TheLoop21.com

By: Michael E. Ross (Add to your loop)
Thu, 06/25/2009 - 15:13

Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, where he was best — on stage.

We know him, in some ways, not so much from the sound he produced as from the sound generated around him: the shrill, birdlike screams of the millions around this planet who adored him. We know him less from the light of rhythm and energy he generated from within, than from the camera flashes that attended his every move for almost 40 years.

When Michael Joseph Jackson departed Thursday afternoon in Los Angeles, he fully joined the pop-culture pantheon, keeping company with Frank Sinatra, Elvis and James Dean as an indelible icon of our time.

Jackson’s persona as a performer and showman were unrivaled. By turns channeling Fred Astaire, P.T. Barnum and James Brown, Michael, alone among this nation's top tier of musical talent, wed sound to spectacle like no one before him, and like no one ever will again.

But spectacle only gets you so far. Sooner or later, with ravenous fans round the world, you have to Bring It. And Michael brought it, pretty much from the time his professional career started at the age of 11. You know those songs in your sleep or you grew up with someone who did. ABC. The Love You Save. I’ll Be There. I Want You Back. Michael, the lead voice of the Jackson 5, was the prodigy son, combining a clarion falsetto with the R&B sensibilities of Sam Cooke and Ray Charles in a package all its own.

Michael came into his own as a singer and songwriter; by the time the Jackson 5 was rechristened the Jacksons, Michael was the voice of the group in more ways than one, even then beginning to establish the MJ signature look: individual, personal, a thing apart.

And then there was the breakthrough. Do you remember the time? By the mid-1980’s, in the wake of Off the Wall and Thriller — until recently the biggest-selling album in history — there was Michael Jackson and there was everybody else. In an era exhausted by punk’s nihilism and bored with a widening gap between the precincts of R&B, funk and rock, Michael’s new sound — crisp, fresh, daring, relentless — took the world by storm.

And it was bigger than music. In the infancy of the music video era, Michael broke through in another important way. His Thriller videos shattered the music-video apartheid cultivated by MTV. To that point, MTV refused to show videos by African American artists; the irresistible popularity of Billie Jean and Beat It put a stop to that.

Last year, The Washington Post observed: “M.J. achieved nothing less than a reintegration of American music, and he helped pave the way for all who followed, from Prince to Public Enemy.”

Today we’re reawakened to what he always was: part of the pop-cultural firmament, the oxygen we breathe. His dance moves have been practiced by everyone from prisoners at a maximum-security prison in the Philippines to participants in a zombie tribute to the Thriller video in Seattle last year, when Thriller the album turned 25. A device for one of his dance techniques is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Yancey, in a reader comment at The New York Times, said it best: “For my generation, the greatest moonwalk had nothing to do with NASA.”

An observation from February 2008 stands, mostly, with all its ironies intact:

This year the Thriller album is 25 years young. And fans are waiting to see how maturity and time have changed one of the most transcendent artists to hit the scene. Remember, folks, in less than six months from now, on Aug. 29th, the thriller known as Michael Joseph Jackson will be 50 years old. That’s a good time for a “comeback,” in one sense.

But maybe a comeback isn't necessary. In many ways, in the many samples and artists, images and sounds around us every day, Michael Jackson has never left the building.

And a postscript to that observation:

With a velocity into the culture rarely achieved before and never achieved since; with a master showman’s uncanny sense of timing and drama; with a fierce dedication to his art, its history and its possibilities; with more than 750 million records sold and a generation’s worth of musical hits that will ring in the ears of our children’s children’s children; in ways we can’t fully measure at this wounded moment, Michael Jackson was the building.

Veteran journalist Michael E. Ross has worked at The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, msnbc.com and elsewhere; and was formerly an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism. His reviews, fiction, essays and criticism have also appeared in The Times Book Review, Essence, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, Konch, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Root, PopMatters and other publications. Author of the novel Flagpole Days (2003), and the essay collection Interesting Times (2004), he contributed to the anthologies MultiAmerica (1997), and Soul Food (2000). His newest collection of Weblogs and essays, American Bandwidth, will be published in the summer of 2009.

The fans boycotting Michael Jackson's 'This Is It' movie are:

Right, MJ would hate it

Just looking for attention

Wrong, hurting MJ's legacy

I'm not sure