BILLY JEAN IS NOT LANDO CALRISSIAN
Aug. 4th, 2009 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nigeltdeSaturday night RAGE ran a chronological Michael Jackson retrospective (which is at the same time of course a crash course in the history and evolution of the music video and pop music and Australian music journalism) and to see all that in one go is a confusing and confronting experience, is like a tour through the life of a fucked-up person who existed entirely through this ephemera. How can you think about Michael Jackson without summing up his life in terms of his body? How does he exist outside of the transformation of his skin and his baby voice and a disco bass line? How impossible is it to watch this person's work without seeing his tragedy as physical deformation out there in the open for all to see? (Watch the final concert footage from that Madison Square thing and you get a very similar thing.)
His face changes in every film clip. At first you get that natural progression of sweet-faced young boy to gorgeous adolescent that at my age I do not associate with Michael Jackson at all. And then year by year you instinctively catalogue the changes, the nose first by degrees, then skin, hair, cheeks, lips, eyebrows. By Bad there are only echos left, in his eyes and movement. But it's still Michael! the clips insist. You still love him! This change is unlike the personas adopted and discarded by Madonna or the downward spiral embodied by Britney. There's no essential change at all here! This is a simple refinement of who he was always meant to be. But after Thriller the songs get worse and worse and by the Dangerous clips he's a stringy-haired soft-focus white boy so here you have a whole new Michael and you're not sure exactly how it happened. And then there're all those I'm messed up so fuck you/I'm messed up so love me up-tempos and ballads from the mid to late nineties.
What is wonderful to see is the evolution of his dance. In Blame It On the Boogie you can see his distinctive snap and flair just begin to emerge; by Beat It it is fully-fledged, energetic awesome, and it reaches its charismatic height in Thriller and its technical height in Smooth Criminal. Here too the Madison Square performance is an exercise in pathos, his movement noticeably weaker, the entire show choreographed around his difficulty as everyone smiles that desperate The This Isn't A Train Wreck smile.
The other obvious signifiers of change are his vocal tics, those plosive glottal and nasal stops, the c-AH!s, the hee! and hoo!s, that slightly gritty and strained high register, that eventually completely take over his performance, and, of course, the OUTRAGEOUS DISCO AND EIGHTIES AND EARLY NINETIES FASHION.
So watching these clips you get the guy's life in a bunch of snapshots that just work as a pathology of mental health and it's fucking weird and disturbing.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lainy122 just linked to a site called swimatyourownrisk.com where you see people taken apart by sharks, and this RAGE special is pretty much the exact same thing except in stop motion.
But while I ain't going near the sharks this special is at the same time one giant nostalgia trip, every song keyed up to trigger a whole bunch of things about your childhood or adolescence or early adulthood or that one wedding you went to where your cousin Giovanna threw up trying to dance the Thriller dance. We all know that some of this stuff is really amazing. First and foremost you have the unbeatable trifecta of Billie Jean, Thriller and Smooth Criminal. Between them, BIOTB and Beat It, you have some of the greatest songs of the last fifty years. Of course mixed in are those songs like Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough and Wanna Be Starting Something which like too much of Jackson's work is like six unbearable minutes of chorus fadeout that just goes nowhere, starting on one level and keeping to it until you want to drive a railroad spike through your ears (other really good songs like Can You Feel It and Beat It manage to transcend this limitation by virtue of their awesome hooks). Not to mention utter sentimental tripe like Say Say Say, which, my GOD McCartney, how did you think your bland eighties pop would improve upon that tendency?
Something else to notice is that as he ages, his default facial expression goes from a wide, appeasing smile to a narrow-eyed grimace. Is there any other person on the planet more suited to a chronologically ordered retrospective? Is there any other celebrity whose troublesome mesh of infantalisation and choreographed sexuality is so indelibly and loudly played out across their high pop-royalty body?
His face changes in every film clip. At first you get that natural progression of sweet-faced young boy to gorgeous adolescent that at my age I do not associate with Michael Jackson at all. And then year by year you instinctively catalogue the changes, the nose first by degrees, then skin, hair, cheeks, lips, eyebrows. By Bad there are only echos left, in his eyes and movement. But it's still Michael! the clips insist. You still love him! This change is unlike the personas adopted and discarded by Madonna or the downward spiral embodied by Britney. There's no essential change at all here! This is a simple refinement of who he was always meant to be. But after Thriller the songs get worse and worse and by the Dangerous clips he's a stringy-haired soft-focus white boy so here you have a whole new Michael and you're not sure exactly how it happened. And then there're all those I'm messed up so fuck you/I'm messed up so love me up-tempos and ballads from the mid to late nineties.
What is wonderful to see is the evolution of his dance. In Blame It On the Boogie you can see his distinctive snap and flair just begin to emerge; by Beat It it is fully-fledged, energetic awesome, and it reaches its charismatic height in Thriller and its technical height in Smooth Criminal. Here too the Madison Square performance is an exercise in pathos, his movement noticeably weaker, the entire show choreographed around his difficulty as everyone smiles that desperate The This Isn't A Train Wreck smile.
The other obvious signifiers of change are his vocal tics, those plosive glottal and nasal stops, the c-AH!s, the hee! and hoo!s, that slightly gritty and strained high register, that eventually completely take over his performance, and, of course, the OUTRAGEOUS DISCO AND EIGHTIES AND EARLY NINETIES FASHION.
So watching these clips you get the guy's life in a bunch of snapshots that just work as a pathology of mental health and it's fucking weird and disturbing.
lainy122 just linked to a site called swimatyourownrisk.com where you see people taken apart by sharks, and this RAGE special is pretty much the exact same thing except in stop motion.But while I ain't going near the sharks this special is at the same time one giant nostalgia trip, every song keyed up to trigger a whole bunch of things about your childhood or adolescence or early adulthood or that one wedding you went to where your cousin Giovanna threw up trying to dance the Thriller dance. We all know that some of this stuff is really amazing. First and foremost you have the unbeatable trifecta of Billie Jean, Thriller and Smooth Criminal. Between them, BIOTB and Beat It, you have some of the greatest songs of the last fifty years. Of course mixed in are those songs like Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough and Wanna Be Starting Something which like too much of Jackson's work is like six unbearable minutes of chorus fadeout that just goes nowhere, starting on one level and keeping to it until you want to drive a railroad spike through your ears (other really good songs like Can You Feel It and Beat It manage to transcend this limitation by virtue of their awesome hooks). Not to mention utter sentimental tripe like Say Say Say, which, my GOD McCartney, how did you think your bland eighties pop would improve upon that tendency?
Something else to notice is that as he ages, his default facial expression goes from a wide, appeasing smile to a narrow-eyed grimace. Is there any other person on the planet more suited to a chronologically ordered retrospective? Is there any other celebrity whose troublesome mesh of infantalisation and choreographed sexuality is so indelibly and loudly played out across their high pop-royalty body?
