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Black or White? Michael Jackson and the Idea of Crossover

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03007766.2011.616301

1740-1712

David Brackett,

Gender, Feminism, and Media

Abstract Michael Jackson has been referred to as a crossover artist for more than forty years, but what does this mean? The term "crossover" usually describes how an artist's appeal transcends an audience associated with one type of music to include another, with some reference often made to the role of musical and visual factors in this process. After a discussion of some of the assumptions frequently attached to the concept of crossover, I analyze several of Michael Jackson's biggest crossover hits both for how textual elements address multiple constituencies and for how these texts project a vision of racial relations and identity. Acknowledgments Many thanks to Susan Fast, Stan Hawkins, Lisa Barg, and the anonymous reviewer for this journal for their many constructive comments; and to my research assistants, Cedar Wingate and Nicholas Thompson, for their timely and efficient support. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of IASPM-Canada in Regina, Saskatchewan, June 2010. This research was aided by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Notes [1] A sampling includes the following: Kris Kross ("Jump," 1992), Tamia ("Imagination," 1998), Jay-Z ("Izzo [H.O.V.A.])" and Lil Romeo ("My Baby," 2001) (see Whitburn Whitburn, Joel. 2003. Top Pop Singles, 1955–2002, Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research. Print [Google Scholar]). [2] Motown certainly did continue as a highly successful recording company throughout the 1970s as measured by record sales and chart positions. What Motown seemed to lose was an identifiable sound, marked by consistency of songwriting, studio musicians, and recording ambience, with this change tied closely to the company's move from Detroit to Los Angeles. For an argument against the declining importance of Motown, see Flory Flory, Andrew. "From Motown to Mowest: Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man." Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Indianapolis. 6 Nov. 2010. Address [Google Scholar]. [3] For more on changing radio formats and the fate of Motown, see George George, Nelson. 1988. The Death of Rhythm and Blues, New York: E.P. Dutton. Print [Google Scholar] ( Where Did George, Nelson. 1985. Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise & Fall of the Motown Sound, New York: St. Martin's Press. Print [Google Scholar]; Death 147–69) and Barnes Barnes, Ken. 1988. "Top 40: A Fragment of the Imagination". In Facing the Music, Edited by: Frith, Simon. 8–50. New York: Pantheon Books. Print [Google Scholar] (18–22). [4] By "homologous," I am referring to situations in which the audience for a musical genre seems to fit the social connotations (which may simplify the actual audience) of that genre; i.e. a soul recording finds an African-American audience, a country recording finds a rural, white, southern audience. This concept of homology is derived from Georgina Born's Born, Georgina. 2000. "Music and the Representation/Articulation of Sociocultural Identities". In Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, Edited by: Born, Georgina and Hesmondhalgh, David. 31–37. Berkeley: U of California P. Print [Google Scholar] typology of possible music-identity relationships; see Born Born, Georgina. 2000. "Techniques of the Musical Imaginary". In Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, Edited by: Born, Georgina and Hesmondhalgh, David. 37–47. Berkeley: U of California P. Print [Google Scholar] ("Music"; "Techniques"). [5] The opposition of "imagined" to "lived" reality refers here to Jacques Lacan's Lacan, Jacques. 2006. "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis". In 1953. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, Trans. Bruce Fink 197–268. New York: Norton. [Google Scholar] formulation of the Imaginary—as in the mode of identification associated with a utopian plenitude—and the Symbolic as that system of rules and constraints associated with social conventions and language. On the Imaginary, see Lacan Lacan, Jacques. 2006. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience". In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink, 75–81. New York: Norton. Print 1949 [Google Scholar] ("Mirror"; Seminar 73 Lacan, Jacques. 1991. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique 1953–1954, Trans. John Forrester Edited by: Miller, Jacques-Alain. New York: Norton. Print [Google Scholar]–159). Lacan reworked his notion of the Symbolic throughout his life, but for an influential early account that discusses this register for its relation to, and ultimate interdependence with, the Imaginary, see "Function." In an influential and much debated attempt to apply Lacan's ideas in the realm of social and political theory, Louis Althusser Althusser, Louis. 1971. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)". In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Trans. Ben Brewster 127–86. New York: Monthly Review Press. Print [Google Scholar] theorized ideology as arising from a conflict between lived and imaginary relations to reality—see his "Ideology." [6] This conception of racial identity is derived from various strands in postcolonial theory and critical race theory, especially the work of Homi K. Bhabha Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Print [Google Scholar]. For similar approaches applied to the history of African-American music, see Lott, Love and Theft; Radano. Also influencing the view of black popular music presented here are studies that explore conceptual continuities in African-American music with an emphasis on cultural memory and embodied knowledge; for two examples, see Floyd; Ramsey Ramsey, Guthrie P. Jr. 2003. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop, Berkeley: U of California P. Print [Google Scholar]. [7] This argument about the connotations of musical categories and the role of institutional practices is elaborated in Brackett Brackett, David. 2002. "(In Search of) Musical Meaning: Genres, Categories, and Crossover". In Popular Music Studies: International Perspectives, Edited by: Hesmondhalgh, David and Negus, Keith. 65–83. London: Arnold. Print [Google Scholar] ("(In Search of)"; "Questions" Brackett, David. 2005. Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music. Black Music Research Journal, 25(1): 73–92. Print[Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). [8] See Brackett Brackett, David. 1994. The Politics and Practice of 'Crossover' in American Popular Music, 1963–65. Musical Quarterly, 78(4): 774–97. Print[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] ("Politics"; "(In Search of)"); Garafalo ("Crossing Over" Garafalo, Reebee. 1990. "Crossing Over: 1939–1989". In Split Image: African-Americans in the Mass Media, Edited by: Dates, Jannette L. and Barlow, William. 57–121. Washington, DC: Howard UP. Print [Google Scholar]; "Black Popular" Garafalo, Reebee. 1993. "Black Popular Music: Crossing Over or Going Under?". In Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions, Edited by: Bennett, Tony, Frith, Simon, Grossberg, Lawrence, Shepherd, John and Turner, Graeme. 231–48. New York: Routledge. Print [Google Scholar]). [9] All musical examples are author's own transcriptions. [10] As the medium of music television continued, this process (of making a video to illustrate the song) could be reversed, a situation that is possibly even the case in Jackson's own Thriller video, which sounds as though it were written to be a music video (see Mercer 99). [11] Many of the following observations about the changing definitions of whiteness are indebted to Jacobson and Roediger Rolling Stones. Exile on Main St. Deluxe Edition. Universal, 2010. CD [Google Scholar]. [12] The use of this type of riff, involving a major chord with a suspension and its resolution voiced in a particular way on the electric guitar, deserves further attention as it is one of the defining musical gestures of folk-rock, and a musical signifier of whiteness both in the historical moment in which it arose in the mid-1960s, and in numerous recordings since then. See Brackett Brackett, David. 2005. Elvis Costello, the Empire of the E Chord, and a Magic Moment or Two. Popular Music, 24(3): 357–67. Print[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] ("Elvis"). [13] For example, this is Lott's Lott, Eric. 1993. Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, New York: Oxford UP. Print [Google Scholar] interpretation of the opening scene of the video, when white child actor MacCaulay Culkin blows his father out of his easy chair back to "Africa" with a loud electric guitar: Jackson "locat[es] the source of white rock and white suburban youth rebellion in cultures of the African diaspora," while the journey of Culkin's father "invokes and reverses the middle passage" ("Aesthetic Ante" 550). To be sure, as the video opens, we see the earth as viewed from somewhere in orbit and an outline of the African continent. The camera swoops down (presciently anticipating the now-common experience of using Google earth) into a suburban neighborhood, eventually finding its way to Culkin's house. If this image locates the source of white rock in Africa, then it also locates Culkin's dwelling there. Under this scenario, the transportation of Culkin's father "back" to Africa makes no sense. Then again, this spatial confusion could simply be Jackson's and director John Landis's contribution to cinematic expressions of postmodern geography. [14] I am drawing here on the theories of genre and creativity developed by Bakhtin Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Print [Google Scholar] in several essays spread throughout his career (see, for example, Dialogic Imagination 259–422; Problems 78 Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Print[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]–100, 270–302; Speech 1 Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee Austin: U of Texas P. Print [Google Scholar]–9, 60–102). [15] The idea of hard rock (and heavy metal) being forged out of the blues comes from Walser Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Hanover, NH, and London: Wesleyan UP. Print [Google Scholar]; on "sedimented genres," see Jameson (103 Jameson, Fredric. 1981. "Magical Narratives". In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 103–50. Ithaca. NY: Cornell UP. Print [Google Scholar]–50). [16] This is also an aspect of Jackson's "play" with categories of music and identity, one which also include aspects of gender/sexuality. See Susan Fast's Fast, Susan. 2010. Difference that Exceeded Understanding: Remembering Michael Jackson (1958–2009). Popular Music and Society, 33(2): 259–66. Print[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] contribution to this volume on the role of white female guitarist Jennifer Battin in Jackson's 1993 tour and Orianthi in the rehearsals for the This Is It tour, both of which highlighted the "otherness" of rock within Jackson's stylistic bricolage. The collaboration of Jackson with Slash on other rock-influenced songs could also complicate this line of analysis due to Slash's own "mixed" background (his mother is African American), although this knowledge may not have been widespread at the time. [17] A point also made by Tate (400). Note that in the opening of this mini-film, Jackson's character is shown attending an all-white prep school. [18] Prince also comes to mind as a good case for comparison. I focused on Richie here because his success as a crossover artist more clearly parallels Jackson's success during the period beginning with Off the Wall (when Richie was still lead singer with the Commodores), whereas Prince really hit his commercial stride in 1983, the year of Thriller's domination, with "1999," "Little Red Corvette," and "Delirious." [19] Has anyone ever attracted so much media attention while not conforming to public expectations about "normal" behavior and remaining essentially mysterious and unknowable? Susan Fast has argued that this reaction was due to how Jackson aroused the fear of difference by confusing all vectors of identification simultaneously ("Difference"). [20] By "star text," I am referring to how a "star" is constructed from a range of media texts, including artistic output, promotional materials, media discourse about the star, etc.; the classic formulation of this concept may be found in Dyer Dyer, Richard. 1979. Stars, London: British Film Institute. Print[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. [21] For further discussion on this phenomenon and its ties to consumer capitalism, see Ivy.