He was Michael Jackson, an iconic figure in the history of American culture.
The path he traveled would seem impossible, unimaginable – if someone somehow hadn’t managed to navigate it, actually, to invent it. It started in the African-American community of a small industrial city about as glamorous as a steel mill, Gary, Indiana. It ended in America’s entertainment capital, Los Angeles, but by that point Michael Jackson was recognized as a world-straddling figure.
A career that stretched from early childhood to his final days, arcing and re-arcing several times, earned Michael Jackson a measure of fame so great that it could actually obscure or distort his artistic achievements. You’re in danger of thinking so much of the public figure, the subject of news stories and speculation, that you forget the most important feature of his life: performance.
He was a singer and song stylist who was utterly original, a high soprano who was amazingly able to tear off a riff with ferocious intensity and grit.
He was a dancer of fantastic energy and invention. His “Moonwalk” might be his greatest dance invention, but it was just one astonishing step in a forty-year-long whirlwind of acrobatic art.
He was a shooting star and point of pride for the African American community, but there was hardly a corner of American or world culture he wouldn’t dare cross over to.
Who admired Michael Jackson’s music? Everyone from kids who grew up in the sixties, seventies or later to folks who grew up on the blues or big band music – including people as diverse as Whitney Houston and Madonna, Don Cornelius and Dick Clark, Berry Gordy Jr. and Gloria Estefan.
Who said this? “That’s the greatest dancer of the century!” The quote is by the man long believed by most critics to have himself been the greatest dancer of the century, Fred Astaire.
It’s sadly easy for some to forget that the revolution Michael Jackson hopped and hiccupped into reshaped the landscape of our culture so drastically and rapidly. When MTV formed, it was all about rock and roll videos, and about as accessible to black performers as a fifties suburban high school prom. How did Michael shake that up and become MTV’s number one performer? Nobody had to pressure or argue on his behalf. He made himself a programming necessity through huge talent, hard work, and video performances that made the small screen blazingly big.
Michael was music and dancing – but he was more. He was fashion, attitude, fearlessly original style, a culture unto himself. His audacity to cut through all expectations about a superstar was a bomb that kept exploding.
Also explosive was his defiance of expectations about how much an African American performer could do, and how broadly one could cut across cultural boundaries. The many great black performers who preceded him had usually – through no fault of their own – been confined to a niche. You could be jazz or blues or soul or rhythm and blues, later on rap or hip hop. And a few brave geniuses did break out of the categories, most notably Ray Charles.
But no African American performer ever did what Michael Jackson did: ignore categories, transcend them, make them irrelevant. The total and exhilarating access to all aspects of creative culture for African Americans was Michael Jackson’s greatest inspiration. Think about it, really. That took a lot of guts and a lot of heart.
His heart is stilled now, but his work and his legacy live on for everyone who was thrilled by how much he did and how far he reached out. Still a thriller, isn’t it?
