Michael Jackson

The Beatles were lucky. There were four of them, so no matter how insane it got – and, from all accounts, it got pretty insane – they always had somebody else who was going through the same thing to get a reality check from. By their own admission, it helped dilute some of the madness, and they were able to emerge from their fabness relatively unscathed (well, except for that whole getting shot by your biggest fan nonsense, but that wasn’t Johns fault, he never thought he was god). Elvis and Michael Jackson weren’t so lucky. They had to ride the eye of their hurricanes alone. And, clearly, they both went insane because of it.

Growing up, I was certainly aware of who Michael Jackson was – I’d occasionally see the Jackson 5 TV show on Saturday mornings – but I didn’t really care. He had a good voice and all, but that whole R&B soul thing didn’t really do much for me (mostly still doesn’t), so I didn’t pay much attention to him. Even after Off the Wall came out and flooded the market, I didn’t pay him much attention. Although, I must admit, I did buy the single of She’s Out of My Life, but only for the opening string line. Shortly after I brought it home, I discovered the song was greatly improved by playing the 45 at 33rpm, his voice is so solid on that recording that it sounds good at any speed (it almost makes him sound like a man!). The other tracks were okay, I mostly didn’t mind when they came on the radio, but it didn’t make me want to buy it and, most of the time, I found Michael Jackson quite easy to ignore.

But Thriller changed all that.

Thriller came out while I was doing penance at the University of Chicago and I remember idly looking at it in the record racks one day that spring. There wasn’t a chance I was going to buy it, but there was something intriguing about it. I can’t say I was particularly impressed with the early singles, including an obnoxious duet with Paul McCartney, but there was an enormous amount of buzz building up around the album. It must’ve been enormous if it reached all the way to my lonely dorm room on the south side, a cell with no radio.

When I finally made it out of that hell hole, I ran back home to Interlochen to help my former classmates celebrate their graduation. Eric, being a year younger than I, was graduating and we had plans to move to NYC together that summer. I watched his year-end performance with an enormous amount of emotion, and burst into tears backstage after it was over. It was such a mix of feelings – glad the Chicago ordeal was over, glad to be back in the land of the living with people who valued the same things I did, glad to be turning the page and starting a new chapter, but also enormously sad and lost at the giant hole that cutting dance out of my life had left. I knew I didn’t really want to pursue the life of a dancer – not only wasn’t I ultimately good enough (I was more of a performer than a technician, and technique ruled in the big city), but I also didn’t have the drive, I didn’t care enough to really make a go of it. But the hole it tore out of my life was enormous and it would take a couple of years to find something that could begin to fill it up.

Recovering my composure, I met my pals after dinner and we went out to make the year-end party rounds. First stop, a dance at the outdoor Kresge Auditorium, which was only officially used once during the school year, and that was for the upcoming Commencement. The dance was its usual good time, and I was glad to be in a situation where I could dance to my heart’s delight in any style – and with anybody – that I desired and not get any shit for it, unlike in Chicago, where I used to get phone threats for dancing the way I did. I shuddered at the thought of my recent incarceration, and turned my attention back to the matter at foot. A song that I had never heard came on, and a roar went through the crowd. Even though I had never heard it, in a few measures, I knew what it was. I had heard about this particular song and the controversy it had sparked and, listening to the mix of mechanized beats and flame-throwing guitar, I knew right away that this was Beat It.

It’s hard to remember that Beat It was a controversial song, but at the time it raised quite a few objections. Not so much for lyrical content – who but hardcore gang-bangers could really object to a song encouraging you not to get the shit beat out of you? – but because of its musical content. At that time, 1983, black music and white music were two distinctly different camps, and rarely did the twain intertwine (see (hear?) Martha + the Muffins’ Black Stations/White Stations). Michael Jackson was clearly a black artist – not so much for the color of his skin (or, rather, what the color of his skin used to be), but because of the musical idioms he pursued. Soul, R&B, light funk, urban contemporary, those were all clearly delineated black musical forms and, although they certainly got play on pop radio, it was generally accepted and expected that those forms would stay in their community. Separate but equal, you might say. By the same token, Eddie Van Halen was a white musician, not so much because of the color of his skin, but because he was the lead guitarist in one of the biggest pop metal bands in the country, and all stripes of metal – pop, heavy, death, speed, what have you – were white musical forms. They probably got more airplay on the big stations in the major markets, but they were also expected to ultimately stay in their neighborhoods. As a white kid, you could profess a fondness for certain black musical forms – Motwon in particular – as long as you tempered it with enough Eagles or Led Zeppelin or David Bowie or the Beatles or whatever. And I’m sure the same thing was probably true if you grew up black. The only music that really crossed color lines, as far as performers went, was disco, and that was widely reviled as “fag” music and, once the disco craze had burned out, it too was relegated to its cultural ghetto.

And now here’s Michael Jackson inviting Eddie Van Halen to spice up one of his tracks, and here’s Eddie actually doing it, and doing it in his own heavy metal style, neither artist giving an inch. What with all that’s transpired in the 20+ years since Thriller came out, it’s hard to appreciate just how cutting edge it was, but Thriller in general, and Beat It in particular, was a revolution in music. Mixing these two icons on one track was quite a gambit, and it almost blew up in their face (rumor has it that the original lead singer for Van Halen, “Diamond” David Lee Roth, got kicked out of the band partially over his vocal objections to Eddie playing on Beat It). Instead, it worked perfectly, and the walls came tumbling down. What Stevie Wonder had suggested on Ebony & Ivory, Jackson put into practice, and it worked beautifully. By uniting these two musical icons and forms in one blistering dance track, Jackson brought the whole world together, and he was ultimately rewarded by becoming the biggest pop star in the universe. I knew, on hearing Beat It, that Jackson had done something special, but the full impact of Thriller had yet to be felt. Beat It was merely the tip of the iceberg.