used to give an otherwise bland and safe
artist a supposedly dangerous rock sheen. This is a rock and roll song from conception to
performance. It is the work of Jackson solely, as writer and composer, and in its existence allows
some of the loose ends of the African American legacy in pop music to be tied up once again.
Black musicians created rock 'n' roll, even though since the 1950's it has been dominated almost
exclusively by white artists. Jackson uses rock in "Beat It" not as an outsider appropriating a form
he admires but as a part of that music's legacy and history, a natural heir to the sound who has as
much right to it as any white musician does. Even though he has not even dabbled with rock
music in the past, he reveals himself within the first 20 seconds of "Beat It" to be an avid listener
and fan of the genre. The influence of his friendships with white icons like Freddie Mercury, Paul
McCartney, and Mick Jagger, as well as black rock founders like Chuck Berry and Little Richard
can be heard in how comfortable he is with the sound, and how naturally he composes in its
idiom32. It's a bold and confident musical statement, executed perfectly, and goes a long way to
explaining why "Beat It" instantly became such a massive hit in the United States. The song first
got the music industry's attention in December of 1982, right after Thriller was released, when
AOR stations started playing "Beat It" even though it hadn't been officially released as a single,
and to huge positive response… as long as no one knew who it was by. "Some stations played the
record without identifying the artist and got good phones all along," Billboard quoted Epic Senior
Vice President Don Dempsey as saying, "And then after maybe a week of airplay they'd say, 'This
is Michael Jackson we've been playing,' and some AOR listeners would have a problem with it."33
Though a combination of rock 'n' roll snobbery and casual racism may have deterred AOR
listeners from openly liking a Michael Jackson-penned rock song when Thriller was initially

32
It has been suggested that the real motivation behind Jackson's decision to purchase the ATV Music
Publishing catalog in 1988 (which controversially gave him control of the Beatles' publishing rights, as
their company Northern Songs had been partially bought by ATV in the 1970's, and which damaged his
friendship with Paul McCartney) may have been to protect some of Berry's and Richard's music. The ATV
catalog contained most of their original compositions, as well as a huge number of other black rock 'n' roll
songs that had helped created the genre in the first place. Such suggestions were not widely reported until
after Jackson died in 2009.
33
"Michael Jackson Cut Breaks AOR Barrier," Billboard Magazine, December 18, 1982: 1.

22
released, by the time "Beat It" was officially released as a single, complete with a music video in
heavy rotation on MTV, Michaelmania had already brought the nation to its knees. Jackson took
to the rock form naturally; he was so good at it that he broke this genre and color barrier without
even trying.

Eddie Van Halen's guitar work on "Beat It" is masterfully raw and just before the first
verse begins he adds a neat little staccato guitar harmony on top of the killer main riff. Then
Jackson bursts in, voice already at full force and a high tenor pitch as he bites out, "They told 'em
'Don't you ever come around here! / Don't wanna see your face you better disappear!'" The fury
we first heard in his voice in "Wanna Be Startin' Something" is back and seems to have been
ignited even further by the furious rock song behind him. What at first seems to be a narrative
abhorring violence among the (implicitly black, urban) youth delivered in straightforward rock 'n'
roll style is actually masking a subtle and subversive duality in message and meaning. Jackson's
narrative is indisputably clear: he wants kids to stop trying to solve their problem with violence
and instead to retreat from confrontation and seek out personal expression through creative means
like music and dance. At the same time, he recognizes the inherent dilemma they face by backing
down from a fight. The first two verses make this explicit:
They told him don't you ever come around here
Don't want to see your face you better disappear
The fire's in their eyes and their words aren't very clear
So beat it, just beat it
You better run, you better do what you can
Don't wanna see no blood, don't be a macho man
You wanna be tough better do what you can
So beat it—but you wanna be bad!
Jackson's engaging explicitly and almost exclusively with a dynamic unique to urban, and
especially poor urban, life and one that is tied to black experiential identity. Ethnographers like
Elijah Anderson have observed that, "In the street culture…respect is viewed as almost an
external entity, one that is hard-won but easily lost—and so must constantly be guarded."34 This
view of acquiring and guarding respect as a precious commodity exacerbates the tensions
produced by living a life that is stunted at each turn by institutional inequality and racism,
producing an environment in which gestures and behaviors that would go otherwise unnoticed
become the cause for small battles which can take any number of forms, from verbal insults to
physical violence. Anderson's work has been rightly challenged as racially essentialist and

34
Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York:
W.W. Norton, 199): 33.

23
ignorant of reality in its construction street culture (of his work on "the dozens," an African
American word game, Robin D. G. Kelley eloquently skewers his entire argument by pointing
out, "The goal of the dozens and related verbal games is deceptively simple: to get a laugh"35),
but his observations of the emotionally charged atmosphere of inner city life and the relief of that
tension through interpersonal violence are not pulled from thin air. "Beat It" could not exist if
violence amongst the youth – especially violence used as a way to gain or keep respect from one's
peers – wasn't a prevalent enough problem in the black community for Jackson to feel
comfortable singing about it36. And while most white youth, urban and suburban, are not involved
with these street politics, Jackson keeps his lyrics vague enough for them to be widely relatable if
not actually relevant to all listeners.

It's a bold statement on the young artist's part, to engage so explicitly with this problem.
Jackson had been held up for much of his life as part of a black family that, to state it uncouthly,
was a "good example" to the community. The Jacksons were a cohesive family; the brothers were
outwardly stable, polite and genial young men with pretty, charismatic sisters and two still-
married parents. They were cheerfully hard working and extremely successful. Of course, part of
the reason Joseph and Katherine Jackson chose to form their sons into a singing group was to
keep them off the streets of Gary, Indiana, which was poor and rife with violent gangs. With their
sons inside and rehearsing they could ensure they would not get themselves mixed up with drugs
and violence. Therefore, Jackson became part of the model of how to lift oneself out of urban
poverty and into the charmed life of fame and fortune. His exit from this downtrodden world
early in life (he was 10 when the family was moved by Berry Gordy from Gary to Los Angeles to
record for Motown) could have severed his ties to this part of his community, but with "Beat It"
he displays a continuous and proud connection to the aspects of black life that many in and out of
the community find troubling. Since Thriller is intended to break through racial and class barriers
in order to achieve the kind of cultural domination Jackson desires, it is a risky move to include a
song that many listeners – white, privileged, divorced from this kind of community tension –
could find alienating. It's a testament to Jackson's nimbleness as narrator and overwhelming talent
as a pop songwriter that it becomes one of Thriller's biggest breakthrough hits.

35
Robin D.G. Kelley, Yo' Mama's DisFUNKtional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America. Boston
(Beacon Press, 1997): 34.
36
This connection and intention is made even more explicit by the video, which uses as its narrative base
Jackson's mission to stop a massive gang fight in a warehouse, and which features real Los Angeles gang
members. It will be discussed later in much greater detail.

24
 The chorus of "Beat It" always enters immediately after the end of each verse, an answer
to the implied question of "Well, what do I do now?" posed each time Jackson exhorts the listener
to retreat from violence. He begins in full-tenor wail ("So beat it! / Beat it!"), so high in his
register that further climbing must be done in falsetto ("No one wants to be defeated!"). It is the
intensity of his tenor throughout the song that sells it as really guttural rock 'n' roll, and which
makes his use of the genre seem so effortless, but at the end of the first chorus he gives us a
glimpse of his vocal range often unseen, though attested to by many. After the final call to "Just
beat it" there is an intricate call-and-response between Jackson's multi-tracked voice in which the
first invective is answered by another "beat it" echoed an octave lower and once more at the
original pitch. This happens twice in this moment, and never again in this song. The flexibility
and power of Jackson's high tenor and falsetto had been admired by fans and musicians alike
since "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" (sung almost entirely at the top of his falsetto range)
became a smash hit in 1978, but rarely were listeners given such a clear aural window into how
low Jackson's range extended. "He started with a high voice and I've taken it even higher," Seth
Riggs, Jackson's vocal coach told Time Magazine in 1984, and explained further, "He can sing
low – down to a basso low C – but he prefers to sing as high as he does because pop tenors have
more range to create style."37 Riggs may be right about stylistic freedom, but Jackson's low-
pitched vocal display in "Beat It" is not just important because it's a departure from his usual
practice, but because in its inherent display of testosterone (which causes men's voices to be
lower-pitched) it connects Jackson vocally to the trope of masculine virility embedded in rock 'n
'roll tradition.

Rock credibility has been established by the end of the first chorus and is set in stone
when, after the third verse and second chorus, the vocals drop away to allow Eddie Van Halen to
perform an absolutely blistering guitar solo, raw and jagged and aggressive and sexual. Just as
there is no attempt to "whiten" "Wanna Be Startin' Something" and other songs on Thriller for the
white youth Jackson is courting, there is no attempt to "blacken" Van Halen's guitar-work, to turn
it into something more recognizable to the community who'd been alienated from their own
creation. Rock guitar solos had been indisputably influenced by pioneering black guitarists from
Chuck Berry to Jimi Hendrix, but Van Halen's style is inextricably tied to hair metal, an
aggressively white subgenre. Instead of pushing for a racially-defined "kind" of sound, Jackson
pushes for the most rocking, aggressive, in-your-face guitar solo he can pull out of this virtuoso,
understanding the needs of the music are far more important than any sort of racial allegiance,

37
Cocks, "Why He's A Thriller," 59.

25
even as the song is working to address racialized social woes. Sound trumps lyric and creates a
new meaning, allowing the aggression of Jackson's vocal performance and Van Halen's guitar
work to foreground the bravery of standing up for and expressing yourself honestly, the noblest of
goals embodied in the lyrics, over the specificity of the situation Jackson has woven his narrative
around. And it works; so untouchable is the guitar solo that all Jackson can do for the rest of the
song is wail the chorus over and over again until, exhausted, the sound fades out.

"Beat It" could have been the peak of the album, the apex of furious tension and
catharsis, but it is not. It fades into a silence that is broken a moment later by one of the starkest
and most recognizable beats in the history of pop music38. Played on the snare drum and
emphasizing the off-beat of each 4/4 measure, this consistent, up-tempo rhythm is the engine that
powers "Billie Jean." For two measures it is heard alone. In the third measure, the iconic pile-
driving bass line enters, a tense arpeggio rising and falling with edgy nervousness. For four
measures it is just this, the backbone of rock and modern pop – bass and drums, the rhythm
section – and then there is a sound panning from right to left, Jackson adding his own vocal
percussion "Chh-chh-chh!" Four more measures of just bass and drums, and then the rest of the
instruments come in: jittery synthesizers and strings, a heavier (multi-tracked) bass, more vocal
percussive interjections from Jackson and then, finally, that unique little vocal hiccup just before
he begins to sing.

"Billie Jean" is, without question, a work of sonic art. It is impossible to describe in
words exactly how affecting the first 20 seconds of instrumental starkness are for the listener,
how tightly it coils your stomach, how your muscles tense involuntarily in anticipation. The
restraint of the introduction gives you no choice; it is nothing but a promise of something more,
much more. When Jackson finally sings his voice is tight and almost a mumble. His words are
unclear, the lyrics sometimes difficult to understand, and he sounds haunted. When he opens with
the line "She was more like a beauty queen / from a movie scene" the listener gets the sense he
has not stopped thinking about this girl in a long, long time, not because he wants to but because
she won't give him a moment's rest. "Billie Jean" is Jackson's tightest and tensest composition to
date, a perfect pop song about an imperfect and infrequently employed pop subject: the paranoia
and misery caused by fame and adoration. It is ostensibly about a paternity suit, as the repeated

38
"In my estimation," wrote Bruce Swedien, "'Billie Jean' is a perfect example of what I call 'sonic
personality.' I don't think there are many recordings where all you need to hear is the first few drum beats,
and you instantly know what song it is." (37)

26
chorus of "But the kid is not my son!" suggests, but that paternity suit is connected through the
rest of the lyric (and through the invocation of the title subject's name in "Wanna Be Startin'
Something") specifically with the pitfalls of celebrity. When he sings, "She told me her name was
Billie Jean as she caused a scene / And every head turned with eyes that dreamed of being the
one" he's not singing about being so cute and so popular with the ladies that he has to fend them
off with a stick; he's singing about how fame makes you desirable for reasons indiscernible to the
person being desired. It's a truth he's seemed to know for a long time but chose to ignore; the pre-
chorus breaks free of the mumbling tension of the verses into full-voiced frustration as Michael
wails "People always told me: be careful what you do! / Don't go around breaking young girls'
hearts!" He doesn't just blame Billie Jean for the lie, but himself for not heeding the advice given
to him by his friends, his managers, his mother: "And mother always told me: be careful who you
love / Be careful what you do / Because the lie becomes the truth!" Here the public and the
personal collapse into one existential crisis, as the press is now implicated alongside Billie Jean
and Michael himself for the predicament he's found himself in. And with no other choice, he
declares "the truth" to the listener: "Billie Jean is not my lover / She's just a girl who claims that I
am the one / But the kid is not my son!"

The lyrics from this point out document a paternity fight, one that is infused with biblical
language ("For forty days and for forty nights / the law was on her side") and with references to
black community paternity politics ("And showed a photo of my baby crying his eyes were like
mine"). Jackson imbricates his experiences as a young, secular black man immersed in the black
community with his religiosity, and its reaction to his feelings of persecution at the hands of this
wily woman. But the specifics of "Billie Jean" were pulled directly from Jackson's life, and the
palpability of the fear, confusion and anguish in his vocal could be attributed to how fresh the
inspiring incidents were in his mind. Jackson has never specified a single incident that inspired
"Billie Jean" (he said in interviews throughout his life that the music was composed while he was
driving, starting with the bass and then the synthesizers and finally the melody), but biographers
have identified several. The Jackson family home in Encino, California, had been staked out by
female fans since the 1970's, many of whom would try to hop the fence to meet the boys. The
family sometimes came home to find those girls hiding in the house or sunbathing by the pool.
They – and Michael in particular – also received a large amount of fan mail from fans, some
normal and some obsessive. Close friends have recalled Michael getting a letter from a girl
claiming he was the father of one of her twins (just one), and some, like former manager Frank
DiLeo, have named this girl as the subject of "Billie Jean." J. Randy Taraborrelli, in his

27
biography Michael Jackson: The Magic & The Madness (which is the most definitive biography
of Jackson at the moment), offers another scenario:
"In 1981 a female fan wrote Michael a letter to inform him that he was the father of her
baby. She enclosed photographs of herself…and of the infant. Michael, who often
received letters of this nature, ignored it as he does the others. This teenager, however,
was more persistent than the rest. She loved Michael, she claimed, and longed to be with
him. She wrote that she could not stop thinking about him and how happy they would be
as they raised their child together. She was obviously disturbed.
In the months to come, Michael would receive dozens more letters from this woman. In
one, she claimed that the baby and Michael had the same eyes and wondered how he
could ignore his flesh and blood. It wasn't long before Michael began having nightmares
about the situation…. One day, Michael received a package from her. When he opened it,
he discovered another photograph: her high school graduation picture. In it, she smiled
with girlish innocence. Also in the box was a gun. In a note, the fan asked Michael to kill
himself on a certain day, at a certain time. She wrote that she would do the same – right
after she killed the baby. … Michael was horrified. He took the photograph, had it
framed, and displayed it in the dining room on the coffee table."39
Taraborrelli asserts that this is the definitive incident at the center of "Billie Jean," but Jackson
never made a public statement one way or the other, choosing instead to skirt the question of the
song's subject by saying it was based on an amalgamation of obsessive fans from over the years.
I'm not out to dispute him, but I do want to draw attention to the depth of the emotional well he's
drawing from here. The lyrics of "Billie Jean" enhance the song, but they are incidental without
the virtuosity of his vocal performance.

Michael Jackson has an extraordinarily elastic voice. It was not just flexible with pitch,
but with grain as well. The grain of the voice is a term, an idea, coined by Roland Barthes to
describe an aspect of music vocally performed that had not yet been named. "The grain is the
body in the voice as it sings," he wrote, "the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs."40 "[It] is
not – or is not merely – its timbre," he explained, "the significance it opens cannot better be
defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the music and something else, which
something else is the particular language (and nowise the message). The song must speak…"41
We can think of the grain as the emotive inflection on the part of the singer, the extra sonic layer
that makes legible to the listener the soul of the music. Lyrics are just words set to music; the
grain of the voice is what gives those words weight and meaning, and what compels us to listen.
Jackson has the ability to sing in almost every mode, inflecting almost every meaning. Others
composed pop dynamite for him, but when he wrote for himself the real power of that voice box

39
J. Randy Taraborelli. Michael Jackson: The Magic & The Madness. London (Sidgwick & Jackson,
2003): 223-224.
40
Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice" in Image Music Text. London (Fontana, 1977): 188.
41
Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice," 185

28
was put on display. "Billie Jean" derives the majority of its weight, its paranoia, and its emotional
grip on the listener from the incredible vocal performance Michael turns in. Bruce Swedien
recalled that when they recorded the song it was recorded in full vocal takes with no drop-ins,
meaning Jackson sung the song from beginning to end without flubbing a lyric, missing a note, or
coming in late42. This is very unusual in pop music, especially with the increasing advances in
recording technology. Recording this way allows Jackson to harness the power of the live
performance on record; he can follow a natural emotional crescendo through the song, allowing
himself to get lost in the sound and the lyrics in a way he wouldn't if he was stopping and starting
from lyric to lyric, verse to verse. This technique gives Thriller, as a whole, a far more
compelling sound than your average pop album, but it particularly benefits "Billie Jean." Jackson
needs to build that paranoia and claustrophobia for the song, in all its eventual forms to work.

I don't think it's accidental that "Billie Jean" was Thriller's first huge radio smash,
Jackson's first major video, the video that broke the color line on MTV, and Jackson's most iconic
live performance, a dance routine so perfect that for the next 25 years he was essentially not
allowed to perform it any other way. That video and that performance – the performance on the
televised 25th anniversary Motown celebration, Motown: Yesterday, Today, Forever – will be
discussed in further depth later. I bring them up now only to point out that as a song, "Billie Jean"
was recorded with its iconic performance potential in mind. Jackson's voice builds and builds
until we reach the bridge which, on record, can come off as surprisingly understated. Though
punctuated by a few tortured yelps, it's mostly a tense, sparse electric guitar solo and then right
back into the chorus, repeating his rebuke of the paternity charges until he finally withdraws into
silence. It does nothing to interrupt flow or break mood, but the bridge also makes much more
sense once you see Jackson fill it with a short dance break consisting of his tight spins, gravity-
defying toe stand, and, most importantly, the moonwalk. Jackson was also known to dance while
recording, and the marriage of body, voice and sound is readily apparent in the song's
composition.

The sequencing of Thriller is a master-class in balancing emotion and intensity, and the
track following the sonic assault of "Billie Jean," the dreamy, spacey "Human Nature," provides
the listener with the same kind of space to relax as "Baby Be Mine" did following "Wanna Be
Startin' Something." Composed by Steve Porcaro with lyrics by John Bettis it began as a small
snippet at the end of a tape of songs submitted to Quincy Jones for Thriller and was then written

42
He also recalled that he created 91 mixes for "Billie Jean." The mix on the album is #2.

29
into a complete pop vehicle for Jackson43. The snippet consisted of what would become the
chorus, the airy "Why? Why" followed by Porcaro just humming the melody that would be set to
the words "Tell 'em that it's human nature." Jones and Jackson were both taken with the melody
and asked for it to be turned into a whole song. The result is a dreamy lament of freedom, Jackson
yearning to run through the streets of New York City at night, to be young and free. Paired with
the oppressive paranoia of "Billie Jean" it seems to embody a direct response to the former's
content. "Looking out across the night time / the city winks a sleepless eye," he sings breathily,
"Hear her voice shake my window / sweet seducing sighs." The listener can see him ensconced in
a decadent penthouse suite in one of the city's high-rise hotels, staring out into the dark night and
winking, blinking buildings, longing to be out there and not trapped inside, to be part of the world
and not just observing it. "Let me out into the night time," he begs, "Four walls won't hold me
tonight / If this town is just an apple / then let me take a bite!" Jackson keeps his voice wistful,
and the shuffling easy beat and light synthesizer work keeps the song from feeling mired in
sadness, but his longing is palpable. And with the chorus, Jackson brings his personal longing for
escape round to something more universal: "When they say why? Why? / Tell them that it's
human nature." Perhaps we don't all feel trapped like Jackson feels trapped in the gilded cage of
fame, but he knows as well as we do that we all have our moments in which we just want to get
out of wherever we are, escape whatever our small pressures are, and run uninhibited through our
towns, cities, countryside, just feeling alive.

"Human Nature" returns Jackson to a more conventional R&B mode after the pop
uniqueness displayed in "Thriller," "Beat It" and "Billie Jean." It's extraordinarily effective, both
in the way it gives the listener space to decompress after the attack of those three songs and in
grounding us once more in familiar pop and soul aesthetics, grounding Jackson there as well.
Some songs on Thriller, like "Wanna Be Startin' Something," "Beat It" and "Billie Jean," are real
breakthroughs in the pop musical form, new precedents for what can be done with that familiar
set of rules, sounds and rhythms. "Human Nature" is not revolutionary in that way, but it is
soothing and romantic, yearning and deep, a perfect vehicle for some of the softer tones Jackson's
voice can achieve and some of the softer emotions he can evoke. It's also wonderfully age
appropriate; Jackson was 24 when Thriller was released and the dreamy yearning on "Human
Nature" reminds us that all young people have certain feelings and experiences in common,
despite massive differences in background. The desire for independence, freedom, exploration,
romance, and the allure of the city is something all of his young listeners were feeling in their

43
George, Thriller, 131.

30
own particular way. The ability to convey that kind of universality, especially considering the
unique circumstances of his own life, is just another reason why Jackson was able to enact such a
stunning cultural transformation with this album.

Now in its final ten minutes, Thriller does not use the lull provided by "Human Nature"
to sink further into musical inertia as happened in its first third. Instead, the ballad is followed by
"P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)," a sassy, flirty dance pop composition by Quincy Jones and James
Ingram that has Michael playing the role of the irrepressible flirt, virile young man out to catch
the next pretty thing in a skirt that goes his way. Jones and Ingram use some highly improbably
"slang" (I put it in quotes because I have never heard of "tenderoni" being used as slang for a girl
one likes until after "P.Y.T." became a hit) to ground the lyric firmly in the frivolity of youth:
"Where did you come from baby? / And ooh won't you take me there / Right away, won't you
baby / Tenderoni you've got to be / Sparklin' nature, sugar fly with me." It's silly, nonsensical –
young and dumb, if you will – and perfectly in tune with both Jackson's playfulness and his
audience. Ingram, a deep-voiced soul singer, uses the slang of the lecherous old man in the song;
one only calls a girl a "pretty young thing" if he knows he's too old to chase after her. As Nelson
George points out, "An older guy leering at a young girl is a staple of American music, but even
so 'PYT' would probably not have been a top-ten hit if Ingram had put it on one of his solo
albums. Michael's man-child quality is what really sells the song."44 Caught in the crosshairs of
Michaelmania, many journalists in the year after Thriller is released will write time and again of
Jackson's childishness: his fascination with Peter Pan and Disney, the many young friends he has
and is seen publicly with, his outspokenness about the kinship he feels with children, his
admiration of E.T., his infantilized nature and soft, boyish voice. They will make fun of him for
it, question his sanity because of it, and some will even go so far as to insinuate that such
personality traits make him an unfit superstar and icon. Most of them will express confusion at
how such a childish man (or "man-child" as he is often referred to) can make such adult music.
All who do so miss the youthful energy and fun in songs like "Baby Be Mine" and especially
"P.Y.T." While "Billie Jean," "Wanna Be Startin' Something," and "Beat It" may all be heavier
compositions, they are only one third of this album. Pleasure, playfulness and fun are all essential
characteristics of dance music, pop music, and as Robin Kelley makes clear, black music: "Black
music, creativity and experimentation in language must also be understood as sources of visceral
and psychic pleasure."45 Jackson's youthful performance on "P.Y.T." rescues it from a tired soul

44
George, Thriller, 137.
45
Kelley, Yo' Mama's DisFUNKtional, 41.

31
trope of lechery and re-infuses it with just that visceral pleasure. From the silly verses to the even
sillier call-and-response bridge ("Pretty young things repeat after me / Sing: Na na na! / (Na Na
Na!)" with the responses sung by Jackson's sisters Janet and La Toya) to the supremely wacky
Alvin and the Chipmunks voice overlaid on the song's final moments, it is in some ways the least
burdened and most conventional song on the album. Its conventionality doesn't sound staid
though. It is fresh, it is bubbling, and it is perfect.

If "P.Y.T." is a sonic statement about Jackson's commitment to youthful frivolity, then

"The Lady In My Life," Thriller's final track, is Michael all grown up. Nelson George states that
the song was originally commissioned from Rod Temperton by Quincy Jones for Frank Sinatra;
instead it was recorded by Michael. It's an extremely complicated composition, full of strange
rhythms and unexpected chord and key changes, perhaps the most melodically complex
composition Jackson sang outside of "I Can't Help It," from Off The Wall, which was written
specifically for him by Stevie Wonder. It demands from Jackson a vocal performance strikingly
different than the rest of Thriller, one that is more mature and complex than even the sweeping
paranoia of "Billie Jean" or the anger of "Wanna Be Startin' Something." Jackson recalled in his
1988 autobiography that it "was one of the most difficult tracks to cut. We were used to doing a
lot of takes to get a vocal as nearly perfect as possible, but Quincy wasn't satisfied with my work
on that song, even after literally dozens of takes. Finally he took me aside late one session and
told me he wanted me to beg. He wanted me to go back to the studio and literally beg for it."46
The "it" in question here is sex, and it is the topic perhaps least covered on Thriller. "Billie Jean"
represents its fallout – the paternity suit, the rumors, the self in crisis – but it barely figures into
the romantic duel of "The Girl Is Mine," and though it is mentioned in the lyrics of "Baby Be
Mine" ("Only you and I could make sweet love this way") it is far from the topic of the song.
Thriller's approach to sex, much like Jackson's in real life, is to skirt it, to imply it, but never
confront it, revealing that at its center the album and the man behind it are deeply ambivalent
about it. This makes sense in the context of Jackson's upbringing as a Jehovah's Witness, a sect of
Christianity with stricter-than-usual teachings about sex and its place only in a marriage. During
the recording, release and explosion of Thriller, Jackson was open about his deep devotion to his
religion, his implied virginity, and his complex views on women and relationships. He seems at
this time to be inexperienced in adult relationships – he publically dates Tatum O'Neill and
Brooke Shields, but the public and media are skeptical about whether either relationship would be
seen as such when compared with a typical adult relationship – and rumors abound that he is gay

46
Jackson, Moonwalk, 197-198.

32
(rumors that had been persistent since the 1970's), transsexual, and asexual, but his performances
speak to an undercurrent of natural, raw masculinity and sexual virility. So as not to get
distracted, think of it like this: At large, we assume a certain level of sexual authenticity in the
performance of black soul and pop music, but that assumption was not automatically transferred
onto Michael Jackson by dint of his race. His public innocence, his man-child persona, and a lack
of an extensive public dating history make him an unlikely singer for a song like "The Lady In
My Life," and explains why Jones had a hard time drawing the right emotional and sexual
intensity out of his voice.

In the end, Jackson performs. The song's groove is irresistibly sexy, and Michael's voice
settles deep into that pocket and just flows. He croons, he entices, and boy oh boy does he beg.
He begins the first verse sweetly, but by the end of the song when he is ad-libbing his pleas for
this woman to stay with him, next to him; his voice is raw and ragged. As Nelson George astutely
points out, all he has to do is dip into a lifetime of watching some of the greatest soul men
performing their own love songs to conjure the right emotions for this song, but he doesn't just
pull from them, he joins their ranks with this performance. He oozes sex and heat, maturity and
mastery. He is confident and strong, powerful. It is a statement more subtle but just as firm as the
one issued by "Wanna Be Startin' Something" at the album's outset: Michael Jackson is not some
boy who can be pushed around by the business and the culture anymore. Michael Jackson is a
man, and he's coming for your women. Perhaps it looks a little silly written out like that, but it's
right there in the sound. This is a new man, a new album, and the dawn of a new day.

Thriller lasts for under three quarters of an hour, but it takes the listener through an epic
gamut of emotions, sounds and performances. Jones sequences it into a musical rollercoaster,
with insanely high peaks and smooth drops. One can imagine Jackson laid out on the floor of the
studio, sweating and panting at the end of the final take of "The Lady in My Life" because that is
what the listener is reduced to by the end of the album as well (perhaps not sweating, though how
one stays seated through some of those dance tracks is beyond me). It is an extremely powerful
set of nine songs, and it is doing work as we listen to it. Jackson's extreme reluctance to give
interviews to the press (especially the white press; he was a little bit more loose-lipped with
Ebony and Jet magazines, with whom he'd had a relationship since the Jackson 5) can, and I think
should, be interpreted as a directive to his audience and the public at large to use his album, and
eventually his music videos, as the primary text by which to understand him. Though he
sometimes justified his unwillingness to talk about himself by complaining about the way the

33
press twisted his words and intentionally misquoted him (a complaint that became more frequent
and louder after Thriller and his pop explosion), I think his primary motivation was the sense that
he'd been perfectly clear about his state of mind, intentions, and insight on his records, in the
sound and in the lyrics, and that the record should speak for itself. I think looking at the evolution
of his albums, we can see a reflection of that – as Jackson became more political and
philanthropically-minded more socially conscious songs, like "Man in the Mirror," "Heal the
World" and "Earth Song," took up tracks on his albums that may have been previously devoted to
a couple throwaway love ditties. In 1982, Jackson is not looking to talk about the world at large;
Thriller is a deeply personal album, though it may not take the introspective, self-examining form
that we have become used to after decades of folk- and rock-grounded singer-songwriters. He
writes dance music, but the music and the lyrics are underwritten with intense emotions and
feelings, clues to his inner life expressed as he feels most comfortable expressing himself: in
sound (and eventually dance), not in words.

As I hope I made clear in my close reading, though Thriller does not contain
conventional social message songs (with, perhaps, the exception of "Beat It"), it engages with a
number of serious social issues in a far more subtle way. Jackson's assertion and interpretation of
his own blackness encompasses a number of different issues about race relations both within the
black community and between the black and white communities. Jackson chooses to take up the
issue of his identity and his place in America without singing directly about it, parsing complex
feelings through the sonic assault of "Wanna Be Startin' Something" and the frustration of "Beat
It." He is clearly deeply connected to his black roots and his black identity, but does not feel that
those things should alienate him from white listeners in any way. In fact, coming towards the end
of the waves of militant Black Nationalism that had been sweeping through the black community
since the late 1960's, Jackson's sonic vision is much closer to the integrationist approach of Dr.
King than the separatist message extolled by Malcolm X. It's not that Jackson is looking for
assimilation – again, he resists "whitening" his music at all turns – but that his music recognizes
that black and white identities are all variations on the same American theme; that we have far
more commonalities than differences. His music is not an olive branch so much as it is a window
into the other side of the racial fence, and the compulsiveness of the dance rhythms are the
indication that skin color as arbiter of taste is suddenly horrifically passé. This is not music for
white people or black people, it's music for young people, for funky people, and because of that it
is able to transgress all the boundaries set up to make sure that black culture and white culture do
not further intermix.

34
 Though the videos will help it along, it is the sound that sets in motion the crumbling of
so many color lines. Earlier I related the story of "Beat It" transgressing the AOR color line
without even intending to. Now, I want to quote Rolling Stone's assessment of Thriller in the
1983 yearbook issue, at the end of the first year of Michaelmania:
"[Michael Jackson's] scenario for Thriller looked something like this: satisfy the
black/urban-contemporary audience at the year's outset with the dance-club-styled 'Billie
Jean.' Then, as LP sales hit 2 million, launch a major assault on the whites-only land of
MTV and album-oriented radio (AOR) with 'Beat It,' a rock and roll slammer that
features a blazing Eddie Van Halen guitar solo and is accompanied by an invigorating
video directed by Miller Lite lensman Bob Giraldi.
It was a smart plan, but it didn't work. It didn't have to. There was simply no resisting
'Billie Jean' – that pile-driving bass line, that soaring vocal and that magnificent Steve
Barron video, each frame of which is a further testament to Jackson's amazing talent as a
dancer … [I]n a year full of successes and trends, from the Aussie Invasion to the Tide of
Technopop, the crossover of Jackson's 'Billie Jean' was the most important. It exposed
black music to a white audience for the first time in the post-disco era; it led to the
collapse of AOR and its consultants; and it signified the primacy of MTV."47
All of that from just one song. Rolling Stone's attention to the impact of the videos should not be
ignored, nor do I wish to – perhaps the most astounding thing about Thriller and Jackson's
success is that his videos served only to enhance already astounding pop songs, not detract in any
way (a very difficult feat, as many subsequent years of MTV have shown). But MTV's agreeing
to show the video for "Billie Jean" on MTV was largely influenced by its status as a smash radio
hit, on black and white radio alike, and by the stunning sales of Thriller only four months after its
release. The video may have broken MTV's color line, but the song is what broke everyone else's.

Each television performance, each music video, each new sales record, each tour date
enhanced Jackson's cache and Thriller's allure, but none of them would have been possible if the
album did not provide such a solid musical foundation. The power and potency of the music can
be measured by the oh-so-famous sales numbers: 14 million worldwide by October 1983,48 8.5
million in the US; over 30 million records sold worldwide by March 1984 and over 19 million in
the US,49 to make it the biggest selling album of all time in less than a year and a half after its
release. Numbers like that can only be achieved if more than one person per family is purchasing
the album; to put it another way, Thriller was a record that siblings could not share. It is the
power of the music that makes each listener's relationship to the record so intense that people had
to have their own copy; it is the power of the music that allows the bass lick of "Billie Jean" or

47
Jon Pareles, "The Year In Music." Rolling Stone, December 24, 1983: 19-20
48
Billboard Magazine, "Thriller Tops 14 Million," October 8, 1983.
49
Billboard Magazine, "All-Time Best-Seller: 'Thriller' Album Breaks 'Fever'," March 19, 1984.

35
guitar riff of "Beat It" to need only to be hummed in passing to be recognized. Today a limp
record may be able to excel from one or two truly excellent music videos, but that was not the
case when Thriller was released because Thriller and its videos for "Billie Jean," "Beat It" and
"Thriller" is what made the music video into the cultural emblem and measure of worth that it
became. MTV may have existed before Michael Jackson, but Michael Jackson made MTV and he
would have never been able to get their attention had his music been anything other than simply
undeniable.

Importance, achievement and impact can and have been measured by sales and sales
records, and in that arena Thriller stands atop them all. Its success is unequivocal. But sales are
not the beginning and end of Thriller's story, and are only the very tip of the iceberg when teasing
out why Jackson is such a desperately important American icon. Sales can show us a fad, or a
trend, but Thriller is neither: it's the impetus for a pop explosion, for a drastic cultural shift, and
that can never be measured by charts or sales alone. The true measure of Thriller's impact can
only be measured by the relentless and relentlessly public swells of adoration and obsession from
his fans. Thriller inspired the kind of public chaos and emotion unseen in America since The
Beatles landed in 1964, and Jackson earned himself the honor of having a mania named after him
because of it: Michaelmania. It is in the pitch, volume and variations of Michaelmania that we
can locate the truly subversive work that Thriller and Jackson are doing to American identity, and
it is to Michaelmania that I turn my attention now.

36
 Chapter Two
This One's for the Girls in the Back: Michaelmania

What is mania, and why is it important? Strictly speaking, a mania is what happens when
a large swath of people (in our case, Americans) becomes obsessed with a particular cultural
artifact and that artifact becomes the focus of media coverage and discussion amongst arbiters of
taste and ordinary citizens alike. We can describe the uproar surrounding the multitude of passing
fads that come through our popular culture, like slap bracelets and Beanie Babies, as manias if we
wish, but we don't. The word is used more carefully, applied selectively to things that are beyond
the scope of the ordinary fad, especially when that fad is a performer or type of music. Cultural
historians, fans, and journalists tend to recognize only a few actual manias in the history of
popular music. Popularity fads – moments when an act or artist becomes insanely popular on the
radio or, later, MTV and temporarily dominates pop culture – are common and frequent. Popular
music especially tends to celebrate newness above all, reveling in its short memory, insisting on
innovation even where it's not present (as when Britney Spears and Lady Gaga blatantly recycle
motifs, sounds and visual themes from Madonna and are still heralded as innovators in the
industry) and latching onto any new iteration of a sound as a reason to cast off the supposedly
tired and staid music of just the previous year in favor of a new set of albums and merchandise to
buy. Without dipping too far into capitalistic cynicism, the cyclical nature of the music industry
means record companies are heavily invested in finding an artist who can become very popular
very quickly, exposing them to the widest audience as possible, and then casting them aside in
favor of the next new thing.

There are many names for these bursts of popularity that erupt constantly in the music
industry. They're "one hit wonders," "fevers," "crazes," and of course "fads." The descriptions
offer both a sense of the pitch of the reaction and participation of fans, and a sense of their short
duration; after all, fevers break, crazes calm, and "one hit wonders" never go one to have a second
number one single. The term "mania" can only be applied to reactions that are transcendent and
sustained, something nearly impossible to know beforehand, but also instinctively easy to
recognize. Manias are hotter than fevers, louder than crazes, and last far longer than any fad or
one hit wonder. Manias are sparked by something innate and special in an artist and their music,
what Greil Marcus means when he says that within those around whom they revolve, "the

37
capacity for fad must be utterly profound."50 What began as a term to dismiss, to describe devoted
fans as maniacs, lunatics, people incapable of making rational decisions and therefore incapable
of being taken seriously, was transformed through its attachments to profound music and
profound connections between performers and their audiences into a term of reverence and
special respectability. The reluctance to assign the term "mania" to the vast majority of popular
pop music acts is not because of some arbitrary marker of record sales or radio play, but because
it signifies a deep, profound, and tenacious connection between one musical act and our notions
of American identity.

This may sound hyperbolic, but consider the only acts in popular music history to have
manias unequivocally51 attached to them: Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson. Even
though there are far more musical icons – Stevie Wonder, Madonna, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross,
Barbara Streisand, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, I could go on – and dozens of
loud musical fads – teen idols and boybands have inspired plenty of shrieks through the 20th
century – only three groups or performers are granted a spot on the very highest echelon of the
pop music universe. Only three groups or performers have been able to reach deep into the
American consciousness and fundamentally change who we are. The ways in which Elvis and the
Beatles were able to enact permanent substantive changes on American identity – and especially
American youth identity – have been well documented by others. In this chapter I will explore
and analyze Michaelmania and its equally permanent and substantive changes on American
(especially youth) identity. In doing so, I argue that Michaelmania, as manifested in 1983 and
1984, marks the third and heretofore last pop explosion experienced by the American people. As
such, it marks a moment of subversion, transgression, and transformation, all of which are still
central to the way that Americans and young Americans in particular conceive of themselves in
our present moment.

The term "pop explosion" was coined by Marcus in his essay about The Beatles, written
for the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock 'n' Roll in 1976, five years after the Jackson 5
had their historic run of four consecutive number one hits. He uses it to help the reader
understand importance of the Beatles in the context of rock critic Lester Bangs' observation that
50
Marcus, "The Beatles," 215.
51
Many argue that Frank Sinatra was the object of the "first" mania, but I think that manias are distinctly
peri- and post-rock 'n' roll. Seeing manias through Marcus's lens of the pop explosion as transformative
moments, the frenzy surrounding Sinatra certainly points to his enduring and unquestionable importance as
a performer, singer, and lust object, but his musical offerings and presentation did nothing to challenge or
change notions of American identity even during the peak of his popularity.

38
the British Invasion was "not simply a matter of music, but of event."52 Marcus asserts that only
within the context of the Beatles event does the importance of the Beatles' music become legible,
as it is then that it is exposed as a pop explosion. He goes on to define the pop explosion thusly:
"A pop explosion is an irresistible cultural upheaval that cuts across lines of class and
race (in terms of sources, if not allegiance), and, most crucially, divides society itself by
age. The surface of daily life (walk, talk, dress, symbolism, heroes, family affairs) is
affected with such force that deep and substantive changes in the way large numbers of
people think and act take place. Pop explosions must link up with, and accelerate, broad
shifts in sexual behavior, economic aspirations and political beliefs; a pervasive sense of
chaos…doesn't hurt. … Enormous energy—the energy of frustration, desire, repression,
adolescence, sex, ambition—finds an object in a pop explosion, and that energy is
focused on, organized by and released by a single holistic cultural entity. This entity must
itself be capable of easy, instantaneous and varied imitation and extension, in a thousand
ways at once; it must embody, suggest, affirm and legitimize new possibilities on all
fronts even as it outstrips them. This is a fancy way of saying that the capacity for fad
must be profound.
And, at its heart, a pop explosion attaches the individual to a group—the fan to an
audience, the solitary to a generation—in essence, forms a group and creates new
loyalties—while at the same time it increases one's ability to respond to a particular pop
artifact, or a thousand of them, with an intensity that verges on lunacy."53
It would be foolish of us not to look at Michael Jackson's music through this same lens. As with
the Beatles, the importance of Thriller becomes clear when we look at Jackson in the context of
his own event. Jackson's event and the Beatles' event, however, are not the same. Beatlemania can
be traced to an exact date – February 9, 1964, when they touched down in New York City for the
first time – and was sparked when an extraordinary of teenagers reacted strongly first to their
music, which suddenly saturated the airwaves as Capitol Records launched a promotional
campaign leading up to their Ed Sullivan Show performances, and then to the images of them
performing their songs on television and giving numerous TV and radio interviews.
Michaelmania, on the other hand, emerges in a more curious and organic fashion. Unlike the
Beatles, Jackson is an already-established American star and has been since childhood. Also
unlike the Beatles, the release of Thriller is preceded only by the release of its first single to radio,
a standard marketing practice and nothing like the blitz Capitol initiated in 1964.

Furthermore, as a black man and not a cute quartet of white Brits, Jackson's established
star status is balanced by a racist and segregated cultural apparatus that is set up to hinder rather
than facilitate his success. This is especially important when one considers that Michaelmania
unfolds in two steps. The first is the initial six-month period after Thriller is released in
December 1982. The album is immediately lauded for its musical achievement. Interest increases

52
Marcus, "The Beatles" p. 214.
53
Marcus, "The Beatles" p. 214-215.

39
when album cuts are played on the radio before the next single is officially released, which is
when "Beat It" inadvertently breaks the AOR color line and earns the very reluctant goodwill of
rock fans. The second step hinges on specifically the demands by this public to see more of
Michael Jackson. MTV, new vanguard of the music industry, has by 1983 become as important as
radio to marketing musical acts and albums. MTV had also enacted a strict policy, based on
problematic demographic research, of playing almost exclusively white artists in rock 'n roll
videos. Following the release of "Billie Jean" as a radio single and its smashing success, amid
mounting public and private pressure, MTV agrees to air the music video for the single. In early
March of 1983 it is added to the playlist in heavy rotation. On March 31, 1983, the video for
"Beat It" premieres during primetime and joins "Billie Jean" in heavy rotation. By April,
Michaelmania has exploded in all its transformative glory.

The pitch and cadence of Michaelmania and its concurrent pop explosion are distinct
from those that have come before it because of his race, because of this visual element, and
because of his unique interaction with the public. Unlike Elvis or The Beatles, Michael Jackson
was not interested in giving interviews. He was not interested in appearing on television talk
shows, or calling into radio stations. He made very few public appearances, and when he did he
spoke as little as possible. He was clearly charismatic and charming – that came through from his
music videos, in which he invested much time, money, and creativity. But he was not goofy and
funny like the Beatles or sultry and provocative like Elvis, though girls lusted after his own
particular (and particularly powerful) sexiness. We are used to celebrities who are willing to be
in the spotlight, and behavior otherwise is contradictory and contrarian to us; it annoys and
frustrates, especially when that reluctance is met with even more popularity in seemingly-endless
waves. But this is all still perfectly within the framework of Marcus' pop explosion, in which the
cultural artifact at its center – Michael Jackson, in this case – does not need to be physically
present or engaged to be important. He takes on symbolic significance for his fans and for the
people around his fans (as non-participation in fandom does not spare you from the pop
explosion). Jackson's ability to sustain the mania around him without having to directly engage
with it is just another testament to his cultural power.

Michaelmania and Jackson's pop explosion are integral to my discussion of American

identity because if we understand identity as an articulation of the self-in-process in relation to
the world around it, as has been proposed by Stuart Hall among others, and music as a way of
forming, articulating and experiencing identity as proposed by scholars like Simon Frith, then

40
mania becomes a way of witnessing and eventually documenting the formation of new identities
in American youth. "[T]he experience of music for composer/performer and listener alike," Frith
asserts, "gives us a way of being in the world, a way of making sense of it"54 which in turns leads
to the formation of an identity which is intimately connected not to the internal experience of an
individual, but of the individual as part of a group and the group as comprised of many
individuals. "Music constructs our sense of identity," Frith suggests, "through the direct
experiences it offers of the body, time and sociability, experiences which enable us to place
ourselves in imagined cultural narratives."55 The content of mania – the words, actions and
imitations emanating from the audience taking in the music and musician – is a way of reading
and recognizing the cultural narratives being written and deployed by those for whom the music
is enacting the process of identity creation. Since transcendence or rewriting of previous cultural
narratives is a hallmark of mania – what Marcus is gesturing to with his comments on the role of
the pop explosion connecting the performer to an audience and the individual to a group – we are
given a particularly clear view into the process of making the self and the process of making a
social group at the same time, because both of these things are enacted by the experience of music
and interaction with a cultural icon.

Before I get into my lengthy discussion of the biography of Michaelmania, its

participants, its characteristics, and its legacy, I want to note one more thing the reader should
keep in mind, which is the artificial and constructed gulf between the subversive/transformative
and the mainstream. We frame subversion as something that almost always comes from outside
or beneath the dominant culture. Its interaction with the mainstream is problematic for us.
Subversive cultural products that become popular and absorbed into the mainstream are framed as
losing their power; subversive groups are either assimilated and their subversion rendered
impotent, or they retreat back to the margins after their moment in the spotlight. These may be
common circumstances, but they are not universal and the gap constructed between subversive
culture and mainstream culture is false. Celebration and adoption of a subversive cultural product
by the mainstream does not mean it automatically loses its transgressive properties, or that they
have been somehow neutralized by the participation of the majority and not the minority. Instead,
I think that when subversive cultural products achieve true mainstream popularity, the power of
that subversion is amplified. Instead of a small slice of the public engaging willingly with

54
Simon Frith, "Music and Identity" in Questions of Cultural Identity, Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, ed.
London (Sage Press, 1996): 114.
55
Frith, "Music and Identity," 124.

41
transgressive practices, representations, and messages, the culture at large engages and
transforms. Frith notes that "[popular music's] most important social function is assumed to be
commercial – the starting analytical assumption is that the music is made to sell; research focuses
on who makes marketing decisions and why, on the construction of taste and 'taste publics.'"56 As
such, when music sells well (in this case, when an album becomes the biggest selling album of all
time) scholars view its importance in terms of the triumphs of its marketing and engagement with
capitalism; any rebellion or transgression in its message is lost to those who see the apparatus of
capitalism (and successful use or manipulation of that apparatus) as the primary structuring force
of American identity, a hegemonic force so powerful it cannot be overcome or subverted. It's a
woefully short-sighted view; as Frith points out, "The appeal of the music itself, the reason why
people like it, and what, more importantly, 'liking it' means, is buried under an analysis of sales
strategies, demographics, the anthropology of consumption."57 Especially when looking at music
that becomes mega-popular, losing sight of the why of the music in favor of using it as an entrée
into examining consumptive practices blinds us to the transformative value of popular music
when it is taken up by an immense group of Americans.

Perhaps we can think of this using as our example rock music broadly conceived. When
first created, rock was a deeply transgressive and subversive genre of music frowned upon by the
public at large, and enjoyed by small groups of people – mostly young and mostly black – until
Elvis and the Beatles popularized it amongst the white American majority. When The Beatles
took rock mainstream they also created a powerful and potent pop explosion that, as I've argued
in the past58, was greatly responsible for the coalescing of youth identity that was then able to
manifest in the counterculture, the anti-war movement, and bolstered second-wave feminism. In
this case, as with others, acceptance by the mainstream enhanced the potency of rock's
subversion. The argument that assimilation into mainstream culture eventually drains rock of its
subversive potency shouldn't be automatically dismissed as history seems to have borne it out, but
what is at issue here is the notion that interaction with the mainstream (especially positive
interaction) always and automatically renders the previously subversive impotent. Recognizing
this fallacy is vital to our exploration and understanding of Michael Jackson, Michaelmania, and
its lasting effects as a pop explosion on American culture, for it is when he is taken up by the
mainstream in proportions heretofore unseen in his life that Jackson's music, visual presentation,

56
Frith, "Music and Identity," 120.
57
Frith, "Music and Identity," 120.
58
Sara Tenenbaum, One Sweet Dream: The Beatles and America, 1964-1967. Waltham (Brandeis
University, 2006).

42
and mere existence become the site of subversive cultural transformation. As Dave Marsh noted
in 1985, "Michael Jackson's music brought black sounds and black faces back to the center of all
pop; he created, in fact, the first pervasively popular music, with appeal in almost every segment
of the audience, since the demise of The Beatles."59

American culture at the time of Thriller's release was an internally conflicted, confused,
and curious thing. It was caught firmly between a burdensome past and an unknown future,
flickering in an uncertain present. The staggering changes that started in the 1960's continued to
reverberate through the country, and caused visible and particular ripples in each of our cultural
corners. Popular culture and the entertainment industry, both catering to the youth demographic
that first became socioeconomically essential during the rock explosion, was in a particularly
precarious position. While American movies were coming out of a particularly creative and
exciting period, American popular music was in a kind of free-fall. The rock 'n' roll and soul
explosions of the 1960's had been interrupted by the disco in the mid-70's, which by 1980
triggered a massive backlash. The result was a swift and severe re-segregation of the music
industry, a return to a form that hadn't been used since the era of "race" records. First Motown,
then soul and funk had served the breaking down of segregation in American music. White rock
bands talked openly of their love and respect for black musical forefathers and the stunning
achievements of Motown in the 1960's, and then Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder in
the 1970's had integrated Americans' record collections more than they had ever been before.
Disco initially looked like it would continue that trend; it was a black-originating music, written
and performed primarily by black musicians, and was popular across racial lines. But disco
quickly became overwhelming. It was easily co-opted by mainstream record labels and white
artists looking for a quick hit. Those opportunists did not care much about the funk roots of the
genre, or about what would make a good song versus an easy hit. Disco oversaturated the market
and the airwaves. Since the popular music world was still ruled by radio, DJs wielded great
influence over their audiences and when they grew tired of disco, they drew the line.

Claiming that disco was being forced upon their listeners, who hated it, they established
Album Oriented Radio (or AOR), a format designed specifically to allow DJs to play only rock
records at the exclusion of a near totality of black music. With a handful of notable exceptions60
soul, funk and R&B (collectively known as "black music") had not paid much attention to the

59
Marsh, Trapped, 2.
60
Stevie Wonder's Talking Book and Innervisions, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, etc.

43
long-playing album as a musical format the way rock had. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club
Band transformed rock music forever by introducing the idea of the concept album and, through
its genius, making the idea intensely appealing. Rock became art, and changed forever. "[B]lame
it on 'Sgt. Pepper,'" Dave Marsh told the Baltimore Sun in 1983, "You see, I think the idea is that
rock and roll has not just been mistakenly identified as white music, but that it has been identified
as European art music – that European art music is the key to its tradition – which, of course, is
all wrong, totally backwards. But how else do you explain the idea that groups like Pink Floyd,
Yes, Genesis or King Crimson are rock bands? … [R]ock had to be redefined, and the
consequence of this highbrow redefinition was to play into the hands of lowbrow backlash."61
The lowbrow backlash meant separating rock from its origins in black music, in the blues, and
alienating it from forefathers like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino. What Marsh
pinpoints as a misidentification of rock tradition becomes the logic by which record companies,
radio stations, and eventually MTV, could justify increasingly complete musical segregation.
Instead of stating their decisions in the proper racial terms, they redefined rock to exclude all
sounds that could be considered soulful or funky. Where the original crossover rock music by The
Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who reveled in the heavy backbeat and crunching guitars of
blues, and the pep and harmony of Motown, "rock" in 1982 was defined by the absence of all
those. Of course, those now-rejected musical forms still successfully existed but they did so under
the ever-present modifier of "black." Just as in the days of Jim Crow, music that was considered
"black" was separated from the bunch and labeled accordingly. There were "black" sections in
record stores, "black" radio stations, and "black" LP and singles charts in Billboard. It was the
music industry's equivalent of "separate but equal," with all the dishonesty and maliciousness of
its historical precedent.

It's redundant to assert that racism has always been present in the music industry, but by
the 1980's that racism was occupying an increasingly uncomfortable public position. Marsh
points out, "A generation of American kids had grown up listening to radio broadcasts that were
almost as strictly segregated as they were before Elvis Presley, Alan Freed, Little Richard, Chuck
Berry, Fats Domino and other pioneers of rock n roll."62 Music was rightfully seen as one of the
more progressive and integrative forces for social change during the cultural shifts of the 1960's,
and the spirit of diversity, equality and universal love were a consistent topic of white and black

61
J.P. Considine, "Black music/white music: Is racism rocking rock?" Baltimore Sun, January 16, 1983:
D15.
62
Marsh, Trapped, 2.

44
artists alike. To have acceptance and rejection once again couched in such overtly racial terms
was problematic, and the DJs and executives enacted elaborate explanations to try to reconcile
reality with image. They claimed that this really was all genre and sound, and not anything to do
with race. Chuck DuCoty, a Baltimore AOR DJ interviewed for the same article as Marsh
combated charges of racism by boasting, "There are a lot of white artists who play funk-type
music, and we don't play them either."63 And, even more importantly, they insisted their listeners
could tell the difference and uniformly rejected the black sounds. "When Queen was
experimenting with [funk-type music]," DuCoty explained, "we played 'Another One Bites the
Dust' – which we don't play anymore64. And this last album, which was more funk-oriented, we
played but it stiffed badly. That tells me it's not a black or white situation, but a style of music
that does or does not work on an AOR radio station."65 The result of all this elaborate justifying
was that the music world seemed hopelessly flattened and monotonous, stifled by the very
segregation DJs claimed would save rock 'n' roll. "People wonder why pop music lost its sense of
possibility and enchantment in the Seventies," Marsh wrote in his 1985 book on Michael Jackson,
"What other goddamn reason do they need? Segregation is precisely what choked off the spirit
that lifted Sixties music. Once black performers had to beg, twist, and contort to get their fair
share of attention, everything was distorted and corrupted – including the white rock world."66 By
the 1980's, the format and its racist undertones found itself under an even closer microscope
because of the premiere of MTV (Music Television).

A 24-hour cable network that played almost exclusively music videos and was dedicated
solely to rock, MTV became very popular and very important very fast. It debuted on August 1,
1981, with a base of 2.5 million subscribers, which increased tenfold to 25.4 million subscribers
by 1984.67 Music videos had been created and used in the past, mostly by European groups who
were still based in Europe, and outside of touring did not get much exposure in the United States.
Videos for songs were played on network television after the regular programming for the day
was done. MTV took these and devoted an entire channel to them, singlehandedly transforming
them from niche promotional tools to a new form of visual and musical art. Founder and CEO

63
Considine, "Black music/white music."
64
Just a curious historical intersection: It was actually Michael Jackson who told Freddie Mercury that
"Another One Bites The Dust" should be the first single off Queen's album The Game, after Mercury
played him the just-finished record. Mercury took his advice and the song was a huge hit.
65
Considine, "Black music/white music."
66
Marsh, Trapped, 203.
67
Andrew Hempp, "Readers: I want my MTV back from Snooki," Advertising Age, February 15, 2010,
accessed March 5, 2011. http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/cable-readers-i-mtv-back-snooki/142099/

45
Bob Pittman, who started in radio, adopted the AOR format and criteria for the channel, selecting
only songs that would be recognized as "rock" to be played. But the highly subjective reasoning
of radio DJS, who were essentially their own masters, in determining playlists would not fly on
television, where the channel's success depended on massive viewership and more lucrative ad
sales. As such, Pittman and his vice president of programming Les Garland conducted huge
marketing research surveys in order to confirm that their prime demographic – in the 12-34 age
range, middle class, largely suburban (where cable subscriptions were sold), and white – was as
uninterested in black music as radio listeners. It's hard to tell now if the surveys were conducted
intentionally to skew the data collected or if MTV was just able to twist the responses to serve
their assumptions about the appeal of black music to white suburban kids; suffice to say the moral
at the end of this story is not that white kids hated black music. But Garland insisted to the Sun,
"In the studies we've done…we haven't found a great amount of information that says the people
who like Van Halen, the Who, or A Flock of Seagulls like Rick James. That's two different
groups, overwhelmingly."68 Pittman was brasher about it. The New York Times reported that,
when defending charges of racism in MTV's programming, "he cites the fact that black and white
popular music have always been segregated. 'We chose rock because the audience was larger,'
Pittman explains. 'The mostly white rock audience was more excited about rock than the black
audience was about contemporary rhythm and blues.'"69 When Rolling Stone brought up the
charges of racism that had developed into something of a national conversation in 1983, Pittman
became defensive, upholding the argument that it's just the format. When pressed, he gets angry:
"'If anyone says we should change, I'd like them to take our losses. I'd change our losses
with theirs right now. They don't recognize that this is a business. … MTV is a
phenomenon of the youth culture. Our point of view music be hitting home.'
Some say that's because, while you may not be racist, you're catering to white suburban
racism. And that you're in a position to change that, to expose people to great black artists
as well as white ones.
'I don't know who the fuck these people are to tell people what they should like,' Pittman
fumes. 'They sound like little Hitlers or people from Eastern-bloc communist countries.
The good thing about America is that people rule. That's the essence of America!'"70
The problem, of course, is that because all anyone knew about MTV's research and programming
decisions came directly from MTV spokespeople, no one knew if it or the conclusions drawn
from it were in any way accurate. As Marsh told the Sun, "The answer to [racism in popular
music] isn't a format… Formats are the problem. There's a real danger right now of looking at
music as something that's controlled by the radio, rather than seeing radio as something which

68
Considine, "Black music/white music."
69
Ed Levine, "TV Rocks With Music," New York Times, May 8, 1982: SM42.
70
Steven Levy, "Ad Nauseum: How MTV Sells Out Rock & Roll," Rolling Stone, December 8, 1983: 37.

46
intuits certain trends and tries to drive them home. Basically, if people weren't lied to all the time
for marketing reasons, they'd be willing to accept pluralism."71

Certainly Americans were looking to accept something. Though MTV was a phenomenon
by 1983 and had contributed to boosting record sales for its most heavily played artists, the
industry at large was still in a tailspin. Record sales had been slipping for years, and nothing
seemed to help. "Beset by recession," People Magazine lamented, "seemingly abandoned by an
entire generation that grew up on rock, bereft of formative figures like Elvis and Lennon, an out-
of-sync music industry is asking not just what is its future, but is there a future at all?"72 While
melodramatic, People was far from incorrect. The reinstatement of segregated formatting for
music on radio and now, with MTV, on television in the wake of the anti-disco backlash also
robbed the music scene of much of its creative vitality. The rigid boundaries put in place by
programmers and marketing executives dampened the spirit of racial mixing that makes pop and
rock such vital and exciting genres. Without an open exchange of ideas and sounds inspiration
dwindles. By enforcing arbitrary standards of what does and does not constitute "rock," and by in
turn defining all other music as "black" and "black" as "bad" or "unappealing" or "unmarketable,"
the music industry effectively enacted a slow suicide by discouraging its artists to experiment at
all with sound and beat. The youth hungered for something as exciting as what older generations
had gotten to experience with Elvis and The Beatles. "The late music mogul Neil Bogart," People
noted, "once theorized that overwhelming musical trends emerged in 10-year cycles, starting
around the fourth year of every decade: '54 the rise of Elvis, '64 the advent of the Beatles, and '74
the disco explosion. Is something in the wings for '84?"73

One potential option was New Wave, an aggressively white fusion of pop and rock that
managed to incorporate some of the appealing funk of black music by smuggling it in with heavy
use of synthesizers and drum machines. Technology kept New Wave in line with the supposed
European art rock tradition of rock music while actually taking advantage of the appealing groove
of black music. DJs and VJs (Video Jockeys, MTV's programming hosts) alike noticed but
refused to acknowledge that the appeal of New Wave was in the incorporation of these black
musical themes. At the same time, cries of racism rose up from all sides: from the popular press,
from the music press, and from musicians themselves, most vocally Motown funk artist Rick

71
Considine, "Black music/white music."
72
Carl Arrington, Chet Filippo, and Eric Levin, "Is Rock Dead?" People, January 17, 1983: 51.
73
Arrington, Filippo & Levin, "Is Rock Dead?"

47
James. There were small concessions: Prince, who is half-African American and half-Hispanic
but who had always made music very much in the traditional rock idiom, got limited play on
AOR and MTV alike, as did long-established black artists like Tina Turner. "Then," as Rolling
Stone put it, "came Michael Jackson."

Thriller was released into this world of segregated popular culture in 1982, and initially it
performed like any other good record by a black artist with some crossover appeal. "The Girl Is
Mine," the duet with Paul McCartney, was the first single released in anticipation of the album
and benefitted from having one white and one black singer. It performed well on the Black
Singles and (predominantly white) Adult Contemporary Billboard charts, and the combined star
power of Jackson and McCartney's names pushed up to number three on the Hot 100 singles
chart. When Thriller was released a few weeks later, it was met with overwhelmingly positive
reviews and positive reaction from listeners as it began to get play on black radio stations. In the
1980's, radio DJs still played album cuts that were not officially released as singles regularly,
especially just after an album was released and the general public had not yet gotten to know it.
This applied to Thriller as it would with any of its peers, but with Thriller something strange
happened. Enticed by the music and by the presence of Eddie Van Halen, AOR disc jockeys
played "Beat It" for their white audiences, and they liked it. "Michael Jackson Cut Breaks AOR
Barrier," Billboard's front page crowed on December 18, 1982. The triumph for the album served
only to highlight how blatantly racist radio programmers and radio listeners could be. Epic
Records Senior Vice President Don Dempsey told them, "Some stations played the record
without identifying the artist and got good phones all along. And then after maybe a week of
airplay they'd say, 'This is Michael Jackson we've been playing,' and some AOR listeners would
have a problem with it."74 Jackson's sharp showman's eye recognized that this was a moment of
flux and uncertainty in American culture and identity, a moment in which the weakness of the
prejudices that dominated the American past were exposed and vulnerable. His single-minded
determination to make Thriller the biggest album in the world had produced a record containing
nine of the best pop songs yet recorded. Now all he had to do was make that greatness legible to
the general public, a public conditioned to ignore black artists. He had to make sure that he was
simply the most compelling thing anyone had ever heard or seen, and he knew the way to do that
was on MTV.

74
Paul Grein, "Michael Jackson Cut Breaks AOR Barrier," Billboard, December 18, 1982: 58.

48
 The brief and unlikely success of "Beat It" on AOR was encouraging for both Jackson
and his label, though Billboard reported that "it's unlikely 'Beat It' will be the second single from
[Thriller]," and said Dempsey would "prefer to follow 'The Girl Is Mine' with a more mainstream
black track, probably 'Billie Jean.'"75 As I noted in the previous chapter, "Beat It" is not a
straightforward rock song in which a black artist is co-opting a white sound in order to appeal to a
black audience, but a "black" song utilizing the black tradition of rock 'n' roll naturally, as an heir
apparent to the form. Jackson must have been encouraged that white audiences accepted his black
rock so readily, even if the unspoken racism of rock caused listeners to reject it once they were
told who'd created it. That extra boost of confidence also must have informed his decisions for his
second single, which was indeed "Billie Jean." It entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart on January
22, 1983, at number 4776 along with a brief and extremely positive review that lauded his tense
vocal as "one of his finest performances."77 The public agreed; by the following week it was the
second-most-added record to AOR and black radio stations in the country, with 50% of AOR
stations and 61% of black stations reporting its addition78, and had risen ten points on the Hot 100
to number 37. Thriller, which had debuted on the LP chart at number 11 on Christmas day the
year before, had been holding steadily in the middle of the top 10 since the beginning of January.
Three weeks after its release the song reached number one on the black singles chart ("the fastest
climbing black chart-topper since the Jackson 5"79 had their string of three number one singles in
1970); a week after that it reached the top 10 on the Hot 100 chart. Thriller finally reached
number one on the LP chart in the last week of February, and "Billie Jean" achieved primacy on
the Hot 100 one week later on March 5. With over 90% of black and AOR stations playing the
song often, and with such swift success on the charts, the label and Jackson decided a music
video was overdue.

They decided to use Steve Barron, a British director who had developed a reputation for
his videos after his 1981 video for The Human League's "Don't You Want Me" became a
touchstone for the emerging genre. Still finding their place, music videos ranged from simple lip-
synched performances to elaborate and opaque concept films. Barron shot videos with plots and
more firmly linear stories, something that, in 2010, he recalled appealed to Jackson: "He had seen
don't you want me and he liked the cinematic edge of that. He really was looking for something

75
Grein, "Michael Jackson Cut Breaks AOR Barrier."
76
"Hot 100," Billboard, January 22, 1983.
77
"Top Singles Picks: Michael Jackson, 'Billie Jean'," Billboard, January 22, 1983: 69.
78
"Radio Additions," Billboard, January 29, 1983.
79
"Chartbeat," Billboard, February 12, 1983: 6.

49
magical."80 Jackson didn't come to the table with an idea for the video, and Barron suggested a
treatment he'd originally come up with for another band referencing the Midas touch by having
different parts of the set light up when touched. "I thought he had wonderful ideas," Jackson
recalled to MTV in 1999, "but I let him go with it. The only part I wrote in the piece was I said, 'I
just want a section—' I said, 'Just give me a section where I can dance.'"81 Barron agreed and they
set a date to film. The original idea for the set was far more elaborate than what the budget
eventually allowed, and he ended up with only eleven sidewalk stones that lit up (as well as a
number of other elements, including a lamppost and a trash can). What at first seemed like an
obstacle, however, ended up not even being a nuisance because the performance Michael turned
in was truly extraordinary. Barron recalled:
"What I had planned for him in terms of walking on the street and the dances and things
is that all the paving stones were being directed, so pressure—he'd step on one and the
light would come on. Of course with our budget the director couldn't deliver what he'd
promised and when I got onto the set on the day I had to take Michael through what
worked and what didn't. And I said 'Unfortunately we've only got eleven of these stones
that light up.' And I said this is one this one and those two and then you've got to skip that
one and then those two and that one, and Michael goes 'Okay, okay, that's fine.' And I
said, do you like to rehearse, and go through it, we can spend a bit of time on it, and he
goes, 'No, just let me just do it,' so we yank the track, the chorus, the chorus came up
really loud, filled the stage, and then he started.
And he moved onto the first stone and moved onto his toes and then he spun around and
as I was moving the camera back I was pretty gobsmacked at what I was seeing. It had
moved to a completely different plane from anything I'd ever seen before, and the
eyepiece literally steamed up and I could hardly, by the end of the take it was so steamed
up from my energy and my energy seeing this energy I could hardly see through it. But I
saw enough to see that this was phenomenal. That this was something that was about to
be launched on the world that was going to go beyond what we had ever known
before."82

Jackson's performance is the key to why "Billie Jean" (and then shortly after it, "Beat It")
was the spark that finally lit the fire under Thriller. I've already discussed the potency of the
musical performance, and at the end of my last chapter I tried to emphasize that Michael's
musical performances were inextricably linked to his bodily interpretation of the sound. To
reiterate, Jackson consumed music with the totality of his body; all of his producers over the
years have recalled that they knew they had recorded a truly good song when it made him dance.
More than any other performer of his time or since, Jackson composed for performance. The
overall story of his life and his meteoric rise to stardom as a child is linked to him being a dance

80
The Music Video Exposed: Steve Barron. Broadcast by VH1 Classic, February 26, 2010. 0:01-0:02.
81
VH1 Classic, The Music Video Exposed: Steve Barron, 0:02.
82
VH1 Classic, The Music Video Exposed: Steve Barron, 0:02-0:03.

50
prodigy, for it was not just the extraordinary voice that got America's attention in 1970, it was
also his incredible moves. He learned from watching James Brown perform first on television,
and then from the stage wings, absorbing every shuffle and spin. "I'd stare at their feet," he
recalled of his days on the Chitlin' Circuit, "the way they held their arms, the way they gripped a
microphone, trying to decipher what they were doing and why they were doing it. After studying
James Brown from the wings, I knew every step, every grunt, every spin and turn."83 Brown and
Jackie Wilson, another regular performer on the circuit and at the Apollo Theater in New York
(where the Jackson 5 took up a kind of residency, winning amateur nights before they were
picked up by Motown), were probably the most important influences for Jackson's dance style,
along with street dancers. A handful of professional choreographers who were still involved in
the street dance scene, like Vincent Patterson and Michael Peters who both became regular
Jackson collaborators, kept the star connected to the emerging styles of breakdancing, including
popping and, most crucially, a move known as the backslide or moonwalk.

Though "Billie Jean" and the moonwalk are forever linked in the public imagination, it
doesn't appear anywhere in the video. Instead, Jackson seems to be combining Brown and
Wilson's frenetic footwork, popping's angularity and sharpness, and Fred Astaire's easy grace into
a style that was immediately and distinctly his own. Clad in a slim-cut black leather suit (the
pants are cut a few inches above his slim ankles, instantly and permanently becoming part of his
stylistic signature), light pink shirt with small red bowtie, light pink socks and black and white
wingtip shoes, his face soft and rich brown, his hair curled into a loose Jheri curl, Jackson struts,
skips, spins, and pops up on his toes, his every move lit from below. The choice to wear his pants
short and with white, sparkling or brightly colored socks was intentional; it ensured that people
watched his feet when he danced. Combined with the sidewalk's bright glow the result is that
Jackson looks truly otherworldly, like a celestial creature floating and spinning his way down a
dirty Los Angeles street. It's exactly that magic Jackson and Barron had been looking to capture.
To enhance it, Barron strategically employs the freeze-frame, capturing Jackson with his fists
clenched in agony, popping his collar, and perched weightlessly on his toes. The frozen images
are shown on their own, in pairs, and in groups of three; Barron also focuses on certain body parts
at key moments, cutting out his sparkling eyes or using a shot of his hands, thumbs confidently
extended, and then an overlaid video of him moving into that position before letting the
movement resume. Several long shots of Jackson dancing along an empty street with a large

83
Jackson, Moonwalk, 47.

51
billboard are thus cut and dispersed through the video; the original treatment, intended to be the
centerpiece, becomes an interesting but unnecessary side story as his body becomes the real star.

The rest of the video involves Jackson walking sullenly along an anonymous and dirty
Los Angeles street as he is stalked by a private eye/paparazzo. The paparazzo tries to capture him
on film a number of times, perhaps to disprove his musical claim that "Billie Jean is not my
lover," but fails each time. As Jackson walks and dances his way to a hotel room the sidewalk
lights up under his feet; when he pauses to shine his shoe on a trash can or lean against a light
post, those objects light up as well. At one point he tosses a quarter into a homeless man's cup.
The cup glows brighter and brighter until suddenly the sleeping homeless man, in rags, wakes up
to find himself clad in a white tuxedo with a red bowtie and cummerbund. When Jackson drops
the tiger-striped rag he used to clean his shoe, it transforms into a tiger (together these images
recall Thriller's cover picture, which features Jackson in a white suit posing with a tiger cub).
Eventually he makes it to the hotel, holding a finger to his lips when a neighbor notices him
climbing the fire escape to his lover's room. His steps light up the stairs and the hotel sign; the
paparazzo follows and the woman picks up the phone to dial the police. Jackson contemplates his
lover's bed, eyeing the lump of her body beneath the sheets, and then climbs in fully clothed. The
bed glows white, the paparazzo tries one last time to take a picture, but by the time the glow has
faded Jackson has disappeared, his form totally invisible under the covers. In the video's final
seconds the police come and arrest the paparazzo and, on the street below, we see the sidewalk
tiles light up as an invisible Jackson makes his escape.

This video in many way sets the standard for all subsequent Jackson videos and along
with "Beat It" redefines the standards for the new genre. Though in the end "Beat It" may be the
more obviously influential piece, it is crucial to recognize "Billie Jean's" role in introducing the
public to a set of visual signifiers that become instantly and permanently associated with Michael
Jackson as an American icon and superstar. First, there is the style. New Wave and British pop
had employed a number of different flamboyant hairstyles, makeup trends, and fashion trends, so
color or unusual cut were far from unknown to the American youth at the time. Jackson, however,
presents a distinctively black stylistic sensibility. His hair gestures to the pompadours and long
hairstyles of Little Richard, Chuck Berry and James Brown. The Jheri curl had been around for a
while, and was as assertively black as the Afro had been a decade earlier (the style in which the
Jackson 5 had worn their hair). The combination of hard leather and feminine pink in his clothing
came from a distinctly black sense of style as well. White artists preferred to either present

52
themselves as futuristically masculine or effeminate; though they would both be referenced later
as part of the "new androgyny," there is a palpable difference between the gender bending of Boy
George and stylistic flair of Michael Jackson. The gestures to effeminacy seen in the color
choices is balanced by the tribute to street hardness in the leather clothes worn by break dancers
and cool inner-city youth. Second, there is his dancing. Jackson was as voracious a consumer of
dance as he was of music; by many accounts he continued to take dance classes in all the basic
styles (jazz, tap, ballet, hip hop) regularly until he died in 2009, as well as learning from countless
musicals, movies, and fine arts performances. Yet when we think of Michael Jackson the dancer,
the images that come to mind are strikingly consistent. We think of the sharp and unbelievably
precise movements, the astonishing speed at which he was able to move (the video introduces his
signature whip kick, when his outstretched leg jerks back and forth so quickly you can miss it
with a blink), and his apparent ability to defy gravity.

The combination of Jackson's exceptional performance and Barron's directorial skills

produced a video whose MTV appeal was readily apparent to all involved, yet when it was first
submitted to the channel it was rejected out of hand for not complying to the station's format.
"When we first finished it we heard that MTV probably wouldn't play it because it wasn't in the
demographic or whatever and that nearly became an explosive situation,"84 Barron recalled. But
CBS Records, recognizing the video's potency, refused to let it go that easily. "The widespread
rumor has it that CBS Records threatened to pull all its clips from MTV unless it aired 'Billie
Jean,'"85 Rolling Stone reported (and other magazines and trade journals, like Billboard, also
helped this legend spread). At the time, and in all the years since, CBS Records, MTV and Walter
Yetnikoff (president of the label) have all categorically denied that threat was made, but the
legend persists. We must assume that the video was met with quite a bit of resistance for the story
to even emerge in the first place, and considering Pittman's stringent policy of format-based
racism it's hard to imagine him giving up without a fight. "Billie Jean" is an aggressively black-
sounding pop song, rooted in funk and soul and lacking the rock undertones that propelled "Beat
It" to equivalent heights. It did not just break MTV's unspoken ban on putting black faces on
screen, it broke the channel's spoken policy of keep black sounds out of suburban white ears.
However the negotiations went down, the end result is that "Billie Jean" was not just added to
MTV's playlist, but added in heavy rotation (guaranteeing the song would be played about once
an hour). This was the first time any black artist had a video added to the heavy rotation playlist.

84
VH1 Classic, The Music Video Exposed: Steve Barron, 0:04.
85
Steven Levy, "Ad Nauseum: How MTV Sells Out Rock 'n' Roll," Rolling Stone, December 8, 1983: 37.

53
When "Billie Jean" premiered on MTV in March 1983, in heavy rotation, Michael Jackson
effectively and permanently destroyed the channel's color line.

The reaction to "Billie Jean" was immediately and overwhelmingly positive. Barron's
ethereal setting and camerawork combined with Michael's superhuman dancing captured the
imagination of the American public. The video helped keep "Billie Jean" at the top of the Hot 100
chart for seven weeks; moreover, it was insanely popular amongst MTV's youthful and white
audience, disproving Pittman's research that insisted those kids "didn't like black people or their
music."86 It also led to another boost in sales for Thriller as it became appealing to a whole new
audience, one not often reached by black music. It is in this moment – and more intensely in the
moments that follow over the next 10 weeks – that Jackson begins his act of unprecedented
cultural integration. Despite the blackness of his image and performance in "Billie Jean," what
white suburban fans latched onto was the power of his performance, that magnetic yet
inarticulable something that distinguishes harbingers of pop explosions from simply talented
performers. There is true magic in Jackson's performance, magic that made the sidewalk glowing
under his feet seem not like a music video gimmick but something that surely must happen as he
walks down the street. The energy that fogged up Barron's camera lens shot through our
television screens unadulterated and, in that moment, Michael Jackson became something much
more than a simple superstar.

The reaction to "Billie Jean" also ensured one other important thing: that the video for
"Beat It" would get made and would get played. For his second video (which he was already
filming when "Billie Jean" broke MTV's color line), Jackson hired Bob Giraldi, known for his
Miller Lite commercials, to direct a gritty short film for the rock song. Giraldi eagerly agreed, and
the two set about creating a concept. They decided that the video would be shot on the real Skid
Row – a dangerous part of East Los Angeles – and would show Jackson intervening in a gang
fight, stopping the violence with the power of music. They also decided they would use real gang
members to flesh out the crowd scenes. The concept was elaborate and the price tag matched, at a
reported $150,000. Though record companies were recognizing the importance of music videos
more than ever before, such an exorbitant price tag was practically unheard of in the industry at
the time, and then only for already-established rock legends like David Bowie. Unsurprisingly,
CBS Records refused to provide the money for the video. Instead of capitulating to his record

86
Levy, "Ad Nauseum," 37.

54
company, as other artists would have had to, Jackson simply told them he would fund the video
by himself, and retain all artistic control and ownership of the copyright.

It's important to keep in mind the unique position Jackson occupied in the music industry
in 1983. As many media outlets were quick to point out as Thriller set and broke sales records for
the next year and a half, Jackson had been a star in the music industry since he was a 12 year old
fronting the Jackson 5 on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1970. Their unprecedented string of four
number one singles in 1970, several wildly successful group albums, and a string of successful
singles and albums as a solo act for Motown and then Epic Records in the 1970's had made
Jackson a wealthy man. This put him in an extremely unlikely and uncommon power relationship
with CBS Records and the industry at large in the moment when he was making his most
important crossover moves. Unlike other artists of his caliber and his age, he was not dependent
on the record label to fund all of his ventures. If he wanted a production far more extravagant and
expensive than the record company was willing to pay for, he could simply pay for it himself –
and he did. His wealth gave Jackson more agency than other black musicians at that time, and
would prove crucial to his pop explosion. These videos – even "Billie Jean," which got its
concept from its director instead of its star – are all partially or wholly financed by Jackson
himself, and in turn he was either co- or sole owner of the final product. As such, we can view
and interpret them as self-representations that are almost entirely unmediated by any person or
group other than Jackson. He controlled the production, the editing, and the final cut. He placed
his faith, money, and good will in the hands of directors he thought were the most talented and
innovative of the time, but in the end nothing was put on a screen that didn't have Jackson's full
approval. More than any other music videos of that time, or perhaps ever, "Billie Jean," "Beat It,"
and eventually "Thriller" exist as records of how Jackson saw himself and how he wanted the
public to see him.

How he wanted America to see him was as a black man. He spends "Beat It" navigating a
complex web of visual tableaus representing the struggles of young black men in America.
Jackson appears in this video every bit as sweaty and dirty as his co-stars; the privilege of his
wealth and fame is erased from his body from the first moment we see him. He is lying on his
stomach on a twin bed in a cheap, Spartan high-rise apartment where you imagine one must hear
police sirens at all hours of the night. His white shirt and red pants emphasize his brown skin, his
hair is dark and shining and curly, but slightly deflated by the heat. He looks like every good-
looking ghetto black teenager roaming the streets of Los Angeles (though, once again, his pants

55
are too short and his white socks and black loafers are on display; he may be playing an everyman
but he will not let you forget he's Michael Jackson). While the two gangs are integrated the racist
association of gang violence with primarily black youth casts Jackson automatically in solidarity
with these gang members even as his function in the video is to stop the violence (with dance, of
course). It is interesting to note that Giraldi chose to light the video stingily, so that the not-so-
bright lights of the abandoned bar or pool hall are the only moments when Jackson is fully lit, and
lit only to the point of exposing his black heritage. In the rest of the video Jackson is in low light
or shadow, darkening him. The record company most likely would have insisted that Jackson be
over-lit for this video, whitening him to make him more palatable for the elusive and necessary
suburban white audience. Jackson, on the other hand, insists on his darkening, on confronting the
audience with the reality of his blackness.

Jackson also reclaims his connection to the lives of the poor and the underprivileged even
though he hasn't been either of those things in fifteen years. Jackson's decade-plus in the industry
served to erase for many (especially white) critics his connection to the African American
experience of poverty and racism. Though many noted he was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1958, few
chose to dwell on what that meant. Gary was a steel industry town with a majority black
population. It was poor and suffered early from deindustrialization. It also served as a Midwestern
center for Civil Rights organizing, hosting rallies and conferences of black leaders. Moreover, it
was only 30 miles away from Chicago and intimately connected to the racial politics of that urban
center. Jackson remembered Civil Rights vividly, and remembered the 1968 Chicago and Detroit
race riots. Though he was not an overtly political superstar, refusing until the early 90's to openly
address politics in either his music or his public appearances, Jackson does infuse his music and
performance with the essence of the black struggle in America. His success is part of the
achievement of integration that he enacts, but more important he finds a way through these songs
and videos to imbricate black youth experience back into the mainstream narrative of American
youth and adolescence.

"Beat It" confronts the harsh reality of normative black American life head on and turns it
into a mesmerizing pop performance. Jackson stops the violence of the gang fight in the
warehouse simply by placing a hand on each leader's chest, pushing them apart, and beginning to
dance. They fall into step behind him with no resistance or skepticism with the rest of the gang
members joining in a moment later. Though the real gang members remain on the sidelines (the
dancing is left to the professionals), stories from the set tell of Jackson's real-life peacemaker

56
abilities. Giraldi recalled that the Crips members (distinguished in the crowd by their blue
clothing and bandanas) had been grown disgruntled by the long waits on set, and crew members
were starting to become seriously concerned about their safety. Then, Michael appeared on set in
full regalia (the red leather jacket, blue shirt, and black pants that became instantly iconic after the
video was released) and these big, burly, dangerous men instantly calmed down and glanced at
him in awe. Michael moved easily through the crowd, greeting everyone personally and asking
them if they were having fun. That was the first and last time anyone on the set felt the threat of
violence. The story sounds overblown and suspiciously messianic but it's one of many variations
on the same theme. Simply, there is something special about Jackson, the way there was
something special about the Beatles 20 years before. That specialness is as potent in person as it
is through his videos; Leon Schwartz, a 10 year old boy who was inspired by "Beat It" to learn to
breakdance from older kids who attended once-weekly Hebrew school at his Jewish day school,
explained to Newsweek, "Michael Jackson sent out the word to stop fighting and start dancing,"87
which is exactly what he did.

"Beat It" was even more popular on MTV than "Billie Jean" had been, providing the
spark that lit the short fuse for Michaelmania's explosion. That explosion happened on May 16,
1983, when NBC broadcast a television special called Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever
commemorating Motown Records and produced by Suzanne DePasse. Word about the special
had been floating around since it was filmed on March 25, 1983, and covered two basic topics.
The first was that the special was largely underwhelming and Motown's brightest stars like Diana
Ross had not just failed to impress, but had acted cattily towards their former label- and group-
mates. The second was that the performance of the night had come first from the Jackson 5
reunion (touted because it featured all original members including Jermaine, who had chosen to
stay with Motown in 1975 when the rest of the group had moved to Epic Records and changed
their name to The Jacksons) and then from Michael's solo performance of "Billie Jean." Buzz
about that performance grew over the month and a half between filming and broadcast, but no
concrete details leaked. Originally Michael turned down Berry Gordy's request to be on the
program, as agreeing would necessarily force him to perform with his brothers. Gordy asked him
to participate shortly after Thriller was released, and when Jackson wanted to distance his career
from his career with his brothers more than ever. As first Gordy and then DePasse, who had
forced Gordy to watch the Jackson 5's audition video in 1968, begged him to sign on he
negotiated, saying he'd agree if he was allowed to perform his new single "Billie Jean" by himself

87
"Breaking Out: America Goes Dancing," Newsweek, July 2, 1984: 49.

57
after his Jackson 5 set. Desperate to add his name to the bill they agreed, and unwittingly
scheduled a performance that would change pop history. "May 16, 1983," Richard Harrington
wrote in the Washington Post almost a year after Motown 25 aired. "That's Michael Jackson's
media birthday, as much as Feb. 8, 1964 (the Ed Sullivan Show) was for the Beatles, as much as
Sept. 9, 1856 (also the Sullivan show), was for Elvis Presley,"88

What happened on Motown 25 goes something like this: About mid-way through the
show, the original Jackson 5 plus youngest brother (and Jacksons member) Randy take the stage
for their reunion. They're all happy, beaming to the audience. They run through a medley of their
early hits: "I Want You Back," "The Love You Save," "Never Can Say Goodbye" (Michael's first
Motown solo hit), and "I'll Be There." The rendition of "I'll Be There" is particularly soulful and
moving, and ends with a big brotherly hug between Jermaine and Michael. The brothers wave as
they exit the stage, leaving Michael dressed in his high-water black pants, white socks, black
loafers, silver sequined shirt and a black sequined cardigan sweater he'd borrowed from his
mother's closet, as well as his soon-to-be-signature white sparkling glove, in the spotlight. "Thank
you," he says in his high, soft voice, "You're beautiful! Yeah, those were the good ol' days. I love
those songs. Those were magic moments with all my brothers, including Jermaine. But, uh, those
were good songs. I like those songs a lot. But especially I like… the new songs." His microphone
is back on its stand now; a black fedora appears in his hand. The rest of the stage lights dim as the
first beat of "Billie Jean" explodes from the speakers and, in perfect time, Jackson slams the hat
down on his head. The dancing in this performance is completely different from what was
featured in the video. Jackson rocks his pelvis sharply in time with the beat, kicks one leg out in
front of him, then turns and does the same with the other, slapping his thigh confidently. When
the synthesizer chords begin he flings the hat offstage, mimes combing his hair, and begins to
flick his ankles on beat with astounding speed and precision. The crowd is already cheering and
clapping along and he hasn't even started singing yet. Jackson's performance is full of youthful
verve and confidence, hypersexual arrogance, and sultry provocation. He dances freely, building
upon the musical phrasing with his body. His feet skitter, his ankles whip, and his pelvis thrusts
suggestively through each verse, building in intensity until, just before the chorus, he must either
jump or stamp the excess energy out. As the camera pulls back into the audience we see about
half of the professionals and industry veterans in attendance standing to dance and clap along –
one woman's hand sways in the bottom of the shot like she's in church. Then we reach the bridge.

88
Richard Harrington, "Who Is He?: Somewhere Over the Rainbow With the Enigma of the '80s."
Washington Post, March 18, 1984: L1.

58
With each "Hoo!" Jackson points out towards the audience. He pauses in profile, knees bent, hips
cocked, and looks from side to side. And then he executes the move that will forever be
associated with him and him alone: he moonwalks. Sliding backwards across the stage three long
steps, he then pauses, spins three times in a row, then abruptly comes to a stop on the very tips of
his toes. The audience screams in shock, awe and adoration and for the final choruses they are
oddly muted, as if they've all been stunned into silence. When Jackson finishes, posed with hand
raised triumphantly high in the air, they leap to their feat, cheering and applauding. Jackson stares
defiantly out at them, eyes blazing, panting as he slowly comes back from whatever transcendent
realm he'd traveled to and then his façade breaks, exposing a truly delighted grin before he gives
a deep bow. At home, viewers cheered and squealed. "In a constellation of superstars, there was a
single backwards-walking, swirling-dervish, stick-thin supernova," Harrington remembered,
"There had been an original Jackson Five reunion, and then there had been Michael's solo spot, a
transcendent moment that arrived to the beat of 'Billie Jean.' The transformation was as visceral
as the one we'd see six months later in 'Thriller.' And the next morning, Michael Jackson's name
was on the smiling lips of America."89

It is not a perfect performance. When the camera cuts in close it's clear Jackson's
microphone is no longer on – he appears to be singing, but we're hearing the record cut of his
song. And the toe-stand that caps off his moonwalk/spin sequence over the bridge is too short;
Jackson planned the choreography in threes: three moonwalk steps, three spins, three seconds
standing on his toes. He hits the toe-stand wrong, and maintains it for only a moment. Yet even
after many viewings, enough to make the flaws not just visible but glaring, it still inspires in any
audience the same chest-tightening thrill you feel the very first time. It is a moment, captured
almost unintentionally on film, of a star exploding into a superstar, a genius finding the correct
creative foothold, and a pop explosion exploding. It's rare for the energy of a live performance to
successfully be transmitted through a television screen and arrive in the home with as much
potency but this energy does not just transmit well, it sustains its freshness and excitement
through repeated viewings. The sheer glee of the audience witnessing the moonwalk for the first
time remains contagious 28 years later, an astounding feat for a dance move that is so ubiquitous
in contemporary popular culture. "Dance, as cultural form, and sexual ritual," explains Kobena
Mercer, "is a mode of decoding the sound and meaning articulated in the music."90 The power of

89
Harrington, "Who Is He?" L1.
90
Kobena Mercer, "Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson's Thriller," in Welcome to the Jungle:
New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, New York (Routledge, 1994), 39.

59
Jackson's performance on Motown 25 is rooted in the exceptional decoding abilities he had in his
body, and in the potency of the translation received by the audience watching in awe at home.

There is no underestimating the importance and profound impact of the Motown 25

performance. For one thing, it became the template for every single live performance of "Billie
Jean" that Jackson would perform for the rest of his life. By the time he stopped touring in the
late 1990's, his moonwalks and toe stands had become to stuff of pop legend. But in the most
immediate sense, it did for Jackson what Sullivan had done for The Beatles and Elvis: it pushed
him from the realm of mere superstardom to pure American iconography, turning him into a
phenomenon. Yes, he'd been a household name for many for some time. But on the morning of
May 17, 1983, the words "Michael Jackson" suddenly meant something entirely new. He was
now a symbol of genius, of the energy and vitality of youth in its positive, productive forms, the
embodiment of a new American, a new pop star, and a new hero for young Americans black and
white. Sales of Thriller (which was already sitting atop the LP charts thanks to the power of his
music videos) shot through the roof. Children and teenagers began searching for that sparkling
white glove, began cuffing their pants well above their ankles, and began trying to hunt down
black sequined jackets for themselves. Teenage girls of all races declared their love for Jackson
and their intention of marrying him. Teenage boys of all races declared their intention to become
him. Everyone began devoting hours a day to learning to moonwalk. The country went absolutely
crazy. For the rest of the summer the words "Michael Jackson" were always on the tip of
everyone's tongue.

Over the summer of 1983, in the wake of the Motown 25 performance, we see the
Marcus's pop explosion begin to manifest. The "walk, talk, dress, symbolism, heroes, family
affairs" he uses to define "the surface of everyday life" that is so profoundly affected by the pop
explosion are immediately molded by Jackson. His style becomes the hottest trend. His goody-
two-shoes persona which would have only undermined his credibility as a rock/pop icon in the
past is seen as both attractive and in some ways irrelevant; teenagers, girls especially, are more
inclined to focus on how sexy he is, how good of a singer and dancer he is, how stylish his
clothes are, and his impressive music videos. He becomes the standard-setter for MTV with bands
and solo artists clamoring to work with Steve Barron and Bob Giraldi, trying to replicate the
phenomenon for themselves. And, perhaps most importantly, adults are utterly baffled. Though
his music and style are not as immediately alienating of the older generation as The Beatles or
Elvis, and though some adults (who were fans of Jackson in his younger years) jump on the

60
Thriller bandwagon as eagerly as their children, the vast majority of adults, critics, journalists and
other "establishment" folk cannot make heads or tails of this phenomenon. Unlike the Beatles or
Elvis, no one goes so far as to question his innate talent, but most cannot understand what it is
about him that makes their children go so damn crazy. Jackson is "[dividing] society itself by
age."

In Michael Jackson, American youth find an identity that was both familiar and novel. As
an entertainer, he challenged staid and overwhelmingly white representations of youth that, due to
their origins in rock 'n' roll and the baby boomer generation, had become simultaneously iconic
and institutionalized. Though the idea of adolescence and adolescents has existed since the turn of
the 19th century, what "teenagers" and "teenage culture" constitutes to the average American are
ethics and identities linked with archetypes that emerged in the 1950's and 1960's through the
movie and music industries, perhaps most crucially through rock. Domestic- and community-
based rebellious activity in the 1950's transformed into statewide and national political
involvement and protest in the 1960's. Of course, as a black-born musical subgenre, rock had
from its inception been associated with rebellion but when rock musicians openly took up the
cause in the late '60s the relationship became codified and, eventually, institutionalized. By the
1980's Americans expected their rock (and, thanks to the Beatles' genre-bending sound, pop) to
shock, offend, or at least attempt to fight against the mainstream tide. What many didn't seem to
realize was that their very expectations had become the center of the mainstream. Jackson is a
superstar superficially unconcerned with being perceived as rebellious in any traditional sense.
He professed an admiration of traditional show business and for atypical (for a black performer)
musical genres including musicals, classical and folk.91 In his rare interviews he spoke openly
about his love for his mother and family, his closeness to his brothers and sisters, and the fact that
he still lived at home. He admired, to the point of fetishization, Disney, Peter Pan, E.T. and
children. In many ways as a person he seemed more engaged with pre-adolescents than with the
teenagers who formed the majority of his fan base. Yet his music, style, and performance spoke
to a more mature mind and artistic sensibility than any reprinted quote. When he sang and
especially when he danced, Jackson seemed very much a young man.

91
In the supersized summer 1983 issue of Rolling Stone Michael responded to a request to provide a short
summer mix-tape tracklist. Along with The Beatles and Sly and the Family Stone, he included "Oh! What a
Beautiful Morning!" from Oklahoma, "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music, and "Sunshine On
My Shoulders" by John Denver.

61
 By openly embracing that internal contradiction and presenting himself without elaborate
verbal justification as many of his peers did, Jackson conveyed to his fans that duality and
inconsistency was acceptable. Basically, he takes the implied notion that identity is always the
self-in-progress and makes it palpable. One need not conform to the obvious and stereotypical
signifiers of adolescence in order to authenticate their youth identity. Instead, embracing the full
scope of their personhood was a way to amass a cache of coolness that would act as social capital
amongst one's peers. And for young men especially, Jackson presents an alternative vision of
masculinity while simultaneously proving its appeal to young women. He's not a jock, he's not a
trauma-scarred loner (not in his public self-presentation, at least), and he's not a juvenile
delinquent, the three archetypes of female-attracting masculinity that emerged from the rock 'n'
roll explosion. In the context of black masculinity in particular, he is quite the anomaly. Locating
Jackson's work, the context for his particular androgyny, "entirely in the Afro-American tradition
of popular music and thus must be seen in the context of imagery of black men and black male
sexuality," Mercer points out: "Jackson not only questions dominant stereotypes of black
masculinity, but also gracefully steps outside the existing range of 'types' of black men."92 Mercer
is pointing to the ways in which Jackson combines elements of idealized black masculinity, like
commitment to nuclear family and sturdy religiosity, with elements of aberrant black masculinity
like his slender frame, androgynous style, high voice and passive nature, to create a black
masculinity that is quite novel. There is a certain amount of aggressiveness expected in teenage
male identities and culture, black or white, that Jackson simply disregards, and when it does come
out in his performances it does so without the undertone of machismo prevalent elsewhere,
"explicitly refus[ing] a bellicose model of manliness."93

Unlike Boy George, whose fame was concurrently rising and who as a gay man openly
embraced femininity as well as androgyny, Michael's performances maintained a sense of
masculinity that allows our reading of him as androgynous or sexless to go only so far. His dance
and stage performance embodies strength, aggression, power and confidence, four markers of
traditional heterosexual masculinity that are easily recognizable across the spectrum of American
identities, but his everyday performance of blackness and maleness superficially stands in
contrast to those. Looking at the cover of the Thriller LP, Mercer sees the tiger cub draped across
his knee as "a brilliant little metaphor for the ambiguity of Jackson's mage as a black male pop
star. This plays on the star's 'man-child' image and suggests a domesticated animality, hinting at

92
Mercer, "Monster Metaphors," 50.
93
Mercer, "Monster Metaphors," 50.

62
menace beneath the cute and cuddly surface. Jackson's sexual ambiguity makes a mockery out of
the menagerie of received images of masculinity"94 (emphasis mine). He refuses neat
categorization, which can by this point is easily applied to models of teenage rebellion alongside
the normative categories we define identities against. Adults, and in particular the baby boomers
who had helped institutionalize adolescence in the first place, found the embodiment of these two
extremes of maleness confusing, but young Americans were wildly attracted to it. To them it was
liberating for many reasons, not the least being that it was different from their parents' adolescent
rebellion. When Steven Stark, a Harvard law lecturer and culture writer, chastises Jackson for
being "a symbol of a youth culture stripped of defiance,"95 he misses the point of Jackson's
representation of youth. Stark can only think of defiance as understood by mid-century rock's
political and cultural standards, and though he recognizes adolescence's institutionalization he
thinks that Jackson represents an Establishment-friendly performer who can help keep the masses
of teenager consumers attached to capitalist ends. He naively insists that the "many of the
hostilities that fueled the youth culture had disappeared"96 by the 1980's, as if the 1965 Civil
Rights Act and the de-escalation of the Vietnam War had actually effected the structural causes of
their injustices in ways other than the most superficial. He doesn't seem to understand that
assuming rebellion in the 1950's, the 1960's and the 1980's would look the same and use the same
cultural signifiers is faulty in its premise. Different times produce different problems, and are
populated by different people who will cope in different ways. Sit-ins, love-ins, and another
Woodstock would not seem like rebellion to a teenager in 1983; instead, they'd be acting like
their parents had when they were young. And is anything as repulsive to a teenager than being
like their parents?

The power of Jackson's influence eventually becomes front-page news when high school
students in Bound Brook, New Jersey, gain national attention for fighting a school ban on
wearing Jackson-inspired clothing, specifically studded belts and single white glove. "About 60
students, along with 70 parents and teachers, attended the board meeting to back up protests
contained in a petition signed by more than 280 youths who want the right to mimic the outfits
worn by Jackson,"97 the Washington Post reported. School officials tried a number of tactics to
explain their decision, variously declaring that the attire (and the glove was focused on more than
any other accessory) was a violation of school dress code, that it was distracting in the classroom,

94
Mercer, "Monster Metaphors," 47.
95
Steven Stark, "Michael's Moonwalk Out of Adolescence." Hartford Courant, May 27, 1984, p. B4
96
Stark, "Michael's Moonwalk," B4.
97
"Students Protest Ban on Attire," Washington Post, March 13, 1984, C12.

63
and that it could signal gang membership. "It's nice for Michael Jackson to wear a glove,"
Superintendant Edward J. Rachford, told the Chicago Tribune when the newspaper covered
similar actions taken at public schools in the Chicago metropolitan area, "but this is the Chicago
metropolitan area and in this area it's a gang symbol."98 It's exceedingly difficult to imagine that
officials in New Jersey and Chicago would have made these same claims if the white glove was
something worn by a white star. They may have sought to ban the glove because it was a
distraction all the same, but the racially charged language surrounding these particular conflicts
cannot be ignored, especially since gang membership is essentially racially coded to begin with.

If we remove the language of criminality from this debate, we can see another way in
which the glove symbolizes an unacceptable threat to the status quo by signaling a new cultural
and identity-based affiliation between white and black teenagers. It may not signal membership to
a criminal gang, but the white sequined glove does signal membership to the vast American
Michael Jackson fan base, a fully integrated group of youths who idolize a black superstar.
School officials may not want to say it – they may not even be aware they are thinking it – but
their swift disciplinary action implies that this kind of racial mixing and interracial social
allegiance is a threat to the order of the school and to society in general. If black and white
teenagers can be on the same page about one thing, why can't they agree on many more things?
The last time allegiances formed over racial lines deep and ugly wounds were inflicted upon
American culture, forcing changes to law and to social status quos in order to allow African
Americans more fully into citizenship. As I've shown, much of what followed those changes tried
to reinscribe the segregated standards of living on this new terrain. Now that work is being
undone once more, and that undoing is being sartorially signaled to all Americans. It's an
unacceptable situation and those who protect the status quo sweep in as soon as they can to try to
prevent it. They succeed only in keeping the accessories out of schools; the bonds of cross-racial
allegiance are already formed and too strong to be broken by such trivial objections.

Though the summer of 1983 belonged unequivocally to Michael Jackson, he made

startlingly few public appearances. And though he released three more singles ("Wanna Be
Startin' Something," "Human Nature" and "P.Y.T."), he didn't film videos to accompany them.
On MTV, "Beat It" and "Billie Jean" remained heavy-rotation staples, and he dominated the
radio, but Jackson himself remained scarce. His influence and popularity, however, continued to

98
Robert Davis and Casey Banas, "Jackson attire fails to thrill principals," Chicago Tribune, March 14,
1984, A1.

64
grow. Americans, white Americans especially, developed a more vested interest in dance,
particularly street styles of breakdancing. Fashion began to respond to his high-water pants and
especially to that single sequined glove. Sales continued to not just hold strong, but grow. In
1984 Newsweek mused, "Jackson's videos helped him pull of an unprecedented feat: for well over
a year, with scarcely any new music, few public appearances and without any of the live
performances that traditionally have effected a symbiotic fusion between audience and artist, the
interest in him was not only sustained but intensified."99 The magazine calls our attention to a
crucial difference between Michaelmania and the manias that have preceded it, namely the lack
of live performances taking place immediately after the initial cultural explosion. Elvis and The
Beatles both launched comprehensive American tours in the wake of their initial bursts of
popularity, ensuring that their bond with the audience would be sustained through the gap
between the album that initiates the pop explosion and its follow-up. Jackson not only didn't tour,
he retreated almost entirely from public life. Instead, he left his videos and the Motown 25
performance to stand in for his physical presence, once again attesting to the incredible power of
his performance even as recorded and mediated by the television set. And just when his fans were
on the verge of begging for something new, something to augment the excitement of the videos
they now knew so well, Jackson announced a project beyond the scope of what anyone had
imagined for the music video in the first place. That fall his representatives spread the word that
Jackson was working on a short film for "Thriller," his next single, and that when he said "short
film" he meant it. Jackson had hired Jon Landis, director of Animal House, The Blues Brothers,
Trading Places, and An American Werewolf in London, to shoot a fourteen-minute film for which
Jackson planned a theatrical release that would, in turn, allow him to be considered for an Oscar.

An American Werewolf in London was the deciding factor in Jackson's choice to hire
Landis. He was enraptured with the physical transformations in the film, the special effects and
elaborate makeup, and thought Landis would be the perfect director to bring to life the horror
film-inspired "Thriller." Together they conceived an elaborate production that began with a film-
within-a-film, the initial sequence set in the 1950's in which Jackson and his girlfriend, played in
both iterations by Playboy playmate Ola Ray, break down on a drive home from a date. As they
walk, Jackson asks Ray to be his girlfriend and tells her, in that immortal line, "I'm not like other
guys" just before the clouds expose a full moon and he transforms into a werewolf and chases her
through the woods. The short film cuts from the chase to Jackson and Ray, now clearly in the
present time, watching the scene in a movie theater. Ray is scared and demands to leave, Jackson

99
"The Tour: The Money, The Magic," Newsweek, July 16, 1984: 69.

65
is clearly enjoying himself and rebuffs her request; she leaves. He follows her out of the theater,
teases her about being scared, and then as they walk home the song starts and he sings to her
about the fun of horror movies. As they pass a cemetery, zombies emerge from graves and
surround them, and as Ray tries to escape she turns and finds that Jackson too has turned into a
zombie. The zombies, led by Jackson, dance and then chase Ray to an old, abandoned Victorian
home. As they close in on her they scream—and the scene abruptly cuts to Jackson, once again
the human and caring boyfriend, shaking her awake on his couch, asking, "What's the matter?"
She dreamed the whole thing, you see, and Jackson helps her up with the promise, "C'mon. I'll
take you home." All seems to be right with the world again until, in the final second, Jackson
turns back to the camera and reveals the bright yellow cat eyes he had when he first turned into a
werewolf. The scene freezes as Vincent Price's eerie laugh echoes in our ears.

The video for "Thriller" transformed the music video much the same way that Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band transformed the music album. It elevated the form to art, and
set a standard above even Jackson's previous releases to which all pop artists would forever
aspire. It also provided Jackson's vast audience, including professional critics and scholars, with
an artifact with which to attempt to decode and understand the man and his phenomenon.
"Neither child nor man, not clearly either black or white and with an androgynous image that is
neither masculine nor feminine," Kobena Mercer wrote in his lengthy examination of the video,
"Jackson's star-image is a 'social hieroglyph,' as Marx said of the commodity form which
demands, yet defies, decoding."100 A moment later he noted, "Unlike stars such as Lionel Richie,
Jackson has not 'crossed over from black to white stations to end up in the middle of the road: his
success has popularized black music in white rock and pop markets, by actually playing with
imagery and style that has always been central to the marketing of pop. In so doing, Jackson has
opened up a space…at the interface between the boundaries defined by 'race.'"101 "Thriller"
becomes the exemplary video through which to examine Jackson's social hieroglyph precisely
because it operates within this space that Mercer is pointing to, from its premise to its effect on
the population. Take, for example, the opening images of "Thriller," in which Jackson and Ray
play 1950's-era boyfriend and girlfriend. Jackson is dressed in a letterman's jacket, the hallmark
of the varsity athlete and signifier of high school popularity that was rarely afforded to black
teenager during Jim Crow. Also note that he is driving a car – it breaks down, enabling the walk
through the woods that exposes his lycanthropy – and that his confidence leaving it by the side of

100
Mercer, "Monster Metaphors," 35.
101
Mercer, "Monster Metaphors," 36.

66
the road (without fretting about an angry parent he'll have to answer to) implies that he might own
it. This image contradicts what we know of African American experience in the 1950's, especially
the experience of black teenagers who were never allowed into this kind of archetypal
adolescence in popular culture or real life. Without making sweeping generalizations about a
population with plenty of socioeconomic diversity, it is safe to assume that there were far fewer
black teenagers with their own cars in the 1950's than white teenagers. Yet Jackson as, at first
glance, archetypal teenage boy does not seem like much of a stretch now in 2011, nor did its
revisionism leap out at fans in 1983 and 1984. Critical race scholars like Mercer, however, took
sharp notice. They understood that Jackson was openly playing with character embodiment that
would not have been allowed in the past. As the star of "Thriller," Jackson was able to recast
blackness itself as normatively American and his audience, his fans, took in those images without
recognizing them as problematic. The very act of watching "Thriller" becomes an act of identity
transformation; a shift in expectations of what is included in "the norm."

Just because "Thriller" works to imbricate black adolescence visually into the web of
"normal" teenagehood, however, should not signal that Jackson embodies an unproblematic or
uncritical position through the piece. By the end of 1983, questions about Jackson's racial and
sexual identity had begun to circulate through the country via the popular media, questions that I
will address more fully in my next chapter. But just because the critical questioning of Jackson's
race, gender and sexual orientation should not be addressed here does not mean that those aspects
of his identity and self-presentation are irrelevant to our discussion of the mania surrounding him,
especially in relation to "Thriller." Mercer, like many subsequent scholars, fixates on Jackson's
ambiguities (as evidenced by his location of Jackson in the liminal spaces between child and man,
black and white, man and woman quoted above) especially as they are brought to life by the oft-
cited line of dialogue "I'm not like other guys." What an understatement! The line is rendered
more potent with each available reading of it: Jackson is not like other guys because he is black,
because he is non-normatively masculine, because he possesses uncommon talent, because he is
famous. His otherwise inarticulable specialness finds voice in this line, as does a kind of
doubleness. Jackson is at once what he knows he is and what we know he is, a private man and a
public star. The public star, by the time of "Thriller's" official television release in early 1984, has
become ubiquitous to the point of saturation but the private man remains a mystery because of his
overwhelming reticence. The schism between these two, the gap of unknowability, frustrates
critics and delights fans. For critics, it produces frustration because Jackson is refusing the
expected role of accommodating Negro that is still so pervasive among white folks in their view

67
of black identity and social status. Both as black man and as entertainer, they expect him to fulfill
what they see as an obligation to let his audience, vicious critics included, know who he really is
in what seems to be a call to verify authenticity. Because Jackson withholds this information,
critiques that he is inauthentic, empty, vapid, and a symbolic distraction from the noble cause of
black politics accumulate from white and black critics alike (again, this will be addressed fully in
the next chapter); borrowing from Mercer, "[the metamorphoses in "Thriller" play] on the
audience's awareness of Jackson's double role; thus, the credibility of the special effects violates
the image of the star himself…The very appearance of Jackson draws attention to the artificiality
of his own image."102 It is essential to remember that these critics are outsiders to the Jackson pop
explosion even if they are fans of his music and videos; a pop explosion, after all, "divides society
itself by age." To Jackson's young fans the unknowability of Jackson becomes another thing they
seek to emulate alongside his style or coolness. They recognize the refusal to capitulate to
hegemonic demands for insight into the personal as an act of rebellion they can take up, much as
their parents took up the Beatles' irreverence as reprimand to the serious adult world in the 1960's.

Perhaps the ways the youth took up Michael and his image in 1983 could have been
dismissed as a passing fad in 1984 if Thriller had begun to flag and fade by the end of the year. I
doubt a pop explosion could ever be stopped once it has started, mostly because the power of a
pop explosion comes from below, from the participation of an astounding number of American
youths who believe it is their right to like what they like and for what they like to be recognized
as legitimate in the face of its detractors. Perhaps if the establishment had refused to legitimize
Jackson's accomplishments the subsequent efforts to trivialize him and his influence would have
gained footing. But the establishment cannot withhold their accolades from Jackson anymore.
Jackson constructed Thriller as an album, a phenomenon, and a cultural artifact to be undeniable,
and in that he succeeded unequivocally. When the major music award nominations are announced
in the early weeks of 1984103, Jackson dominates them all. He is nominated for 10 American
Music Awards (and is nominated against himself in two categories), as well as being awarded a
special Award of Merit, and 12 Grammy Awards (again, competing in two categories against
himself) including a nomination for the narration he provided on the E.T. Storybook album. From
the start Jackson is considered a front-runner in eight Grammy categories, setting him up to
shatter the previous record for most Grammys won in one night, which was five. It is no surprise

102
Mercer, "Monster Metaphors," 48-49.
103
The Billboard Music Awards and Billboard Video Awards were held in 1983, and garnered Jackson 13
awards in the former and 5 awards in the latter.

68
that Jackson cleans up at the American Music Awards, but what should not escape us it Jackson's
wins for Favorite Male Artist, Favorite Album, and Favorite Video in both the Pop/Rock and
Soul/R&B categories. Just as "Beat It's" unexpected popularity on AOR and "Billie Jean's"
breaking of the MTV color line, these awards show explicitly the ways that Jackson and Thriller
are breaking down codified racial barriers in America. Since "Soul/R&B" is a euphemism for
"black," the wins in both the white and the black categories here at the AMAs show Jackson
occupying a space of pop stardom not delineated or defined by racial tropes. America testifies
through these awards that Jackson is not just the best black pop artist in America; he is the best
pop artist in America period.

Jackson is clearly delighted104 at the American Music Awards, which he attends with
Brooke Shields and Emmanuel Lewis (his dates for all of these award shows). His shyness never
fully recedes but a playful side not often shown but often insisted upon by his fans emerges. He
jokes about his soft-spokenness, leaning close to the microphone and asking "Can you hear me
now?" when he accepts his third award. He becomes giggly, laughing and raising a hand to
interrupt himself by saying "Hi" to no one and everyone during one of many acceptance speeches,
and ducks behind the podium in a moment of playful self-consciousness, drawing a huge cheer
from the audience. Accepting the award for Favorite Video for "Beat It," he thanks Bob Giraldi
without seeing him standing next to him and when he notices him a second later squeaks "Oh
Bob! Hi Bob!" He even breaks out a couple quick dance moves when accepting his Award of
Merit after a lengthy tribute. Dressed in his signature high-water pants, bright white socks,
loafers, a black sequined glove (instead of the otherwise iconic white glove) and a red sequined
military-style jacket with gold beaded embroidery, epaulettes and a gold-and-black sequined sash,
and with his dark aviator glasses and wet-look curls, he literally sparkles as the most iconic
representation of himself. When he attends the Grammys that March he wears a nearly identical
outfit, this time with the signature white glove and with the jacket rendered in royal blue. He
looks every bit the untouchable pop king receiving his coronation, but his demeanor undermines
the aloofness of that projection. Jackson's typical reservation gives way in the face of affirmation
and recognition by his peers, his fans, and the music establishment, a group notoriously unwilling
to recognize currently popular phenomena. The American Music Awards in the end mean less to
Jackson and to us than the Grammys because they are awards bestowed by the American public
and are just a reaffirmation of the public's love. Jackson makes sure to thank the public at large

104
"Michael Jackson American Music Awards 1984 Part 1,"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQCfhME2lmM accessed on March 25, 2011.

69
and his fans specifically in each acceptance speech, knowing that they are the reason for and site
of his transcendent success and not the music and culture establishment who would just as
happily revoke their blessings. The Grammys, on the other hand, are awarded by a body of music
elites who presume their tastes and judgment are superior to the average American. The
Grammys have lost much of their cultural capital unlike the equally trivial Oscars, but they
carried more weight in 1984. More importantly, their voters have historically been extremely
reluctant to recognize the achievements of black artists. Jackson wins eight Grammy awards on
March 10, 1984, the most Grammys won by any artist in one night,105 losing only to The Police's
"Every Breath You Take" in an upset for Song of the Year. He even wins the Grammy for
Recording for Children for the E.T. Storybook. Two awards he shares with Quincy Jones, for
Producer of the Year and the aforementioned Recording for Children. He also wins Best Pop
Vocal Performance – Male, Best Rock Vocal Performance – Male, and Best R&B Vocal
Performance – Male, once again enacting for all to see the destruction of the racial barriers
erected in the music industry.

At the Grammys, Jackson is more reserved than at the AMAs, and seems considerably
more overwhelmed. He brings his sisters up on stage at one point to stand with him and support
him, and seems to shrink a little bit more with each award as evidenced by a moment when,
accepting the record-setting eighth award for E.T., Quincy Jones meets him on stage by jumping
up and down with delight and grabbing him in an enthusiastic hug, all while Jackson stands
nearly stock-still, stunned. When he enters at the very beginning of the telecast and takes his seat
in the front row (once again with Shields and Lewis by his side), the theater erupts into deafening
cheers. This happens again and again, just about every time his name is mentioned by anyone,
and especially when he wins each award. But the loudest screams come late in the show when,
accepting his seventh award he announces, "I made a deal with myself that if I won one more
award, which is this award, which is seven, which is a record, that I would take off my glasses."
The crowd goes crazy (by now it is interrupting him constantly); he looks embarrassed and
continues, "Now, I don't want to take them off really but, um... But Katherine Hepburn, who is a
dear friend of mine, says I should and I'll do it for her, okay?" He pulls back from the mike, ready
to make good on his promise, then holds up his index finger and leans back down, "And for the
girls in the back."106 As soon as he says the words the screams start and they're amplified a

105
This record has since been tied but never broken.
106
"Michael Jackson Grammys 1984 Part 3,"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cYRbPHisMA&feature=related 3:25-3:58.

70
hundred times seconds later when he whips off the glasses and looks around, smiling shyly. One
of the keys to the Jackson mystique that so many adults found confusing was in the way he kept
his eyes covered by dark, impenetrable sunglasses at all times. Now, at the same moment his
Thriller-induced fame is reaching its zenith, those eyes are exposed for the world to see and they
reveal not an enigma, or a star-image, or a facsimile of a person, or an image created for the
purposes of public dissemination, but a young man who is brimming over with happiness. He
averts his gaze from the camera directly, waves, blows a kiss, and shuffles abashedly off stage
with his sisters surrounding him, but that glimpse was more than enough for us. When we see his
eyes we see the ways in which he could be us and we could be him; we see the individual that
creates the group, binds the group together, and attaches that group back to itself. And in that
moment we can also see his allegiance to that group he has created, the new American youth.
Jackson's sunglasses – which function, for him, as a shield to protect his vulnerable self (he
described himself to Rolling Stone reporter Gerri Hirshey as a "hemophiliac who can't afford to
be scratched in any way."107 ) – are not pried off in the name of his promise to himself ("I don't
want to, really") or even in the name of Katherine Hepburn, despite his mention of her; in the end,
he dedicates his unveiling to "the girls in the back," the representatives of his fans all over the
country who shower him with love and adoration, who have taken him on as their imaginative
boyfriend, lover, brother, leader. In the end, Jackson knows that he is most indebted not to the
academy or the industry, but to the millions of young Americans who saw enough of themselves
in Jackson and enough of Jackson in themselves to allow Michael to become the man and the pop
icon he always knew he was.

Jackson's awards sweep temporarily quiets his critics and galvanizes his fans, who return
to buying records, video tapes (The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller, aired as an hour-long
special on MTV, is repackaged with other previously released material onto VHS and quickly
becomes the highest selling home video of all time), and merchandise with all the enthusiasm of
the year before. Thriller jumps back to the number one spot on the Billboard LP charts. Having
spent a good chunk of the previous year reluctantly recording an album with his brothers, The
Jacksons' Victory is released to good (not great) reviews. Shortly thereafter, the brothers
announce they will be touring that summer. Though it is billed as a Jacksons tour – the Victory
Tour, named after the group's album – America reacts as though it is a Michael Jackson solo tour,
and everyone including music critics expect that to be the final result. Victory is an acceptable
R&B album with some great pop moments, but everyone knows that more than ever the main

107
Gerri Hirshey, "Michael Jackson: Life in the Magic Kingdom," Rolling Stone, February 17, 1983: 11.

71
attraction for audiences will be Michael. This puts Jackson, his image, his person, and his pop
explosion in a precarious position, caught between two sets of expectations. His family pressures
him into recording and then touring again with his brothers but Thriller is a clearly emancipatory
project, intended to establish Michael Jackson as a star and musical entity outside of his familial
group once and for all. In that it is a resounding success, and as a result the tour cannot really be a
Jacksons tour because no one wants to see any Jackson other than Michael. And in its takeover of
American culture, Thriller, its singles, and its videos have all presented Michael to his fans in an
exceptionally pure way. Paired with Jackson's singular dance and live performance skills,
expectations for the Victory Tour are set extraordinarily high. This is, after all, the way in which
musicians had traditionally solidified the bonds between themselves and their audience, and with
a year of unprecedented success behind him Jackson must produce something nearly
inconceivable in scope and spectacle. And this time he must do so for an audience vastly more
integrated than any audience he had faced before.

The Victory Tour is essentially the beginning of the end of the zenith of the Thriller
phenomenon and induces a vicious backlash that I will be covering in detail in the next and final
chapter of this thesis. Problems arise almost immediately when the Jackson family announces that
boxing promoter Don King will oversee the tour, then are compounded when King announces
that tickets will cost $30 each (unaffordable for most of the Jacksons' poor black fans) and will
only be available in maximum groups of four through a confusing mail-order system that involves
fans sending in money orders and then waiting to hear back if they won tickets through random
selection. It's outrageous and the public responds with justifiable anger. To make matters worse,
an itinerary emerges with excruciating slowness and at first seems to pass over most majority-
black cities in favor of larger stadiums in predominantly white parts of the country. On the one
hand, the new and enormous group of white Michael Jackson fans necessitates this – you have to
go where your public is, and in this instance they also had to go to stadiums with enough seats to
accommodate the largest audiences the Jacksons would ever play to – but on the other it's an at
best confusing and at worst ignorant decision that alienates a significant segment of Jackson's fan
base. As I've been arguing, Jackson's pop explosion serves to integrate the America youth via a
shared cultural experience, thus bridging deep historical and cultural scars and schisms. Between
the exorbitant ticket prices and the poorly conceived tour route, Don King and the other tour
promoters are actually undoing Jackson's achievements to this point, reinscribing racialized
hierarchies of importance on his audience. White fans, who are in a better position financially and
geographically, seem to be privileged over black fans, and the fact that white fans now outnumber

72
black fans (an assumption we can make simply through population statistics) means they are
more likely to win tickets in the convoluted ticket sales scheme. The black community is
outraged, and rightly so.

Jackson, for his part, is deeply embarrassed. He distances himself from his family, hiring
his own set of advisers to oversee decisions about the tour and informs Don King that neither he
nor anyone in his family is authorized to speak on Michael's behalf, to make decisions in his
absence, or to do a single thing without explicit approval from the star.108 He delivers a statement
at a press conference for over 100 reporters to denounce the ticketing system, and announce that
he will be donating all the money he earns from the tour to charity. He also forces King to
abandon the awful ticket lottery, reinstates ticket sales through normal outlets (though he cannot
bring down the $30 cost), and donates some of the best tickets in every city to underprivileged
youth who would otherwise be unable to attend. It helps, but not much. The press continues to
chastise him at every opportunity. But the fans do not follow suit. Once it becomes clear that
major black metropolitan centers are not being passed over, and once access to tickets becomes
open to all, Jackson's fans absolve him of all wrongdoing and get busy getting excited for the tour
to commence. Anticipation for the tour is immense. Rolling Stone, Time and Newsweek all run
cover stories about it and Michael in the run up to opening night. When the Jacksons relocate to
Birmingham, Alabama, to rehearse for a week before the tour they cause pandemonium. Massive
crowds gather around their hotel and stay all hours of the day and night and one afternoon, the
brothers decided to head up to the roof and wave to their fans. People Weekly interviewed one
teenage girl who was there when they did. "I'll never forget it as long as I live," she sighed
wistfully to them, "Even if Michael didn't play, he came. He waved. He showed us he loved
us."109

The Victory Tour embodies another conflict for Jackson. The fact is America wants a
Michael Jackson tour. They want to see the songs of Thriller and Off The Wall (which, during the
two years that Thriller dominates the country, climbs back up the Billboard charts and almost
back into the top 40, peaking at No. 44 on April 7, 1984110 ) choreographed and staged like never
before, the want to see him moonwalk, they want to see him sweat and sing and lose himself in
his music just as they do. And, when reading through the extensive archive of media coverage

108
Michael Goldberg and Christopher Connelly, "Trouble In Paradise?" Rolling Stone, March 15, 1984: 28.
109
Pamela Andriotakis and James McBride, "On Tour," People Weekly, July 16, 1984, accessed March 22,
2011, http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20197107,00.html.
110
Top 100 LPs chart, Billboard Magazine, April 7, 1984.

73
surrounding the tour, one gets the sense that Jackson wanted the same. His reluctance to work
with his brothers and his family again may go unspoken (the closest he comes to explicit
reluctance is when his lawyer, John Branca, tells Rolling Stone, "The tour is important to Michael
because it's important to Michael's family. I'm not sure the tour was Michael's first choice. He
might have preferred to do other things. But he found it important to tour at his brothers' request
and his family's request."111 ) but when one looks at the photographs and video footage of the
Victory Tour press conferences one sees a young man sullen and subtly embarrassed to be seen in
the center of such a spectacle. As I've discussed regarding his music videos, Jackson is at the end
of an extended period of unhindered self-representation, and has reaped unimaginable rewards
from the acts of trusting his own instincts and following his artistic vision. Now he must
compromise all of those things in the name of family unity, for a family that is exposing itself as
increasingly greedy and self-centered. It's startling to look at the Jackson brothers at these tour
press events. Most of them are dressed more flamboyantly than the family's star, all sport
Michael's dark sunglasses (Jermaine at this time looks the most like a Michael Jackson
impersonator and it's really quite sad when the real thing, his younger brother, is sitting only a
couple chairs away from him), all but Michael grin ear-to-ear as Don King hypes the concert
events to eager reporters. Only Michael seems embarrassed by King's histrionics, scrunching
further into himself as if it will allow him to disappear. When Jackson announces he will be
donating all his earnings from the tour to charity, none of his brothers follow suit. Granted, they
have not enjoyed the culture-shattering success Michael has since the release of Thriller, but
they've also been as famous and successful as him up until that point and should have amassed
the same considerable wealth their brother used a year earlier to make three of the most
influential music videos of all time. They haven't, squandering their money on the trappings of
fame and fortune instead, and their uncontrollable desire for more has much to do with what bogs
the tour down from the start. The burden of performance and power fall to Michael while the
brothers sit back and reap the rewards.

Because his brothers must be part of the show, Michael cannot dedicate his performances
to the new songs his fans want to see so badly. Part of this is a matter of staging and effects;
technology limits what he can do, how much of his vision he can fulfill. On this tour he wrestles
as much from special effects as he can, using lasers, puppet, massive video screens, and pre-
filmed interludes to augment the experience. Only four years later, in 1988, when he launches the
second leg of his first real solo tour in support of Bad, most of these effects have been cast aside

111
Goldberg and Connelly, "Trouble In Paradise?" 27.

74
in favor of highlighting Jackson's supernatural performance skills and the decision serves him
well. The Victory Tour, reviewers agree, is ultimately bogged down by the way in which these
effects sometimes draw the attention away from. One reviewer even notes "fans seemed to head
for the refreshment stands only when Michael left the stage for a breather and another Jackson
briefly assumed the spotlight."112 Where utilizing the most advanced technology for that time
doesn't distract from performance, its limitations make other songs unstagable. Jackson was never
able to perform "Thriller" on the Victory Tour because he couldn't figure out how to properly
stage it, perform it musically (its layered synth effects never sounded quite right until the Bad
Tour), and was regularly criticized by reviewers for the oversight.

Still, what he can stage he does spectacularly. Jackson may not be able to fulfill his vision
in terms of staging and special effects, but he can outperform just about everyone in the business
and he does. "He's arrogant on Beat It, tender on She's Out Of My Life, triumphant on Billie
Jean," People crows, "His Heartbreak Hotel is so full of pops, stops, bangs and breaks that by the
time he's done the crowd is inspecting its arms for imaginary bruises."113 Rolling Stone stated
unequivocally, "the show-stopper was a telescoped version of the 'Billie Jean' performance that
upended the Motown twenty-fifth anniversary special, Michael Jackson in black jacket and
fedora, all glide, pop and spin combos – a brilliant sequined solitaire."114 And it wasn't just the
body that surprised and transformed, but the voice as well. Critics across the board praise Jackson
for inserting previously unheard gospel tonalities into these concerts. "One of [the show's] finer
moments," Gerri Hirshey wrote in Rolling Stone, "is a quirky segment at the end of a medley of
old Jackson 5 hits, when Michael winds up 'I'll Be There.' Alone in a white spotlight, he shrieks
and moans, a cappella, in a gospel voice hitherto unheard… the thirty or so seconds of soulful
improv was a revelation – and, as he tamped it down and stuttered into funk-scat to slide into the
next song, an extended dance version of 'My Lovely One,' the racial nattering of the preceding
weeks – the demands that there be more local black promoters, the complaints about the
discrimination caused by the high ticket prices – was drowned out, at least for the fans inside the
stadium."115

112
Dennis McDougal, "45,000 Shriek as Jacksons Open Tour in Kansas City," Los Angeles Times, July 7,
1984: 4.
113
"The Jackson Fireworks," People Weekly, July 23, 1984: 46.
114
Gerri Hirshey, "Michael's Magic Show," Rolling Stone, August 16, 1984: 32.
115
Hirshey, "Michael's Magic Show," 28-29.

75
 Since critics are quick to point out how many more white attendees there are at these
concerts than black, the inclusion of further identifiably black musical forms in the performance
is important. For one, it's not done to assert their blackness in the face of criticism from the white
and black medias (Hirshey reports in the above-cited review, that Michael added in the gospel
runs after being exposed to the work of legendary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson116 and quickly
becoming obsessed), but because it felt like a natural musical inclusion in their performances. By
drawing on an even wider tradition of black music than he had on Thriller, Jackson is once again
enacting moments of identity transformation by having white and black fans bond through the
experience of live music, and through a genre and a sound that previously would have served to
divide instead of bring together. The shared experience of attending a Victory Tour concert, like
the shared experience of viewing a Michael Jackson video or listening to Thriller as an album,
becomes a point at which black and white experiences intersect and form a bond with each other
that is not mediated or mitigated by racial stratification. The joy experienced at these concerts is
the same for both races and will serve in the future as identificatory touchstones that allow for the
bridging of racial divides when most other cultural artifacts are being used to pull black and white
Americans further apart. Further, the insertion of gospel vocalizations into a pop ballad allows
white audiences to internalize the emotional affect that gospel has made central to black
American identity, giving these youths a glimpse into an affective life they've been kept out of
before. I won't go so far as to claim that this brief moment of affective voyeurism neutralizes the
effects of centuries of ingrained racism, but I do think it's important when one considers that the
generation that is attending Jackson's concerts will subsequently have to face and work through
the consequences of the re-segregation of American culture since the Civil Rights movement in
the rest of the 1980's and early 1990's. As in the original 1960's moment, the pain and strife of the
consequences of that re-segregation finds its voice in a distinctly black music, hip-hop and rap,
that this generation of Michael Jackson fans will listen to. Though race relations in America will
have to get worse to get better, the generation of young Americans that found themselves so
powerfully in Jackson is also the generation that remains committed to bettering the lives of all
Americans, to erasing social tensions between blacks and whites, to providing equal opportunities
and advantages to all instead of calling for the maintenance of a deeply damaging status quo. It is
hard to believe that that generation did not learn quite a bit about equality, compassion, and the

116
It is absolutely crucial to remember that the Jackson brothers would not have naturally been inducted
into the gospel tradition through church attendance in their youth. Katherine Jackson joined the Jehovah's
Witnesses in the early 1950's, and all of the Jackson children attended services at Kingdom Halls in Indiana
and California while still living in their parents' home. Though their knowledge of black music was
extensive, they would have been sheltered from gospel because of their mothers' (and Michael's personal)
devout commitment to the Witnesses.

76
commonalities between black and white Americans from the moments when Michael Jackson
clutched his microphone and wailed a gospel-inflected promise to his audience that, despite the
pain and suffering we can hear in the grain of his voice, he'll be there.

The elements, pitch, and cadence of Michaelmania provide for us a roadmap to the ways
in which the pop explosion enacted by the Michael Jackson event changed the cultural landscape
of the 1980's and of America forever by allowing American youths to forge interracial allegiances
and bonds that will shape the trajectories of their lives. Cultural scholars make much of the ways
in which race shapes experience, making Americans of different races experience the same event
or consume the same product from different and implicitly alienated perspectives. But this
magical moment of pop explosion that began in 1983 and lasted all the way through the end of
the Victory Tour in 1984 allowed white Americans and black Americans to come together and
experience a cultural product together in a way that allowed them for a time to understand each
other without needing to augment that understanding with racially specific qualifications. To love
Michael Jackson, to want him, and to want to imitate him, were emotions experienced by black
and white youths with equal intensity, and carried the promise of equal possibility. For that
generation, this possibility and promise was liberating, galvanizing, and transformative,
subverting the racial status quo in favor of imagining and attempting to create a world that existed
beyond the scars left by centuries of virulent, institutionalized racism. It was a moment as
powerful and transformative as the moment when the youth decided to band together to create a
new world in the 1960's. It may have been enacted without parades or public protests, but it
happened all the same, and those who wanted to protect America as it was took notice.

The flip side to any massive act of identity transformation is always backlash, a loud and
public attempt by critics to disavow and disprove the positive power of a cultural artifact in order
to protect their stake in the status quo. Jackson faced a backlash as fierce and violent as any other
performer, perhaps moreso. "You sure never claimed to be bigger than Jesus," Dave Marsh wrote
in 1985, reflecting on the phenomenon he'd just lived through, "but the idea of a black man
performing such a massively successful and enticing act of unification had to be nipped in the
bud. Somebody must have feared that otherwise people might get the idea that the things that
hold them separate but equal are either bullshit or…visited upon them for reasons other than the
obvious. There are a lot of suburban kids out there who are going to have a hard time that their
white skin is an automatic sign of superiority after spending the happiest years of their childhood

77
trying to be just like you. Not that they won't be given lots of opportunity and encouragement to
deny it."117 It is to these deniers, these opponents, these nippers to whom I now turn my attention.

117
Marsh, Trapped, 9.

78
 Chapter Three
Sissified Man-Children and Reconstructed Noses: The Backlash

So far I have argued for and shown the ways in which Michael Jackson, Thriller, and
Michaelmania provided a locus around which a generation of Americans, black and white,
formed a new youth identity and forged bonds of solidarity with each other that have effected the
components of American culture and identity ever since. I've also alluded here and there to the
strong negative feelings that grew and coalesced around Jackson at the same time these young
Americans were hailing him as their hero, their idol, their great pop cultural love. No act of
identity formation is one-sided. Stuart Hall reminds us that, "[identities] emerge within the play
of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the making of difference and
exclusion, than they are the sign of an identically, naturally-constituted unity – an 'identity' in its
traditional meaning (that is, all-inclusive sameness, seamless, without internal differentiation)."118
Jackson's act of pop explosion and identity formation took place at the intersection of greatly
contested modes of American power, including the oppressive power of racism, the libratory
power of youth rebellion, and the economic power of market domination. At stake at this
intersection is the upholding of American power infrastructures that keep certain populations,
defined racially and socioeconomically, in their "proper place." When Jackson's music and
persona transcended that "proper place," it didn't just bestow upon young Americans a sense of
new possibilities they'd never felt before; it also caught the attention of Americans who sought to
protect the status quo, to shore up the boundaries that kept American society stratified and
unequal.

Because of the racially charged underbelly of the Michael Jackson phenomenon, it would
be easy to assume that these critics were all white but that's not true. Conservative white
Americans had strong feelings about Michael Jackson and especially about the great act of
interracial love that constituted his pop explosion, but old-guard African American leaders and
community members also raised red flags about this transcendent young man. While not fighting
to maintain the status quo that maintained their oppression, they were fighting to use a specific
kind of Black Nationalism and black identity to fight for African American advancement at this
time. In outlining two strategies of combating structuralized racism in America, Paul Gilroy

118
Stuart Hall, "Who Needs 'Identity'?" in Questions of Cultural Identity, Paul de Gay and Stuart Hall, ed.,
(London: Sage Press), 1996: 4.

79
defines the prevailing political strategy being espoused by the black community in the early
1980's as the essentialist strategy. He ties to it "gender-specific forms," and emphasizes that it
"sees the black artist as potential leader."119 Most importantly, "It looks for an artistic practice that
can disabuse [the black community] of the illusions into which they have been seduced by their
condition of exile. The community is felt to be on the wrong road and it is the artist's job to give
them a new direction, first by recovering and then by donating the racial awareness that the
masses seem to lack."120 Michael Jackson, with his unprecedented fame and success, seems like
the perfect artistic leader despite his music's distinct lack of political message, but he does not
give himself over to the cause. As I will show, this reluctance along with the way superstardom
complicates racial coding, consumption and ideology, eventually turned Jackson from darling of
the black community to target. The essentialist strategy also found a leader in another Jackson,
the Reverend Jesse Jackson who in 1984 mounted a bid for the Democratic Party's nomination to
the U.S. Presidency and amassed a collection of scandals all his own. The Reverend, despite his
historical connections to Dr. King and extremely prominent position within the African American
community, was ultimately not as popular or pervasive as Michael Jackson was in 1984. Some
African American leaders see Michael as a distraction from the nobler and more important goal
of getting Rev. Jackson elected, and eventually characterize the stylistic hallmarks of his music
and image as damaging to the African American community.

The chorus of voices both black and white that rise in an attempt to discredit and
undermine Jackson and his influence on American youths, is the noisy byproduct of the other side
of the identity creation coin. As I noted in my introduction, those who love and embrace Jackson
are not the only ones who use him to form a new identity; his critics are also using him and what
he stands for to modify and then solidify a new iteration of a conservative American identity, just
as the 1960's counterculture had an immense effect on the creation of the identities of those who
counted themselves among the Silent Majority and who later ushered neo-conservatism into
power with Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency. Examining the increasingly violent
backlash against Jackson allows us to see how critics are using him to rearticulate their
conservative identities, as well as illuminating once and for all the sites of Jackson's subversion.
If Michael were, as critics often claimed, only a fluffy, insignificant fad that would certainly pass,
then there would be no reason to criticize him as harshly and personally as they did. Everything

119
Paul Gilroy, "It Ain't Where You're From, It's Where You're At," from Small Acts: Thoughts on the
Politics of Black Cultures, (London: Serpent's Tail), 1993: 122.
120
Gilroy, "It Ain't Where You're From…," 123.

80
from Jackson's music, to his intelligence and mental capabilities, his race, and his sexuality is
called into question in an increasingly hysterical tone as these insults fall on deaf ears. As
Jackson's popularity and influence builds with no signs of slowing, detractors pull out every trick
they can think of to undermine him but to no avail. It is not until the Victory Tour – which itself
is situated in conception and planning at the uneasy intersection of racial pride and mainstream
popularity – that they are able to gain some footing. The outcome of this success (the reach of
which can, should, and will be debated) also has far-reaching consequences. "Someone had to sit
down and try to divine just how things had reached the point where the most beloved cultural
hero of one year was being reviled," Dave Marsh wrote in 1985, "not just discarded but mocked
and attacked. And mocked and attacked not only by those whose social role dictated disapproval
of all pop stars, but by a significant number of those who formed the near-unanimous consensus
around him less than a year before."121 To best understand what happens, how it happens, and
what it does, I'll take up this backlash chronologically, tracing its build, the ways it changes, and
how Jackson's massive fan base and establishment supporters attempt to fight back against it.

Before we embark on a journey that tests even the most optimistic American's faith in
their country's capacity for acceptance and change, I'd like to note that when Thriller was first
released and began to gain the momentum that led to the pop explosion ignited by "Billie Jean,"
its detractors were few and not too vocal. It was a vastly enjoyable album, a veritable shot in the
arm for a lagging, flagging music industry whose post-disco output had been less than exciting.
Critics white and black all rejoiced in the opportunity to hear new, exciting sounds and have
groove that compelled them to dance. A little dancing, after all, never hurt anybody. In these
months, those who bristled the most at the mention of Jackson were the radio DJs and MTV
executives who found themselves increasingly the target of accusations of overt racism in the
industry. For them, Jackson represented a sore spot that would just not go away. As I've
mentioned before, black artists had been questioning the demographic research that fuelled the
AOR radio format and eventually MTV's programming decisions for years before Jackson
released Thriller. Brian O'Neal, member of the Bus Boys, told the Baltimore Sun in early 1983,
"What happened was that blacks began to play something that became idiomatically associated
with them…There has always been a strain of white prejudice running through the very structure
of this country, and even in the early days there was a practice of calling that [style of music]
'colored peoples' music.' So while the music itself was highly influential on white artists in every

121
Marsh, Trapped, 4-5.

81
field of music, in its purest form it was still 'colored music' to many."122 Disc jockeys and, shortly
thereafter, MTV executives were forced to assert over and over again that their policies were not
racist but determined by demographic research that, through its association with science and
sociology, was an unprejudiced indicator of what would and would not be acceptable to their
target audiences. That meant that covers of black music, like Phil Collins' cover of "You Can't
Hurry Love," received radio and MTV play that black artists could never dream of. The hypocrisy
of those decisions are as evident today as they were back then, though in the early 1980's there
were still elaborate logic systems in place to allow the average American and disc jockey alike to
blind themselves to this racist reality. Thriller's first act of racial transcendence, breaking the
AOR barrier, was and is still viewed by the majority as a triumph of sound over social
conditioning, but it was not without its controversy. "Jackson elicited violent reactions," Larry
Berger, program director for New York's WPLJ radio station told the Los Angeles Times in
August, 1983, "Petitions, phone calls, letters. A certain small percentage of people are vocal, and
– I hate to say it – are prejudiced. Certain small groups of people don't want any black music at
all on WPLJ."123 Berger adds in the same breath that within a few weeks these complaints turned
to requests, and the fact that AOR and MTV both acquiesced to the Jackson phenomenon fairly
quickly should restore some of our faith in Americans' capacity to change both expectations and
assumptions, especially about music. At this point, Jackson is symbolic of America's continuing
triumph over racism, even a welcome distraction from the kind of indirect racial oppression
enacted by the policies of the Reagan Administration. Jackson's emblematic act of integration
works not just to unify the youth of America under his umbrella, but also to cover up the violent
acts of segregation and oppression visible in other aspects of society.

The initial waves of success in breaking down racial barriers in 1983 allow the black
community to hold Jackson up as a triumph in the ongoing fight to raise the status of African
Americans as citizens. It also allows him to take on the role of icon and object of sexual desire for
white teenagers. This is enacted explicitly. In the "heated debate over who's got the sexiest
videos, Michael Jackson [wins] by a landslide,"124 the Los Angeles Times reported. The raw
sexuality of his music and performance, as discussed in my previous chapters, can and should be
seen as an act of cultural miscegenation in its most classic definition, as a previously illegal and
frowned-upon act of interracial love. As such, some of the earliest signs of backlash manifest in

122
J.P. Considine, "Black music/white music: Is racism rocking rock?" Baltimore Sun, January 16, 1983,
D1.
123
Wayne Robins, "A Thriller: Pop Battles Race Barrier," Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1983, R56.
124
Patrick Goldstein, "Fans Turned Off And On By MTV," Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1983, H1.

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the insistence by critics and observers that Jackson's sexuality, while present in his performance,
is some kind of artifice. "His high-flying tenor makes him sound like the lead in some funked-up
boys choir, even as the sexual dynamism irradiating from the arch of his dancing body challenges
Government standards for a nuclear meltdown," Time wrote in 1984, qualifying that rather
astounding assessment by adding, "His lithe frame, five-fathom eyes, long lashes might even be
threatening if Jackson gave, even for a second, the impression that he is obtainable"125 (emphasis
mine). Though they insist he embodies "eroticism at arm's length,"126 the way white teenage girls
latch onto him belies that unobtainable sexuality; they concocted elaborate plans to make him fall
in love with them, sending him love letters, camping out in front of his house in an attempt to
meet him, even trying to scale the walls of the Hayvenhurst compound to achieve their goal.
Jackson had been an object of desire in the black community for a long time, but when he
transcends the racial barrier between black girls and white girls, he complicates matters for
himself. Elvis Presley had also offered teenager girls an unacceptable sexual object to fixate upon
in the 1950's, challenging social standards by adopting the brazen sexuality of African Americans
in his music, his look, and his dancing, and parents largely succeeded in tamping down their
daughters' desires. Susan J. Douglas remembers hiding in her closet to listen to Elvis records
when her father was home, and contrasts that with the relentlessly public sexual love expressed
for the Beatles a decade later. Jackson's fans operate in the Beatles' mode, not Presley's, taking
their love for him to the very-public arenas of the street, the fan magazine, the radio request line,
and MTV. They do not retreat from their desire. And, in a move that surprises most, Jackson
seems to validate their hopes when he begins appearing in public with Brooke Shields as his date.
She accompanies him to the many events honoring his achievements in 1983, as well as to the
highly publicized sweeps at the American Music Awards and Grammy Awards in 1984. Shields,
at this time, represents an iconic American white sexuality; as a model and movie star, she
occupies the highest level of all-American desirability. Thus, her relationship with Jackson allows
for several interpretations. First, we can read it as a way of confirming Jackson's full citizenship.
Instead of dating less-famous girls or exclusively black girls, as is befitting his station as a young
black man, his romantic entanglement with Shields elevates him from the second-class
citizenship automatically bestowed upon African Americans. This elevation is further bolstered
by his public friendships with Jane Fonda and Liza Minnelli, two other symbols of white
American sexuality and sexiness.

125
Cocks, "Why He's a Thriller," 59.
126
Cocks, "Why He's a Thriller," 59.

83
 Second, we can read the pairing of Shields and Jackson as a way of casting his looks and
sexual appeal as its own iteration of all-Americanness. It is difficult to imagine Shields pairing
herself publicly with anyone who challenges the ideals of American male beauty, as it would be
detrimental to her image and her career. Since her mother was notoriously involved and invested
in her career, it's incredibly difficult to imagine that the pairing would have been allowed to
happen if it wasn't condoned. If that is the case, one must imagine Jackson seemed like an
appropriate partner/boyfriend/date not just because his and Shields' childhoods in the industry
allowed for a bond between them, but also because her all-American image can be bolstered by
his image, not just his fame. If she's iconically American, he must be as well. And so, for the first
time, an iteration of African American beauty, sexuality and appeal is being held up as a norm
and not an exception. It should be evident how threatening and subversive this is at its core.
Essential to the cultural infrastructure keeping African Americans in their place as an American
underclass are the narratives that circulate around black beauty and black sexuality as "exotic"
and "primitive," outside the civilized boundaries of the white ideal. Moreover, in the few
instances in which black beauty has crossed over to mainstream appeal (a move that is usually
temporary and fleeting), it has done so via the beauty of women. To view Michael – with his big
eyes and long lashes, his long Jheri curled hair, his streamlined nose and chocolate skin, his lithe,
slender body and affinity for makeup – as a mainstream and not exotic emblem of beauty and
sexuality is to undermine the white idealization of rugged masculinity, working- or middle-class
machismo and strength, dominance and assertiveness.

Though black looks, male and female, were still kept out of the standardized notions of
American beauty at this time, the frenzy over Jackson cannot be ignored or transferred onto white
pop stars. To deal with the threat he is posing to the status quo, Jackson is immediately shuttled
into the androgyny trend, represented along with Jackson by the gender-bending Boy George and
traced historically back to David Bowie's bisexual Ziggy Stardust character in the 1970's.
"Whatever happened to the days when teens would swoon over guys who had the macho look?"
Trina Dailey asked in the Chicago Tribune. Referring to Jackson and Boy George she wonders,
"Why are these androgynous male entertainers so attractive to young girls? One reason might be
that their parents are so turned off by something that doesn’t appear natural to them."127 So here,
teenage rebellion becomes the answer, a way of dismissing the broader and deeper implications
of the shifting of sexual desire onto the body of a man like Jackson. Though articles like this
(which abound as Jackson and Boy George grow ever more famous) work to deflect the power of

127
Trina Dailey, "Androgynous teen idols: Why so attractive?" Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1984, G1.

84
sexual attraction and force Jackson back into the box of the Other in order to neutralize his
subversive threat to the status quo, they also work (and fail) to obscure the more important work
his looks are doing. "At best, [stars like Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Boy
George] have used androgyny and sexual ambiguity as part of their 'style' in ways which question
prevailing definitions of male sexuality and sexual identity,"128 Kobena Mercer points out. Lest
we think this deployment of androgyny is accidental, he continues, "Key songs on Thriller
highlight this problematization of male sexuality and sexual identity."129 His examples include
"Wanna Be Startin' Something," "Billie Jean," and "Beat It" (which explicitly rejects machismo
when it exhorts the listener, "Don't be a macho man"). For mainstream white America, the
questions Jackson's looks are raising and the intensity of the positive response they get from
teenage girls are deeply disturbing. They must not be addressed, lest a black man undermine the
standard of white masculinity that dominates our cultural constructions of sex and gender. His
relationship with Brooke Shields seems to place his beauty on the acceptable side of masculine
attractiveness, upsetting the natural balance. To neutralize his effect, critics deploy a rigorous and
disturbing set of accusations that Jackson is homosexual.

Rumors that Michael Jackson was gay started in the late 1970's when, during puberty, the
star's voice seemed not to drop. Within the Jackson family, Michael is hardly an exception
vocally – his older brothers Jackie and Jermaine both have speaking high voices, Jackie
especially, and the whole family has a polite, soft-spoken manner that is partially natural and
partially the product of their Motown publicity training. Though many have testified during his
life and after his death that in private Jackson's speaking voice was notably lower than when
speaking in public (and if you watch interviews with him over the course of his adult life you can
hear his public speaking voice drop in register as he ages), the high pitch and soft volume he
employs in interviews and public appearances is undoubtedly a calculated part of his image. It
contributes to a version of himself that Jackson put forward in the press of a young man still
deeply attached to childhood and its trappings, as well as a nonthreatening and typical black
masculinity. The result of this affectation along with his slender frame and pretty, as opposed to
handsome, looks are rumors about his sexuality, particularly his homosexuality. Steven Ivory, a
music critic, interviewed Jackson in 1978 and asked him point-blank whether or not he was gay.
Jackson requested the tape recorder be turned off for him to answer the question. Ivory recounted
his answer after Jackson's death in 2009: "I asked him about the rumor that he was gay. And he

128
Mercer, "Monster Metaphors," 50.
129
Mercer, "Monster Metaphors," 50.

85
looked at me and he said, 'You know what I need you to do? I need you to turn off that tape
recorder.' And I said, 'Okay.' He said 'No, I’m not gay.' And I said, well 'Why did you ask me to
turn of the tape recorder?' And he said, 'Well, because I know that we have many fans that are
gay, and I don’t want to offend any of these people.'"130 Jackson was romantically linked to
actresses Stephanie Mills and Tatum O'Neil in the late 70's and early 80's, but rumors about his
sexuality persisted, if slightly more remotely. Then, when Jackson achieved heights of fame and
importance never before reached by a black musician, the rumors resurfaced with a bitter
vengeance.

Since Jackson had now aged a few more years and his voice remained high, additional
rumors that he was taking female hormones to maintain that pitch (and the upper registers of his
singing range) augmented claims of homosexuality. And when Jackson had the first of his
cosmetic surgeries in the early 1980's, rumors circulated that he was either preparing for a sex
change operation or trying to look like Diana Ross. Jackson refused to comment on his
appearance until late in 1984, which I will address later on. The official explanation for the
changes to his nose was that he'd received a rhinoplasty after breaking his nose when he fell while
dancing. The rhinoplasty was done for the sake of his breathing – an absolute necessity
considering the demands of his performances – and the additional slimming of his nose was never
mentioned or justified. One cannot miss the change in his nose, the way it was shaved down into
a recognizably "white" shape. Additionally, by 1983 Jackson had lost quite a bit of weight due to
his strictly vegetarian diet (and, by the admission of his family, a general aversion to eating that
could be viewed in psychoanalytic terms as a manifestation of Jackson's desire to be fully in
control of his life, career and future; control is a subject both Michael and, more famously, his
sister Janet returned to through all stages of their careers), which emphasized his facial bone
structure more than ever before. In particular it focused attention on his high cheekbones, slim
neck, and high forehead, all feminine traits even though the strong angularity of his jaw is more
traditionally masculine. These are mixed gender messages augmented by makeup – Jackson
plucks his eyebrows into slim arches, wears eyeliner, foundation, and blush, a decision that may
have its roots in his idol Jackie Wilson's image even though most American gossip and
mainstream magazines miss that connection entirely – and they force Americans to do work they
are uncomfortable with in order to understand him. "If we regard his face, not as the
manifestation of personality traits but as a surface of artistic and social inscription," Mercer

130
Transcript of "VH1 Presents: Michael Jackson's Secret Childhood," accessed March 31, 2011,
http://www.silentlambs.org/education/transcript1vh1.htm.

86
implores us, "the ambiguities of Jackson's image call into question received ideas about what
black male artists in popular music should look like."131 James Brown, Marvin Gaye, and Jackie
Wilson who all offer performances of exotic, primitive, animalistic masculinity, aggressive
heterosexuality, hypersexuality, and traditional macho masculinity as embodied by musicians
personify black male sexuality. Echoes of this traditional sexuality are seen in the influence of
Wilson and Brown on Jackson's dancing and performance, but he does not embody any of those
stereotypes beyond the stage. Instead he combines the winsome fragility of Diana Ross with the
showmanship of his soul influences. By defying the conventions of black masculinity, Jackson
undermines their importance in keeping black and white Americans alienated from each other.

What follows from these attempts to undermine Jackson's masculinity are attempts to
undermine his racial allegiance. Richard Harrington wrote in the Washington Post, "Ever since
the cosmetic operation that sharpened his nose and widened his eyes [another persistent rumor at
that time], ever since he dropped the Afro of his youth for the California curl of 'Off The Wall,'
but mostly since he was adopted by the mass audience, Michael Jackson has been described as
raceless, sexless. These are stupid, insensitive words—particularly insulting to black Americans.
But they reflect white Americans' continuing discomfort with a strong black male figure…How
convenient that Michael Jackson is a non-threatening black male whose every movie is physical
and sensual but somehow not sexual."132 Having called our attention to the inherent
contradictions in the public reading of Jackson's person, he asks a crucial question: "How did
Michael Jackson go from being a central figure in soul music to being raceless? Who took the
black out of Michael Jackson?"133 The erasure of Michael Jackson's race from his body is one of
the most persistent mysteries of his life, and if the reasons for why it happened are obvious (the
whitened black body, metaphorically or physically, is always more palatable to the white
mainstream than a body proudly displaying its racial identity, and Jackson's drastic physical
transformation through his life only augmented that), how it happened is incredibly opaque.
Through my extensive research utilizing mass media and television coverage during Thriller's
cultural takeover, I haven't been able to glean the methodology of this erasure, just that it
happened and it happened fast. It seems as though once Jackson's success transcended the
acceptable dimensions afforded to black entertainers (one of the "ritual roles"134 white America
approves for black citizens), the white media began to describe him as "raceless" or otherwise not

131
Mercer, "Monster Metaphors," 50.
132
Richard Harrington, "Who Is He?" Washington Post, March 18, 1984, L9.
133
Harrington, "Who Is He?" L9.
134
"Editorial: Jackson Brothers," The Nation, March 10, 1984, 275.

87
black, insisting that instead of embodying blackness and forcing it into the American mainstream
as never before, he now existed in a space between black and white while not embodying either.

We cannot interpret this astonishing act of denial as anything other than a kind of
metaphorical violence against the black community at large and Michael specifically, punishment
for breaking the unspoken rules of American racial stratification. This is not entirely lost upon
critics, and not just Harrington. "Michael Jackson has made the most of his part," the editors of
The Nation wrote in March 1984, "more than anyone of his generation. With his eight Grammy
awards, he is the living definition of hot, and the heat he generates comes from the combustion of
cultural styles at the point of crossover—when black and white merge in one media moment
without threat, danger or dependence. But for all the glitter and the celebrity, he cannot leap the
wall beyond his role; they'll get him, too, if he tries"135 (emphasis mine). Dave Marsh puts a finer
point on it a year later, writing, "when Elvis was belittled and attacked, he kind of naturally
stepped back into line, which [Jackson] can't, since black and rich and famous is already too far
out of line for some."136 Marsh observes that as Jackson continues to dig into the tradition of
black music as the mother and father of rock and pop alike, he stirs up more and more negative
emotions, "as if there is a taboo on digging too deeply,"137 on pushing blackness back to the
center of pop so explicitly. As with his sexuality, the vocal minority seeking to oppose Jackson
and his influence over the youth cannot stop his momentum, so they seek to neutralize his power
by alienating him from the race that gives him the power in the first place. It is perhaps a
paradoxical way of thinking about the power one gleans from their racial birthright to imagine a
black man having a hand over the white majority in this instance, but we have to remember that
what Jackson's pop explosion is enacting is a revolution from below in which blackness, finding a
voice and bodily expression in his music and performance, is able to transcend and destroy the
structures that confine it in order to assume something closer to its proper place as a legitimate
American ur-identity. If Jackson is no longer perceived to be a black man, he cannot continue to
embody integration and miscegenation. Moreover, if critics can cast his cosmetic surgery as a
sign that he himself is fleeing from blackness they can cast him as a figure that is rejecting his
African American heritage and use him to reconstruct the walls that segregate black and white
culture.

135
"Jackson Brothers," 275.
136
Marsh, Trapped, 9.
137
Marsh, Trapped, 45.

88
 Having called his sexuality, gender, and race into question, the proponents of the growing
backlash against Jackson move on to the final prong of their strategy to totally discredit and
castrate the star: questioning his mental capacity. Specifically, they focus on Jackson as an
emblem of arrested development, emphasize his ambiguous relationship with adulthood, and even
bring up his poor origins and lack of formal education (compounded, of course, by his childhood
spent not in school but on the road and in the studio with the Jackson 5). Jackson, in the precious
few interviews he grants before and during the Thriller event, has a tendency to fixate on the
aspects of childhood and innocence that can and do carry over into the best pop music, though
they are often left unarticulated. He focuses on the "magic," as he frequently calls it, behind pop
music, be it in his composition process (something he constantly attributes to God and the
universe138 , telling Ebony in 1984, "Music started with nature. Music is nature. Birds make music.
Oceans make music. Wind makes music. Any natural sound is music. And that's where it
started."139 ), or describing his idols (He sighs to Rolling Stone, "[James Brown is] so magic."140 ).
Steven Spielberg describes him as "one of the last living innocents"141 and "an emotional star
child."142 His long life in the entertainment industry, which began when he was an actual child,
has the effect of making industry colleagues refer to him in more juvenile terms than they may
otherwise, and Jackson exacerbates it by talking about his close emotional relationship with the
puppet that played E.T., how he identifies with Peter Pan, and how much he relates to children.
Questions of arrested development will plague Jackson for his entire life, and in many ways will
never be adequately addressed by the star or the critics who continue to fixate on it, and in this
moment in 1984 it takes on a central role in deploying a neutralizing critique. Though he may try
to maintain his personal link to childhood and innocence in his private life, there is no question
that in music and business Jackson is fully adult and extremely bright; there's no way Thriller
could have become what it did as musical album, visual record, or pop phenomenon if that wasn't
the case. But even that intelligence is tangled up in the non-adult world. Jane Fonda told Time,
"His intelligence is instinctual and emotional like a child's. If any artist loses that childlikeness,
you lose a lot of creative force. So Michael creates around himself a world that protects his
creativity."143 Looking at the components of the phenomenon, it's hard to doubt her insight.

138
In a rare moment of eloquence (Jackson, for all the cruelty of his detractors, was never a particularly
articulate public speaker), Jackson told Ebony in 1992, "I believe that in its primordial form, all of creation
is sound and that it's not just random sound, that it's music."
139
Robert E. Johnson, "The Michael Jackson Nobody Knows," Ebony, December 1984, 157-158.
140
Gerri Hirshey, "Michael Jackson: Life in the Magic Kingdom," Rolling Stone, February 17, 1983, 13.
141
Hirshey, "Magic Kingdom," 13.
142
Hirshey, "Magic Kingdom," 13.
143
Cocks, "Why He's A Thriller," 60.

89
Jackson has the supreme confidence of childhood, the kind of faith in oneself that adulthood
works over time to undermine by exposing us to our own flaws and helplessness in the face of a
wider and more powerful world. By embracing magic and fantasy, and by avoiding the pitfalls of
adult self-reflection, Jackson's creativity is allowed to grow unhindered by the constraints so
many other artists fall victim to. The content of his work demonstrates startling maturity – his
songs and dances are sophisticated, insightful, sexually powerful, and very much the work of a
man in his mid-20's, not a young boy – while the his method hews close to the possibility of
childhood. As in sexuality, gender, and race, Jackson gracefully embodies the contradictions of
age and aging. It's not much of a surprise, then, that the press most commonly chooses to describe
him as a "man-child."

We can read "man-child," as I just did, as a positive descriptor, a way of articulating

embodied duality that is in line with much of the doubleness forced upon African Americans
since they gained their freedom from slavery. We can also deploy it as an insult, a term that
undermines Jackson's mental capacity and judgment, that belittles and marginalizes him. We
should not be surprised that the press largely decided to go with the second usage. It is sometimes
deployed subtly and perhaps accidentally, as in the Time cover story when the language of
ethereality is used seemingly with the intent to help convey the inarticulable, well, magic of
Jackson's pop event and persona but ends up reinforcing the portrait of the artist as an out-of
touch half-man, half-alien who is so fragile he could disintegrate at any moment. More often,
though, it is used to question his authority, his authenticity, his legitimacy as a star and a man, his
capability to guide himself, much less his fans, through the world. Perhaps the most sickening
example of this that I found was a TRB column in The New Republic written by Michael Kinsley
and published on April 16, 1984. After describing Jackson as a young boy, pre-fame, as "a
healthy, normal child with a talent for music," Kinsey then chastises him for "having no adult
life," calls him a freak, and chastises the Time article for "[taking] as its theme that there is
something wonderful about being an incompetent human being." In his final paragraph he
mentions that Jackson "is supposedly writing a book," and concludes by snipping, "Write, hell.
Can Michael Jackson read?" That final insult is revolting for the way it resurrects racist tropes
about supposedly innate African American inferiority, stupidity, and backwardness. Jackson is a
young man who has spent his life alienated from regular folks by talent and fame, and denied a
traditional education in service of entertaining the public. Though he may be shy and publicly
inarticulate, nothing Jackson has done as a public or private figure should provoke an otherwise
intelligent cultural critic to question whether he is even literate. Kinsley transcends the typical

90
deployment of the trope of Jackson's arrested development as a way of neutralizing his influence
on the youth and descends instead into an ugly bigoted critique of him as simply stupid.

As this chorus of white voices rises, trying ever more hysterically to strip Jackson of the
transcendent, subversive power he wields, one would think the black community would step in to
defend their newfound hero. But in finding fame and influence as a largely apolitical crossover
pop phenomenon, Jackson sidestepped the role of artistic leader the black community wants him
to take on. As I quoted Gilroy describing at the beginning of this chapter, the majority of the
black community in the early 1980's sees popular music as an arena in which racially loyal artists
can raise consciousness and awareness of black struggle and as a form through which the ideals
Black Nationalism (equality, pride, and progress) can be espoused. Certainly many extremely
successful black pop artists had taken up this cause, most notably James Brown ("Say It Loud
(I'm Black and I'm Proud)"), Marvin Gaye (the entirety of What's Going On), and Stevie Wonder
(Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life). Jackson's music is not explicitly political like the
examples I just gave, though I hope I've shown by now that honest and confrontational
representations of black life are embedded in his music and performance. Jackson's popularity,
however, far surpasses that of Brown, Gaye, or Wonder – of most musicians writ large, black or
white – and his influence puts him in a unique position to further the black struggle for equality
and recognition in America. He is a proud black man and black musician, but he is not interested
in being anyone's political puppet. He sees pop and politics as two separate spheres, and has no
wish to imbricate the two.

Frustration builds in private, sometimes spilling over to the gossip columns when black
writers start to question Jackson's decision to be seen in public so often with Brooke Shields.
Abiola Sinclair writes about this in the New York Amsterdam News and muses,
"I don't know what we want from Michael Jackson…We all wished him well because he
sort of stood for hope in what seems like a hopeless situation…Right on, Michael? The
Brooke Shields thing sort of made us feel 'If you can, get the best' which appears not to
be us after all. Yes – I suppose [the rising negative sentiment in the black community] is
just hurt. I'm worried though. Because this kind of hurt will take one of two forms. Either
we'll pick him apart, or, and this is more likely, we'll push the hurt inward like we usually
do and begin to hate ourselves. After all, he must be right, he's rich ain't he? White folks
listen to him."144
Sinclair is one of the first black voices I found that ties Jackson's choice to date Shields
back to the legacy of American beauty and desirability standards that prize whiteness over all

144
Abiola Sinclair, "Does mainstream Michael Jackson prefer babblin' Brooke?" New York Amsterdam
News, March 31, 1984, 27.

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else, and which used appearance-related rhetoric to hold black women as inferior mates, spouses
and human beings. I doubt Jackson intended this interpretation (so does Sinclair: "Me myself I
think neither one is necessary. Michael is just an entertainer, and he never promised us a rose
garden…") and was probably dismayed that his own community would assume that he would
view black women as inferior and undesirable, as he was vocal about his admiration of and pride
in his mother and three sisters. But Sinclair's column tips us off to the ways into which massive
acts of unification and integration can feel like slights to the community from which the
integrating artist emerges. If we follow the voices of black teenage girls writing in to Ebony and
Jet, nothing about Jackson's decision to publicly date a white woman quells their desire for him,
nor does it dampen their dreams of one day marrying the star. But amongst the leaders of the
community and the writers giving voice to their concerns, it's an indicator that Jackson may be
betraying his roots, leaving his past – and the people in it – behind.

Then, a couple weeks later, the black backlash against Jackson explodes when Louis
Farrakhan addresses him in a radio broadcast that makes front-page news. In it, Farrakhan
accuses him "of projecting a 'female-acting, sissified' image that 'ruins' black youth."145 The
Chicago Tribune quotes him at length: "So, we have today a Michael Jackson who is winning all
kinds of awards because he is a great and marvelous performer. But the image that he projects to
young black men is an image that we should all reject." He continues:
"…this Jheri curl, female-acting, sissified-acting expression, it is not wholesome for our
young boys nor our young girls… Certainly, the man is a great singer, certainly he's a
powerful entertainer. We cannot and we would never try to take anything away from our
brother. But the style that is being projected before the world actually ruins your young
men and makes your young women have nothing to look up to as a real man for their own
lives. This is a shame. But, of course men like this will live to die of old age, because
they threaten nothing."
No one should take Farrakhan as a representative for mainstream black America; he was and
remains an extremist devoted to a political agenda combining Black Nationalism with the
extremism of his Nation of Islam that diverges from the more common expressions of the
essentialist political views Gilroy described. But instead of provoking a loud and outraged
reaction from the black community, who one would assume would want to defend the young man
who has brought blackness and black struggles back to the center of American culture, a flurry of
voices join in to support Farrakhan's homophobic and extremely conservative accusations. Jim
Davis wonders, "How would I react to a son who imitated the image Michael Jackson has

145
George E. Curry, "Muslim leader blasts 'sissified' Michael Jackson," Chicago Tribune, April 11, 1984,
1.

92
created?"146 and admits "I was afraid to answer that question because I know how my father
would have responded to me if I had come home dressed like [that]. Believe me, I can't write it in
this column."147 To try to answer it, he enacts an informal survey of his colleagues and friends.
One tells him, "I'd throw up because I would be disappointed that this was the image that would
carry on my name."148 Another responds, "I'd kick my son in the (posterior)." He then asks his
aunt, "a very religious person who probably would disavow any type of association with
Farrakhan. To my surprise, she also agreed."149 He ends on ambivalent note, relieved because he
knows "nothing is wrong with me and that my father's image of a man has been firmly planted in
me and will be passed on to my children," but allowing, "truthfully, I don't know if there's
anything wrong with Michael Jackson."150 Though in those final sentences he seems to try to
distance himself from the narrow-minded views of acceptable masculinity he's now filled his
column with, it's pretty ineffective. Instead we are left with the sense that being a "real" black
man, a "proper" black man and wanting to be like Michael Jackson are insurmountably estranged
and that Jackson, in daring to be different and a man of his own creation, is actually hurting his
race by making over young boys in his image only to leave them in a position of powerlessness
and ridicule inside and outside of their community.

A couple months later, the Philadelphia Tribune runs a letter to the editor from L.G.
Miller who takes up Farrakhan's critique:
"When I see pictures of this young Black man with his silly one gloved hand, his Shirley
Temple hairdo, and his equally ridiculous rhinestone Captain Kangaroo outfit, I am
reminded of the monkey on the organ grinder's leash. It is said he is popular among Black
youth and an inspiration to them. But what has he to offer our youth? … The music of
Michael Jackson does not enlighten, educate, inspire or instruct, which is what true art is
supposed to do. Music is an art, but it is also a science. Those who cannot understand the
science of music will not be able to understand when and how this science is being used
against them."151
Miller does not expand on what this "science" is, exactly, but scientific discourse comes
into play once again in the pages of the Philadelphia Tribune later that summer in a column by
Dr. Charles W. Faulkner titled, "Curing the Michael Syndrome." Couching his critique firmly in
the language of pseudo-psychology, Faulkner mourns the future black community being led by

146
Jim Davis, "Michael Jackson: sissy or superstar?" Philadelphia Tribune, April 27, 1984, 5.
147
Davis, "Sissy or superstar?" 5
148
Davis, "Sissy or superstar?" 5
149
Davis, "Sissy or superstar?" 5
150
Davis, "Sissy or superstar?" 5
151
"Reader's Viewpoint: The music of Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie," Philadelphia Tribune, June 12,
1984, 4.

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fans of Jackson's. "The problem for Black folk and the Michael Jackson 'gender blender' mystic,"
he laments, "is that many Black youngsters who idolize Michael Jackson are fusing the male and
female appearance, behavior and role requirements. This represents a confusion of how people
should behave. …Many people will never be able to recover from the answers [to questions of
self-identity] which Michael Jackson provides. Make no mistake about it, this fusion of male-
female roles will likely produce many problems when these youngsters, male and female, must
relate to one another as adults contemplating marriage"152 (emphasis mine). Faulkner assumes
the future of the black community is wholly dependent on adherence to the rigid gender roles
articulated in Black Nationalism, and that any deviation from those are necessarily destructive.
He, and the other critics quoted and not who write and speak from this perspective, cannot
envision any way in which the alternative modes of black masculinity Jackson expresses would
be considered liberating, transformative or positive. For him and others there can be no
alternatives, no other ways of thinking; everyone must fall in line behind essentialist politics and
only then can African Americans maybe overcome.

The anger and intolerance these critics espouse perfectly encapsulates the frustration
Jackson provokes from his community when he refuses to step into the role of essentialist
political leader. Gilroy tells us that, "the power of music in developing our struggles by
communicating information, organizing consciousness and testing out, deploying or amplifying
the forms of subjectivity which are required by political agency – individual and collective,
defensive and transformational – demands attention to both the formal attributes of this tradition
of expression and its distinctive moral basis."153 He continues, "In the simplest possible terms, by
posing the world as it is against the world as the racially subordinated would like it to be, this
musical culture supplies a great deal of the courage required to go on living in the present."154 The
problem to critics like Farrakhan, Davis and Miller, is that Jackson's vision of "the world as the
racially subordinated would like it to be" is different from theirs. He eschews many of the
trappings of Black Nationalism's hypermasculinity, compulsory explicit political involvement,
separatism, and strict gender subordination. He's not exactly taking up the "pluralistic position"
Gilroy identifies as the opposite of essentialism and its main competitor in black politics, which
"affirms blackness as an open signifier and seeks to celebrate complex representations of a black

152
Dr. Charles W. Faulkner, "Curing the Michael Jackson syndrome," Philadelphia Tribune, July 27, 1984,
5.
153
Gilroy, "It ain't where you're from…," 133.
154
Gilroy, "It ain't where you're from…," 133.

94
particularity that is internally divided: by class, sexuality, gender, age and political
consciousness."155

Instead, Jackson adopts a wholly integrationist position, wanting to leave the trappings of
racial categorization behind, to transcend them, and in doing so to unite all people on a human
level that rejects the specificity of race, gender and age in favor of recognizing the universal traits
that make us all people and, as such, good and deserving of love and equality. In June of 1983,
when the Jacksons were ending their contracts with then-managers Ron Weisner and Freddy
DeMann, Joe Jackson (their father, not the singer of the same name) made public comments
about hiring Weisner and DeMann because he felt he needed "white help" in navigating the racist
music industry. Michael, who was already notorious for his public reticence, was moved to make
a public statement to Billboard, saying, "I don't know what would make him say something like
that. To hear him talk like that turns my stomach. … I happen to be colorblind: I don't hire color.
I hire competence…Racism is not my motto. One day, I strongly expect every color to love as
one family."156 And in the most extensive and revealing interview he granted during the era of
Thriller, not accidentally given to Robert E. Johnson personally for Ebony, he says, "I'm
prejudiced against ignorance. That's what I'm mainly prejudiced against. It's only ignorance and
it's taught because it's not genetic at all. … Look at the many wonders inside the human body –
the different colors of organs, colors of blood – and all these different colors do a different thing
in the human body. It's the most incredibly system in the world; it makes and incredible building,
the human being. And if this can happen with the human body, why can't we do it as people? And
that's how I feel. And that's what I wish the world could do more."157 And though he refuses the
black community's command to use his music for explicitly political purposes, he does not
separate himself entirely from political efficacy: "I try to write, put it in song. Put it in dance. Put
it in my art to teach the world. If politicians can't do it, I want to do it. We have to do it. Artists,
put it in paintings. Poets, put it in poems, novels. That's what we have to do. And I think it's so
important to save the world."158

Unfortunately, Jackson's published rebuttals come at the end of 1984, in the December
issue of the magazine. Farrakhan's statements come just before the announcement of the Victory
tour and the mess of bad publicity that goes along with it. As I mentioned in the previous chapter,

155
Gilroy, "It ain't where you're from…," 123.
156
Goldberg and Connelly, "Trouble In Paradise," 26.
157
Johnson, "The Michael Jackson Nobody Knows," 160.
158
Johnson, "The Michael Jackson Nobody Knows," 160.

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Jackson is reluctant to do the tour in the first place and bristles even more when his parents and
brothers announce they've hired the politically incorrect and unpredictable boxing promoter Don
King to take charge of it. And, as I mentioned before, King's involvement takes a precarious
situation and turns it into a disaster. King was, in many ways, more interested in promoting
himself than the Jacksons, was publicly vocal about money (uncouth no matter what, and
especially uncouth when the tour was coming under heavy fire for setting ticket prices out reach
for most young black fans and the inane mail-order ticketing system), and made statements and
promotion deals on Michael and the group's behalf without consulting them. Eventually, Michael
sent him a widely reported-on letter instructing him "not to communicate with anyone on Michael
Jackson's behalf without prior permission; that all moneys paid to Michael Jackson for his
participation in the tour would be collected by Michael Jackson's personal representatives, not by
Don King; that King did not have permission to approach any promoters, sponsors or any other
persons on Michael's behalf; that King was not to hire any personnel, any local promoters, book
any halls or, for that matter, do anything without Michael Jackson's personal approval."159 But
though he tries to distance himself from the mess King is making, it's already too late. The ticket
prices and mail order systems are roundly and universally condemned by the press, white and
black, music and mainstream. In an attempt to accommodate an audience far more diverse and
vast than the Jacksons had ever played to before, the many tour organizers set their sights on large
outdoor arenas, which pushes the tour agenda out of the urban areas where their black fans are
concentrated and out into the suburbs, a move that is viewed by the public as another way of
intentionally keeping black fans away now that Michael has achieved such stunning crossover
success. Then it's reported that the Jacksons are also excluding local black promoters for the few
dates confirmed, which provokes a public condemnation by the Reverend Al Sharpton. As the
star around which the show orbits, Michael is personally vilified for these decisions as critics
assume he condones them.

Caught between loyalty to his family (who employed the particularly manipulative move
of hiring Katherine as one of the tour's managers, knowing Michael cannot stand to go against his
mother's wishes) and loyalty to his fans and ideals, Michael can only offer the meekest of
rejoinders against this accusation. Behind the scenes he works furiously to reorient the tour to
make sure large majority-black urban centers like Washington D.C. and Chicago are not bypassed
in favor of white suburban settings, to get rid of the inane mail-order ticketing system and ensure
a fairer distribution of tickets (including setting dozens aside for underprivileged youths at each

159
Goldberg and Connelly, "Trouble In Paradise," 28.

96
show), and he wins small victories: Rev. Sharpton retracts his criticism after more local black
promoters are hired and urban tour stops are announced, and the public greets the abolition of the
mail-order system with great relief and renewed excitement for the shows. The damage is done,
though. As Dave Marsh observed in The Nation after the end of the tour, "The truth about the
Victory Tour is that its main event was an after-thought in the public ritual of the coronation and
decapitation of Michael Jackson."160 Newsweek chimes in, writing as the tour begins, "in recent
months, a tide of dissent has engulfed Jackson in the kind of controversy no pop star has
experienced since John Lennon declared the Beatles more popular than Jesus."161 In many ways,
when the black community joins the white press in criticizing all aspects of Jackson and
undermining his transformative power, they do damage to him that he can never fully repair.
They could have refuted white critics' claims that Jackson's androgyny is detrimental and
reclaimed his black birthright against assertions he has become raceless. They could have spoken
about the power his complex "man-child" identity holds in producing creative expressions that
offer a new and powerful vision of an America in which race is no longer a means of
marginalization and instead of articulation of positive difference that helps build and not break
cultural bonds between citizens. Instead, they reject the plethora of possibilities he offers in favor
of upholding an outmoded and oppressive articulation of black progress that stifles instead of
liberating black politics from its constrained past. If Jackson embodies what Gilroy terms a
"politics of transfiguration," which "emphasizes the emergence of qualitatively new desires,
social relations and modes of association within the racial community of interpretation and
resistance and between that group and its erstwhile oppressors,"162 the black backlash against him
is a resounding rejection of that new strategy in favor of an essentialism that hasn't worked in the
past, and is more than likely not effective in the future.

I want to avoid casting the black community as a single, hegemonic voice that decries all
things Michael Jackson once he fails to step into the role that many want him to fill. Through all
this controversy, he maintained and even grew his fan base, capturing the attention and
admiration of black and white youths alike. And some black media outlets remained devoted to
upholding him as a unique positive force in the world. Ebony in particular, which had a long
relationship with the Jackson family beginning when the Jackson 5 broke in 1970, continued to
publish articles lauding Jackson as a symbol of racial triumph and transcendence, a locus for an

160
Dave Marsh, "Music," The Nation, March 23, 1985, 346.
161
"The Tour, The Money, The Magic," Newsweek, July 16, 1984, 69.
162
Gilroy, "It ain't where you're from…,"134.

97
intensely beneficial movement among the youth to look past racial difference and recognize the
vast commonalities between blacks and whites. Because of this, they were the publication that
Jackson used to give himself a voice, to address his public directly. And music critics soon
acquiesced to the power of Jackson's live performance, especially as the Victory tour relaxed out
of the over-rehearsed stiffness of its earliest dates into an electrifying showcase for Michael's
formidable talent. But the power accrued when the black community joined in on the Michael
Jackson backlash cannot be ignored. Though it may not have been their intention, though they
may have thought they were protecting something essential and desperately important to African
American identity, in the end they undermined the greatest act of cross-racial transcendence and
subversion America had yet seen. Reflecting on the backlash a year later, Marsh writes,
"Like Elvis, Michael was in trouble for doing what's not to be done: exposing the power
potential of popular culture, engaging in race mingling, acting 'too sexy.' When he was a
phenomenon solely within the world of music, Michael Jackson had enjoyed nearly
universal acclaim. There may have been doubters, but there were no naysayers. Bursting
past the normal bounds of pop discourse into the mainstream of American events,
Michael became not just a hero but a controversy…Just as the press had boosted Thriller,
it now concentrated upon breaking Michael, cutting him down to size."163
To put it another way, what the editors of The Nation had warned about earlier than year
came to pass; Jackson leapt the wall beyond his role, and they got him. They got him good.

James Baldwin observed this spectacle of outrage coalescing around Jackson and was
moved to speak. In his 1985 essay originally titled "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood"
(later revised and re-titled "Here Be Dragons"), he offers us an extraordinary reading of the
backlash:
"The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at all. I
hope he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life out of the
jaws of a carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for turning so many tables,
for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring and the man who broke the bank in Monte Carlo
has nothing on Michael Jackson.
All that noise is about America, as the dishonest custodian of black life and wealth; the
blacks, especially males, in America; and the burning, buried American guilt; and sex and
sexual roles and sexual panic; money; success and despair—to all of which may now be
added the bitter need to find a head onto which to place the crown of Miss America.
Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated—in the main, abominably—
because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound
terrors and desires."164
His choice to call the backlash a "cacophony" is interesting. A cacophony is a harsh, discordant
mixture of sounds lacking form and order, often overwhelming. It is the opposite of music, and

163
Marsh, Trapped, 228.
164
Baldwin, James. "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood" in Baldwin: Collected Essays. New York
(Library of America, 1998): 828.

98
even more the opposite of Jackson's music with its rhythmic and harmonic balance. Jackson's
music affected the American public, specifically the American youth, by offering them a new
model with which to articulate and organize their identities, a model of shared experience and
love that existed not along the lines of race but across them. In creating a cacophony around him
– a cacophony that projected onto one singer, one entertainer, the expectations and grievances
built up over centuries and the responsibility to somehow erase all of them in one fell swoop –
those participating in the backlash tried to destroy the cohesion his pop explosion created, to
scatter youths just now solidifying a new set of bonds to one another and just now finding their
own generational voice. Some may have thought they were doing so in service of a better future,
but what they were really doing was shoring up the repressive ideology of the past and calcifying
rigid identities that perpetuated American racial stratification. Unable to other Jackson using
traditional tropes of race, gender, and maturity, they turned instead to a vitriolic campaign of
freakishness, doing everything in their power to alienate him from his fans, his birthright, and his
last existing community. A man often described as "isolated," the cacophony surrounding
Michael Jackson ensured he would never feel at home among his own people ever again while
simultaneously denying him the comfort of his new white fans (to find comfort there, of course,
would just affirm accusations of being a race traitor). If Baldwin's final assertion that "freaks are
called freaks and treated as such…because they cause to echo deep within us our most profound
terrors and desires" is true, and I think it is, then we can only conclude that Michael Jackson
tapped into the deepest fears and desires of the American people with the profound act of
crossover his Thriller pop explosion induced, and that America was far from prepared to confront
those fears and desires and put forth the work necessary to overcome the persistent ghosts of its
history. The only question left to ask, then, is did this backlash actually succeed in undermining
and neutralizing the transformative power of Michael Jackson and Thriller? It is my pleasure to
answer that question at the end of this unhappy chapter with a resounding: No!

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 Yes I Believe In Me, So You Believe In You

When I first started thinking about this thesis and this topic, I was motivated by very
personal desires. In the wake of Michael Jackson's unexpected death on June 25, 2009, I found
myself in a place of intense self-reflection. A lifelong fan, I was devastated by his passing. It felt
as though I'd lost a parent or a close friend, a lover or a leader. Something deep inside mourned
the loss of something so great I couldn't quite name it. It was, in a word, a very unexpected
reaction. I had never met Michael, nor had I ever seen him in concert. I'd known him only
through his public face: his records, his videos, his interviews, and his public appearances. What
right did I have to mourn the man like he was family? And why would I even want to? Yet the
feelings could not be stopped, and so as I worked through them I began to explore the potential
intellectual reasons for such a deep emotional reaction. Eventually what I realized was that
Michael (and really, are we not all on a first name basis with him?) had shaped my view of
myself and of my country in ways I was only beginning to understand. I was born at the end of
1984; at the very end of the pop explosion I've dedicated so many words to documenting and
analyzing, into an America that had been deeply and permanently reshaped by Michael and his
event. As such, I was born into a world where the door separating African Americans from
superstardom had already been kicked open. I grew up thinking it natural to idolize this young
androgynous black man (Bad was the first tape I ever bought for myself at the tender age of four
and a half in 1989), natural to lust after him (he was my first crush, concurrent with Ziggy
Stardust, which speaks perhaps too candidly to my own predilections), and, most importantly,
natural to see any and all black musicians and entertainers as perfectly legitimate superstars. I
grew up in a world marred and marked by intense racial strife, yes, but I also grew up having
unproblematically internalized the notion that there were no qualitative differences between black
and white, that judgments of "good" and "bad," "worthy" and "unworthy" had to do with
individual people and not racialized generalizations. It was a notion that was reinforced by my
parents, but I learned it first from Michael's mere existence.

I believe deeply in the transformative power of music. I have argued for it here by
exploring the ways in which the very sound of Thriller and America's affective response to it
opened up experiential dialogues between black and white youths, and opened the minds of white
youths in particular to the sounds of black life and black experience. I have argued for its
augmentation when delivered by Michael's exceptional body, paired with dance so evocative and
potent that it opened the eyes of the youth to new expressive modes of masculinity, interracial

100
desire, and interracial love. And I have argued that the depth and breadth of its power can be
witnessed in how extreme the attempts were to silence its voice and quell its influence. At the end
of the last chapter I answered my own question about whether the backlash had succeeded in
undermining and destroying the positive transformation that was the Michael Jackson pop
explosion with a resounding no. Allow me now, in these final pages, to explain why.

Viewed in the context of Michael Jackson's entire discography, it can be easy to dismiss
Thriller as a lighter, fluffier pop album with a few astoundingly good tracks, but to do so would
be to ignore the floodgates it singlehandedly opened. Thriller thrusts black music and black
musical tradition back into the center of pop music, revealing it as vital to a generation that had
been sheltered from it by the re-segregation of the music industry; those floodgates remain open
well after the Victory Tour has ended and Jackson retreats briefly from the public eye. As the
Jacksons are mounting the Victory Tour, Prince – no stranger to stardom, but nowhere near the
iconic figure that Michael has now become – releases what many now consider to be his magnum
opus, Purple Rain and its attendant movie. By the end of 1984 a new black vocal group, New
Edition, achieves a breakthrough top 10 hit with "Cool It Now." In 1985 Whitney Houston and
LL Cool J release their debut albums to unexpected mainstream success. And if we continue to
chart the path of black music in the 1980's, especially the rise of hip hop and rap, we can see an
increasingly strong presence on mainstream radio, higher overall record sales, and noticeable
increases in visibility by MTV. In fact, black music's presence on MTV becomes so essential to
the network's continued success that only four years later, in 1988, MTV launches Yo! MTV Raps,
an hour-long program dedicated to what was new and hot in hip hop and rap. Yo! MTV Raps was
crucial in exposing white Americans all over the country to all forms of hip hop, from the
playfulness of Run D.M.C., to the romance of LL Cool J, to, perhaps most crucially, the
confrontational politics and rage of gangsta rap.

In the years since the rise of hip-hop, dozens of scholars have devoted thousands of pages
to analyzing it, exploring its signifiers and coded images, and picking apart its lyrics to determine
the politics of the genre and its effect on gender relations within the black community and race
relations in America at large. Of particular interest to these intellectuals is the way hip hop has
transformed from niche race music to the new American pop music, beloved and enjoyed by as
many white Americans as black. They speculate on appropriation and attempts to co-opt
experience, or the ways in which hip-hop gives urban poor whites a voice that other genres
cannot. Michael Jackson's greatest musical – if not musicological – legacy may be the way he

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prepared us – as in white folk, the American mainstream – to receive hip hop and rap. Michael
was not the first to bring black music to white ears, but he was the first to give white Americans a
way of relating to black music, and in turn black people, without reinforcing the walls between
them. This is not to imply that Michael somehow erased racial privilege or the power structures
that continue to stratify black and white American life, but that he taught a generation that those
obstacles are surmountable and, ultimately, less important than recognizing the common
humanity in all of us and using that recognition to forge bonds in our identities as Americans.

Of course, Michael's music casts a specter over all modern pop, dance and R&B. The
music press carefully documents those poised to assume his crown as King of Pop – Usher, Chris
Brown, Justin Timberlake, Ne-Yo, an endless cavalcade of talented young men whose bodies
reveal that their dance training began not in a class but in front of the television blaring "Billie
Jean" or "Thriller." His supremely elastic voice set the standard to which all male singers now
aspire, and his exceptional ear, along with his always-improving facility for songwriting (Michael
writes the majority of his albums' songs for the rest of his career, his confidence bolstered by the
success of his contributions to Thriller), redefined what constitutes a good pop song. Many of his
own songs become the sampled foundation for some of hip-hop's most popular and successful
releases (LL Cool J's "Hey Lover" samples "Lady in my Life," Public Enemy's "911 Is A Joke"
samples "Thriller," Puff Daddy's "Can't Nobody Hold Us Down" samples "Don’t Stop 'Til You
Get Enough," Jay-Z's "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)" samples "I Want You Back," Naughty By Nature's
"OPP" samples "ABC," the list goes on and on). He also set new standards for touring and live
performance, both during the Victory Tour and in his first real solo tour, the Bad Tour of 1987-
1989. In his lifetime he won almost every award he could be given, broke almost ever record he
could attempt, and became such an iconic personification of America and American music that
when the Iron Curtain fell we sent him over to be the first artist to perform around the former
Soviet Union, making him quite literally an ambassador in service of the American way of life.

We also never stopped trying to destroy him. Perhaps better documented than any of his
cultural achievements are the accusations of child molestation he faced in 1993 (they were settled
out of civil court; criminal charges were never brought against him) and then again in 2003, for
which he stood trial in 2005 and was found not guilty. In one of the open letters to Michael that
comprise every other chapter of his 1985 book, Dave Marsh wrote, "…somewhere buried deep in
American cultural memory is the story of your own rise and fall from public grace told over and

102
over and over again as continuing multiracial passion play."165 The deeply subversive and
transcendent power that Michael unleashes on American identity during the Thriller pop
explosion cannot simply be shoved back under the rug because he is imperfect, nor can critics
negate his influence enough to diminish his stardom; he continues to dominate popular music in
the 1980's, first with "We Are The World," a benefit single recorded with an impressive choir of
music giants (Bruce Springsteen, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Cyndi Lauper,
Dionne Warwick, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Kenny Loggins, Hall & Oates, and at least
a dozen more) immediately after the 1985 AMAs, then with 1987's Bad which sold almost as well
as Thriller, and produced five No. 1 singles, a slew of groundbreaking music videos, the highest-
grossing tour of the 1980's, the most attended tour of the 1980's, and a tripped-out feature film,
Moonwalker. During this time, the freak narrative that began to emerge in the moment around
Thriller – the preoccupation with Jackson's seemingly arrested development, his affection for
animals, mannequins, Peter Pan and Disney, and the accusations leveled at the authenticity of his
race, heterosexuality, and masculinity – becomes even more pronounced. Rumors fly that he has
purchased an hyperbaric chamber in which to sleep in order for him to prevent aging; he develops
a public friendship with Elizabeth Taylor and is rumored to have built a shrine to her in his home;
Bubbles, his pet chimpanzee, also becomes a tabloid darling; and as his skin continues to lighten
and his features seem to change further, rumors of skin bleaching and plastic surgery addiction
reach a frenzied pitch. By the 1990's the rumors have turned from sensational to downright nasty,
and the sheer amount of time and energy devoted by the tabloid press to bringing about his
downfall is astounding. Eventually they succeed with the 1993 accusations of child molestation.

The deployment of child molestation charges against him, as opposed to other more
traditional narratives of criminality applied to black stars, is provocative but ultimately the subject
of another paper. In short, it speaks to the specifics of Jackson's "freak" narrative developed in the
Thriller moment, so firmly entrenched in backwards notions about what constitutes "appropriate"
adulthood. It also speaks to deeply regressive tropes of gender in general and masculinity
specifically; they are rooted in the perceived inappropriateness of a man caring about the welfare
of children. To ask an exceedingly simplified question: Would the amount of attention Michael
devoted to children, especially underprivileged and terminally ill children, seem as odd or
unnatural if he were a woman? The bonds forged between Michael Jackson and the American
people, especially the generation of youths that found themselves in Thriller, were too strong to
be broken by petty racial narratives, and so something much more serious had to be used instead.

165
Marsh, Trapped, p. 46.

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 Yet the same folks who had once set out to destroy Michael joined in with his fans and
the rest of the world 15 years later in an overwhelming spectacle of public mourning. Why would
those who hated him cry along with those who loved him? The answer, I think, lies in how deeply
he wormed his way inside our selves and our identities. Michael exhorts us to examine and
attempt to answer incredibly complicated questions about gender, sexuality, race and American
identity in this moment in the early 80's and for the duration of his career. His music remains the
conduit for these exhortations, even as his dominance in American culture and American music
begins to wane. He unseats and unsettles assumptions about what it is to be black, to be a man, to
be an American, and never again so powerfully as during Thriller. So profound was his impact on
us that for many he ceased to be a person and instead became a symbol, a signifier for America
and its complex racial history, for hope and possibility, for transgression and subversion, for
everything we did right and everything that's gone wrong. He acted as a lens through which we
saw ourselves. The youth saw an identity free from the constraints of their parents' generation,
from the obligation to 1960's counterculture and white rock music, from compulsory self-
segregation and increasing alienation. The critics saw a man who challenged all the notions they
believed in, who broke through the barriers they'd so carefully erected, who represented a casting-
off of the standards of morality they had worked so hard to maintain. Black America saw
sometimes their liberation, sometimes their downfall. White America saw sometimes their new
hero, and sometimes their biggest threat. Or allow those involved to tell it, through two letters
printed side-by-side in Newsweek:
"The sequins and glitter, the mansion, the 'sotto voce manner,' all mark Michael Jackson
as the Liberace of the 80's.
James Sullivan
Temple City, Calif.
Michael Jackson's personification of the pain of growing up makes him this generation's
James Dean.
Cecily Cannon
Kansas City, Mo."166
Michael Jackson was whoever you wanted him to be, whoever you needed him to be; "[An] entity
[that] must itself be capable of easy, instantaneous and varied imitation and extension, in a
thousand ways at once; [which] must embody, suggest, affirm and legitimize new possibilities on
all fronts even as it outstrips them."

166
"Letters: The Age of Jackson," Newsweek, July 30, 1984, 9.

104
 We've now come full circle, back to the pop explosion, that incredibly rare and incredibly
powerful phenomenon we've only been able to experience thrice. Marcus told us that "at its heart,
a pop explosion attaches the individual to a group—the fan to an audience, the solitary to a
generation—in essence, forms a group and creates new loyalties."167 I hope by now I have proven
just how fully Michael Jackson fulfilled that role in 1983 and 1984, when, along with Thriller, he
formed the magnetic center of pop music and pop culture, a center that drew together youths of
all backgrounds, races, classes and genders under the umbrella of love, goodwill, and good old
fashioned American entertainment. He was not a canvas for us to paint our images on – he was
too individual, too exceptional, too fully realized for that. Instead, he provided us with a new
palate of paints to use to paint ourselves; he gave us the tools and the permission to see ourselves
differently than we had been told we could, to see beyond prejudice and bigotry, beyond tradition
and history, to a new and different future of our own making. "So hold your head up high / And
sing out to the world / I know I am someone," he told us, singing the words in that indescribable
tenor, whooping with the joy of self-determination and emancipation. "No one can hurt you
now," he continued, that voice lifted by that chant, and both lifting us, the listener, higher and
higher into aural ecstasy, "Because you know what's true / Yes, I believe in me / So you believe
in you!" In this exceptional moment in American culture, we not only heard his exhortation but
we listened, using him to know ourselves and opening the door to the possibility that the future of
American identity could one day be freed from its shameful history. The echoes of that possibility
still reverberate through our culture to this day. May they one day find themselves fully realized.

167
Marcus, "The Beatles," 214-215.

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 Bibliography
Books
Baldwin, James. "Here Be Dragons." Baldwin: Collected Essays. New York: Library Classics,
1998.
Bego, Mark. Michael! New York: Pinnacle, 1984.
Cadman, Chris & Craig Halstead. Michael Jackson: For the Record. Bedfordshire: Authors
OnLine, 2007.
DeCurtis, Anthony & James Henke, ed. (Jim Miller, original editor). The Rolling Stone Illustrated
History of Rock & Roll. Revised edition. New York: Random House, 1992.
Douglas, Susan J. Where The Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media. New York:
Three Rivers, 1994.
Frith, Simon. "Music and Identity" in Questions of Cultural Identity edited by Stuart Hall and
Paul du Gay, London: Sage Publications, 1996.
George, Nelson. The Michael Jackson Story. New York: Bantam Dell, 1984.
George, Nelson. Thriller: The Musical Life of Michael Jackson. Cambridge: Da Capo Press,
2010.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1993.
Gilroy, Paul. Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. London: Serpent's Tail,
1993.
Hall, Stuart. "Who Needs 'Identity'?" in Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and
Paul du Gay, London: Sage Publications, 1996.
Jackson, Katherine with Richard Wiseman. My Family, The Jacksons. New York: St Martins
Mass Market, 1990.
Jackson, Michael. Moonwalk. New York: Harmony Books, 1988.
Jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Minneapolis: University of
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Kelley, Robin D.G. Yo' Mama's DisFUNKtional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America.
Beacon Press: Boston, 1997.
Marsh, Dave. Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream. New York: Bantam, 1985.
Mercer, Kobena. "Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson's Thriller" in Welcome to the
Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York: Routelage, 1994.
Swedien, Bruce, In The Studio with Michael Jackson. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Books, 2009.
Taraborelli, J. Randy. Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness. 2003 revised edition.
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Magazines and Newspapers
Billboard Magazine, Aug. 1982 – Dec. 1984.
Chicago Tribune, Nov. 1982 – Dec. 1984.
Ebony Magazine, Jan. 1981 – Dec. 1984.
Jet Magazine, Aug. 1982 – Dec. 1984.
Los Angeles Times, Nov. 1982 – Dec. 1984.
New York Times, Nov. 1982 – Dec. 1984.
Newsweek Magazine, Nov. 1982 – Dec. 1984.
People Magazine, Aug. 1982 – Dec. 1984.
Rolling Stone Magazine, Jan. 1982 – Dec. 1984.
Time Magazine, Nov. 1982 – Dec. 1984.
Washington Post, Nov. 1982 – Dec. 1984.

Aletti, Vince. "E.T. as Mr. Entertainment." The Village Voice, December 14, 1982. Accessed on
February 10, 2011. http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2009/06/from_the_voice_1.php
Banks, Samuel L. "Michael Jackson come home." Afro-American, July 21, 1984.
Christgau, Robert. "Working the Crowd." The Village Voice, August 21, 1984. Accessed on
February 10, 2011. http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2009/06/from_the_voice_8.php.
Considine, J.P. "Black music/white music: Is racism rocking rock?" The Sun, January 16, 1983.
Considine, J.P. "The making of Michael Jackson," The Sun, March 4, 1984.
Davis, Jim. "Michael Jackson: Sissy or Superstar?" Philadelphia Tribune, April 27, 1984.
"Editorial: Jackson Brothers." The Nation, March 10, 1984.
Faggins, Barbara. "Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie to be boycotted." Philadelphia Tribune, May
11, 1984.
Faulkner, Charles. " The Making of Michael Jackson, Superstar." New Journal and Guide, July
25, 1984.
Faulkner, Charles. "Curing the Michael Syndrome." Philadelphia Tribune, July 27, 1984.
George, Nelson. "Chocolate Chips at the Ice Capades." The Village Voice, August 7, 1984.
Accessed on February 10, 2011.
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2009/06/from_the_voice_7.php.
"Jacksons Targets of Racist Media." Philadelphia Tribune, July 13, 1984.
Kinsley, Michael. "Michael Jackson, Prisoner of Commerce." The New Republic, April 16, 1984.
Marsh, Dave. "Music." The Nation, March 23, 1985.

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"Michael Jackson and the Flap Over the Summer Tour." Afro-American, June 30, 1984.
Pitt, Keary. "Don't Lay the Blame on Jackson." The Hartford Courant, June 9, 1984.
Rizzo, Frank. "People are Dancing Again." The Hartford Courant, October 20, 1983.
Sinclair, Abiola. "Does mainstream Michael Jackson prefer babblin' Brooke?" New York
Amsterdam News, March 31, 1984.
Smith, Carl. "Why must we have superstars?" The Sun, July 1, 1984.
Stark, Steven. "Michael's Moonwalk Out of Adolescence." The Hartford Courant, May 27, 1984.
Thomas, Bill. "The glove, sunglasses, white socks: What's it all mean?" The Sun, March 4, 1984.
"Who Is Michael Jackson?" The Wall Street Journal, March 6, 1984.

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