How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(29)
Let Mama tell it, she grew up different, alone, the “peculiar dove” in a caring but limited nest. Let her sisters Sue and Linda tell it, each of them was the peculiar dove longing for belonging. My aunts and Mama tell the story of my grandmother working hard to get them their first stereo and first record during the Christmas of 1969. The record was a 45 with “I Want You Back” on the Aside and “Who’s Loving You” on the B-side. After huddling in the living room and listening to both sides of the 45 over and over, Mama remembers telling Grandma thank you, then wading through chinaberry bushes and climbing a hanging moss tree where she wrote about Michael Jackson’s happy-sad voice, her hatred for nasty Isaiah Horde, and the colorful isolation she felt from the world.
As a single working parent in the late 70s, Mama worked to create music despite the heartbreaking noise of flimsy job security, mangled romantic relationships, and unpaid utility bills. Mama found some order through transference and restriction. I could watch our twelve-inch black-and-white television for one hour a day. I could go outside only after I wrote an essay using words from the dictionary that neither of us knew. I couldn’t eat much sugar or salt, or guzzle that cold drank, unless Mama was there to okay it. Playing any form of hip-hop was always a beatable offense, while all music played on my single tape-deck radio could never exceed six on the volume…except for Michael Jackson.
When Mama and I weren’t jamming until all hours of the night to the Off the Wall tape I got for Christmas, I was in my room listening to the tape alone. There I could sing the songs the way I wanted. I could be as weird and fascinated as I wanted to be by its minimalist cover art. The Off the Wall cover foreshadowed part of my relationship with Michael Jackson. Like a lot of folks, I’d be mesmerized by the movement of Michael’s feet while wondering a lot about his face.
The contrast between the dense black of Michael’s high-watered tuxedo slacks and the glow of his white socks up against a haggard brick wall created a depth, or at least a crease, into which I could easily slip. Deep in that crease, it’s easy to say that I wanted to be Michael Jackson. But I don’t think that’s really true. Didn’t we all want to work, work it like, and be worked by Michael Jackson? We wanted to dress like Michael dressed, sing like Michael sang, and move through the world the way Michael moved, all while he was working for us. And we tried hard, too, didn’t we, over and over again in mirrors, at dances, in bedrooms, on stages, in classrooms, at parties, in our dreams?
Michael’s work post Thriller changed the way we consumed music. Lots of black artists I deeply respect have said that Michael was ours on Off the Wall and then became the property of the world post Thriller. I’ve said that shit too, but I’m not so sure about that anymore. And it’s not only because Mama and her generation had a much more mature love of Michael Jackson than we did. It’s just that I am sure that while Michael belonged to music pre Thriller, and post Thriller, the music video—as a form, and as a workable televisual entity—belonged to him. In forcing MTV to play black music videos, Michael’s work dictated to us the evocative narratives in the songs we loved. Where all of us had made up a thousand scenes, characters, and various familiar details of our lives to songs like “Rock With You” or “She’s Out of My Life,” we now knew Michael’s version of the narrative that went along with “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” “Thriller,” “Say Say Say,” and “Smooth Criminal.” As much as possible, Michael’s narrative imagination became ours. Hence the story of where you were, what you were doing, what you felt when you first saw “Thriller” or “Beat It” is as vivid for us as the videos we imagined while listening to Off the Wall.
On August 29, 2013, Michael Jackson, the greatest American worker of my life, would have been fifty-five years old. Michael’s work connected us. His work made us wear pants that flooded and strange white sequined gloves borrowed from our grandma’s usher uniform. His work encouraged us save up lunch money, birthday money, Christmas money, and found money for the Beat It jacket with the zippers that didn’t work. His work bullied us into celebrating the presence of a confessional, a plea, and an incredible physical ferocity in one audiovisual setting. His work nudged us into accepting a cardboard kind of androgyny, though we didn’t know what that meant. His work redefined rhythm, rhythmic abrasion, and colorful darkness while moaning “look at me” and “look at you” and “it hurts if you look at me too hard.” Michael’s work was our Badman, our trickster, our tragic mulatto, our Pinocchio, our boyfriend, our girlfriend, all at once.
Most of us all remember where we ran, or where we wanted to run, after we watched Michael turn around with those dirty yolk-yellow eyes, grinning like he’d escaped the whupping of a lifetime, at the end of the “Thriller” video. We don’t just remember his many moonwalks; we remember “Motown 25,” the way his work brought us out of our seats and made us wonder if we were watching some Spielberg special effect. We worried and dropped our cool when we heard Michael had burned his curl while shooting that Pepsi commercial, but even then we never ever thought he could die, not before us.
As we’ve grown into our late twenties, thirties, and forties, we’ve become more capable of looking and listening horizontally at Michael Jackson, the way our parents always have. In a nasty twist of fate, we’ve been forced to reckon with our greatest American worker being a paroled American black boy genius from Gary, Indiana, who performed in white face while begging us to “shum on.” Michael Jackson, like us, didn’t really know what to do with the eyes of white folks. He seemed to believe that one could find asylum from the aesthetic burdens of blackness in the creation of ultra-black music and a parodying of white skin and features. We wanted to tell him, “We get it, but you ain’t gotta hide no more. Not you! Magic can just be magic.”