"Be careful what you do, 'cause the lie becomes the truth."

Highly recommended reading on Michael Jackson:

• Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream, by Dave Marsh
• Ishmael Reed's piece "The Persecution of Michael Jackson" on Counterpunch 
• Recent interview with Quincy Jones 

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"You know who plays guitar on that record?" my friend asked, keeping his voice low so as not to attract the attention of our teacher during a school assembly.

"Yeah, that's Eddie Van Halen," I replied.  My friend nodded as if to say, we know about something special.  A secret shared by about 15 million others at the time.

We were talking about Michael Jackson's new single "Beat It" which, as with every subsequent single of his for the next two years, was inescapable.  What was notable about the inescapability of "Beat It" was that every station had to play it.  The most backward-looking narrowcasting "classic rock" stations even played it, and frequently (you could literally hear it sandwiched between Foreigner and Styx).  

But I mostly listened to Chicago's WLS-AM, which played top 40...which meant the top 40 from roughly 1956 to the present.  You would literally hear Chuck Berry, REO Speedwagon, and Prince in the same hour.  Jackson's songs seemed to occupy roughly 1/3rd of its playlist from late 1982 to late 1984, so like everyone else who listened to top 40 radio in those days, I was deeply familiar with the singles off Thriller (which is to say, seven out of its nine tracks).

But I didn't actually buy a copy of Thriller (or even hear the whole record) until years later.  For the time being, my allegiance was to Duran Duran.  I'm not sure why, other than that most of my friends were into Duran Duran and weren't particularly into Michael Jackson.  Some Duran Duran records were decent (Rio), some were horrible (everything else), and all of them had shitty singing.  But in junior high, fights would break out over who was better, Duran Duran or Michael Jackson (I've often wondered if this was our generation's version of the 70s Ace-Frehley-vs-Jimmy-Page schoolyard brawls).  I couldn't argue the case for Duran Duran too strenuously; as much as I liked them at the time, I ultimately knew that Michael Jackson's music wasn't just far superior, but was destined to endure in a way Duran Duran's simply couldn't.  Duran Duran sounds hopelessly dated now; Thriller and Off The Wall sound timeless.

Or rather, they would if Quincy Jones hadn't kept putting those moronic horn fills in Jackson's songs.  I've heard arguments that Jones was the "real" genius behind Jackson's records.  I've heard similar theories about George Martin; a friend once told me that "all the Beatles had to do was sing," which is like saying, "All Michael Jackson had to do was sing" -- if performances that heroic can be so dismissed as an afterthought, I suspect the point of those records is being missed.  What's forgotten is that, like the Beatles, Michael Jackson made brilliant music without his supposed puppetmaster, and the puppetmasters (Jones and Martin) almost never made indisputably great music without their supposed puppets.  Jackson's home demos of "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" and "Billie Jean" show that the arrangements -- Jackson's arrangements -- are complete (and bracing and groundbreaking and a blueprint for future hip-hop arrangements) and nearly identical to those on the master takes.  Jones does add strings and horns to "Don't Stop" (as he would to, in a similarly clumsy fashion, "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'") -- a big, bold, brassy horn section, technically proficient, precise, unnecessary, and utterly laughable, the only element of Jackson's records that dates them (and, not coincidentally, the only one not followed up on, or even imitated, by the vast legions of artists influenced by Jackson).

I don't want to suggest that Jones was useless, or that Jackson could have made those records without him.  He couldn't have.  The role of a producer can be anything from composing and arranging to simply being physically present, but with equal sway over the proceedings.  As Jackson's keyboardist Greg Phillinganes put it, Jones was "running the show without really running the show."  But the music snobs who grudgingly praised Thriller and Off The Wall's innovations with their disdainful comments about who was really the genius behind them (hint: not Jackson) unwittingly provided another example of how unfathomably broad Jackson's influence was.  

In the summer of 1988 I attended the Northwestern High School Music Institute.  On the second day, the director of the Institute, a longtime NU band director, gave a speech with some pretty cogent advice for the students (from what I remember, it amounted to, "You might think you're hot shit; but everyone sitting in this room thinks that about themselves too").  But out of nowhere he made some crack about Michael Jackson saying, "Heh...if you can call that music!"  I thought, yeah, way to engage the world and encourage us to engage it.  I'm not saying he should've uncritically sung Jackson's praises, but I've never considered "music" (like "art") to be a qualitative term, and to offhandedly dismiss anything as "not music" strikes me as ignorant at best (it's like weather: just because the weather sucks doesn't mean it's not weather).  I didn't even consider myself a Jackson fan at the time, and I still thought it was a fucked up thing to say.  He could've said the same thing about, say, Andrew Lloyd Webber and I would have had the same reaction (though not nearly as strong...and, truth be told, I'm not sure a white composer would have provoked such a flip dismissal).  But in slamming Jackson this band director was, intentionally or not, revealing a desire to shut himself off from one of the more important currents in music and, implicitly, encouraging us to do the same.

I finally heard Thriller in its entirety when I was a freshman in college, a used cassette I bought off another student.  I also heard Cheap Trick's first record and John Coltrane's "Live" At The Village Vanguard that same week for the first time.  By law, the Coltrane record should have negated the Cheap Trick and Jackson records, and while it did have an absolutely massive impact on me, one that hasn't abated to this day, it didn't reveal those other records to be frauds.  I've never understood what is ultimately a false dichotomy: that the brilliance and power of one record somehow negates the brilliance and power of others.  I've written about this many times before, how the overwhelming influence of the musics of Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and Bill Dixon in my life not only didn't kill my interest in other musics, but in fact strengthened it.  There are a handful of instances in which such a dichotomy has made sense to me: Sam & Dave surely reveals the Blues Brothers to be the minstrel act they always were, and a John Zorn aficionado's first exposure to, say, Anthony Braxton or Jimmy Lyons would likely reveal the utter lack of depth in Zorn's work.  But immersing myself in Coltrane's and Jackson's (and Cheap Trick's) records for those weeks revealed far more common ground (and more crosstalk between those artists) than one might think possible.  It's there for all who are willing to listen.

When I finally took a conscious, deliberate listen to Thriller it was somewhat shocking at first; initially, I smiled at what struck me as quaint sonics/production.  This was in the early 90s, after years of bombastic, digital-reverb-heavy production in pop music.  By comparison, Thriller almost sounded stripped-down, but Jackson's instincts, before his music suffered from his constant second-guessing, were infallible.  Thriller still sounds more contemporary than much of the music he's made since.  On subsequent records, instead of trying to expand on the groundbreaking arrangements of Thriller, he was mostly flailing around trying to hit a moving (and rapidly fragmenting) target.

In a recent blog post, Chicago Sun-Times critic Jim DeRogatis wrote, "The singular success of 'Thriller' makes it easy to forget that Jackson's canon actually is much skimpier than those of Sinatra, Presley, the Beatles or any other superstar who had such a massive impact on the culture. ...a total of three keepers out of 10 solo albums."  Another false dichotomy (and one which inexplicably ignores Jackson's work with his brothers).  Just as the mountains of mediocre-to-shitty records that Sinatra and Presley made don't negate the achievements of their great records, Jackson's two indisputable (I haven't heard Bad in years, so I'm reserving judgement on it for now) masterpieces don't somehow disappear because of his more recent subpar records.  In fact, such a wide-ranging impact largely centering around one record (Thriller) is something that Sinatra, Presley, and the Beatles were not able to achieve, and I doubt DeRogatis would claim that those artists' respective accomplishments were too dissipated or unfocused.

I'll leave the last word to Dave Marsh who wrote the definitive study of Jackson's heyday-turned-sour (linked above), and wrote this passage for The New Rolling Stone Record Guide, published in 1983.  He's cooled on Jackson somewhat since then, but this still rings true for me:  

Michael Jackson's importance as a singer was established with the very first Jackson Five singles. His importance as a record-making innovator is somewhat obscured by his collaboration with Quincy Jones (although the difference between the debacle of Jones' work with Donna Summer and the genius of his work with Jackson gives a clue as to who is really boss), but both his songwriting and his production and arranging chops have grown so mightily on [Thriller] that he is now in the very top rank of rock artists measured from the beginning. Like Stevie Wonder, Jackson has been capable of sustaining an artistic persona from preadolescence into adulthood, and theorists of rock's eternal attachment to youth notwithstanding, his music has grown richer and more intelligent with each passing year. Michael Jackson is no longer an optional pleasure for those who pretend to know about American music. He has become a necessity.

Comments

[andujar]

of course, we now know that MJ is in N. Korea! and he won't starve to death because he dosn't eat. it's true! for more details check my site www.peaceandrhythm.com. after the karl malden thing, somewhere there will be the MJ.

by the way, in 83 i was definatley van halen, iron maiden. although def leppard and MJ were up there too. and the stray cats too i suppose. i still like 3 out of the 5. wanna guess which ones?

[Matt Wilson]

Great post, Matt. Have you read about the racial disparity between those who think the coverage has been appropriate and those who think it's been too much?

http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/race/2009/07/according-to-the-pew-research-center-while-most-people-found-the-coverage-of-singer-michael-jacksons-death-excessive-bla.html

His death has actually inspired a lot of great writing that I've seen both in the media and just from friends on the net. What it's really driven home to me is how people really *wanted* to adore him again and were just waiting for a reason to forget about all the things that turned them off in the first place.

[Matt Weston]

Matt - Thanks. And thanks for that link. Pretty interesting, but I guess not too surprising. Personally, I didn't find the coverage excessive at all, at least not for someone of his stature. If the scale of coverage on his passing seems unprecedented, well, his redefinition of the scale(s) used to measure popular performers was unprecedented.

I may blog a bit more on MJ, specifically on how DeRogatis' use of the album as yardstick doesn't/shouldn't apply to Michael (as he was so much more than a musician, and as the album format was not necessarily his primary means of disseminating his talents); also about Bill Wyman's (yeah, the guy from the Reader in the early 90s) carping about how the media isn't talking about how Thriller isn't the best-selling album in US history, but is worldwide (as if the latter were less impressive an achievement -- or less important -- than the former).

Brendan - lemme guess; you're still a die-hard Stray Cats fan, scouring the internet for bootlegs? :P