Pages tagged “michael jackson”

Michael Jackson’s iconic album Thriller was one of 25 recorded works added to the National Recording Registry on Wednesday.

The National Recording Preservation Act was passed in 2000 to ensure that “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant” works were preserved for future generations. Each year, the Library of Congress chooses 25 works to add to the collection based on nominations by the public and consultations with the National Recordings Preservation Board.

[Cover Story] [Thriller Resurrected] [Smell the Glove]

Watching Michael Jackson has always been a study in contrasts. Ever since a prepubescent Michael sang so precociously in The Jackson 5, the Michael we’ve heard and the Michael we’ve seen have never fit neatly together. The lesson has only been reinforced by his changing face, and by a public trial that invited us to judge what we thought we knew along with what we wanted to believe.

Michael’s musical sensations are deceptively similar to his paparazzi sensations, the two linked by a consistently wry sense of symbolism, and by the sense that every one of his media spectacles is another carefully wrought Michael Jackson production. Indeed, one could characterize the disheveled, pajama-sporting Michael outside the Santa Maria courthouse as a brilliant diversion executed with “Thriller”-caliber theatrics. Every detail called others into question.

So will Thriller’s re-release. Some may find it a desperate makeover or resuscitated nostalgia. But Michael has never quite left our imaginations—or our iPods, as proven by the #1 debut of “Thriller” in 2005 when iTunes first added videos. It was the short film for “Thriller,” after all, that taught us how to take in the then-newly crowned King of Pop, a Michael who plays multiple roles in a spectacular story that doesn’t always make sense. Rather, it turns like a kaleidoscope each time we see it.

In Jackson’s trial, media coverage concluded that “Wacko Jacko” had lost touch with reality. But Michael has long toyed with his iconic image, which we too often take at face value. Michael’s pajama performance expertly personified trial speculation while minimizing attention given to his accuser’s testimony. His acquittal provided an ending worthy of the “Billie Jean” video, where a private investigator pursues but never catches our Michael. Only the tiles lighting his feet come close.

Seth Clark Silberman coordinated Regarding Michael Jackson, the first academic conference on the icon, when he taught at Yale University in 2004. He currently lives in New York, where he deejays and works on the manuscript This Day in Michael, part of which he blogs at ThisDayMichael.blogspot.com.

[Cover Story] [Thriller Resurrected] [Another Part of Me]

Two things we can all agree on:
1. We all love Michael Jackson
2. We’re all glad he’s not our uncle.

I was 18 and working at a record store in Florence, Ala., in the fall of 1982 when Thriller was released. At the time, it was considered the inferior follow-up to his 1979 solo breakthrough Off The Wall. It had that weak McCartney collaboration as a first single. Then again, it also had “Billie Jean” and “Beat It,” although neither of those had become ubiquitous by then. The elements were all there, but he hadn’t quite moonwalked into our collective consciousness yet. The Vincent Price thing seemed like a campy diversion, and “Human Nature” sounded like fucking Toto. Oh wait, it was fucking Toto.

Then the shit hit the fan and nothing has been the same since. Thriller was the Star Wars of the music industry—it created a monster that’s hard to separate from the original work. Its artistic merits will always be weighed against the seismic cultural waves it unleashed.

For the record, I consider “Billie Jean” one of the definitive singles of the entire Rock Era and a piece of pop songwriting at its best. I never really embraced the album, though. Preparing to write this piece, I went to the shelf and pulled out Off The Wall instead, and I’m really enjoying listening to it as I write. It’s an undeniably great work of pop and—post-Jackson 5—it stands as Michael’s finest hour.

Patterson Hood is the co-founder of the Drive-By Truckers. Their latest release is entiteld "Brighter Than Creation's Dark."

[Cover Story] [Smell the Glove] [Another Part of Me]

Technically, Thriller celebrated its 25th anniversary on Nov. 30, 2007. But when it comes to Michael Jackson, we’re all accustomed to waiting. So now, just a few months later, we have Sony’s deluxe reissue of Jackson’s pop landmark. The set comes with a DVD containing the videos (or “short films,” as they’re called) for “Billie Jean,” “Beat It” and “Thriller,” along with the breathtaking concert clip in which Michael first moonwalks.

The reissue also includes the entire Thriller album along with several new remixes. Kanye West worked on “Billie Jean,” Akon updated “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” and three other tracks were produced by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, who tells Paste that he specifically wanted to work with the lesser-known songs—remixing the most iconic Thriller material, he says, would be like drawing “a mustache on the Mona Lisa.”

So he tackled “P.Y.T” (“I just enhanced the demo version, and made it bounce a little more.”) and completely revamped “The Girl Is Mine.” In the end, he also remixed a slightly more famous tune: “Beat It.” Purists may scream about the song’s vocals, which now alternate between Michael and “My Humps” vocalist Fergie, but the producer says, “I didn’t really change it that much.”

(Nick Marino will be blogging about the reaction to our issue 40 cover story on Ctrl-V. Read his latest entry here.)

[Thriller Resurrected] [Smell the Glove] [Another Part of Me]

The glove, for starters. The white sequined glove pulled tight over one of his dainty hands, hands that would come to symbolize his undoing. The glove: An iconic accessory like Woody Allen’s glasses or George Burns’ cigar. It was a real-life Superman cape, a garment with transformative power. The glove made him mysterious. Nowadays we all know way too much about Michael Jackson, down to the distinctive markings on his genitalia. Back in the ’80s, we fans allowed ourselves to obsess over something as quaint as a pop star’s handwear. Just why did he wear the glove, anyway? What did it mean? Nothing about this man was an accident; surely the glove had a point. It couldn’t have just been an affectation. Maybe it was a commentary on the duality of celebrity—the exposed skin of his bare hand symbolizing the mortal Michael, the gentle young man from a sooty corner of Indiana, and the gloved hand representing the flashy showbiz Michael, the superstar singing and sweating and twirling under the lights. The glove also had a dark side—it was a sheath for fingers that drifted uncomfortably often toward the singer’s crotch, fingers that would come to be accused of fondling little boys. The glove was at once glamorous and unsettling, a simple garment rendered complicated by the context of who was wearing it, and why.

Now that post-acquittal Michael has fled to wherever he is, doing whatever he’s doing, I find myself nostalgic not just for his spangled clothing, but also for his shy smile and feathery speaking voice, always suspended between a whisper and a giggle. I also miss the art he made during the long prime period before he became so freaky that his artistry seemed beside the point. I miss those songs. I miss those dance steps. I miss both his supernatural look and his ecstatic pop sensibility, and I miss the way we were when we let him carry us away.

The moonwalk? It was jaw-dropping, one of the last dance moves to become a cultural phenomenon. Everybody saw it, everybody knew it, everybody was stunned by it. (When he debuted the move in 1983, during a 25th-anniversary concert celebration for Motown Records, the audience responded with a bewildered shriek—they’d never seen anything like it.) This was not like the Macarena, a wedding dance, an asinine hand jive drunken bubbas could do in the stands at NFL games. The moonwalk was otherworldly. We didn’t know a body could move like that—our bodies couldn’t move like that. The moonwalk belonged, and still belongs, to Michael. Have you ever seen anyone else attempt his signature move? It’s pathetic. Not long ago I caught a concert by teenaged R&B star Chris Brown, who is sort of a less charismatic version of Usher, who is himself a less charismatic version of Michael Jackson. And at this show, Brown wanted to pay tribute to someone he’d idolized since he was two years old, and so without mentioning the artist’s name he donned a sequined glove and danced to three Michael Jackson songs of early vintage. And when it came time for him to do the inevitable moonwalk, Brown—ordinarily an excellent dancer—turned his body sideways and strolled backwards across the stage. It was all walk, no moon.

Michael Jackson was probably the last male entertainer to be at least as famous for his dancing as his singing. Fred Astaire was, James Brown was, Michael Jackson was. Today we’re left with Chris Brown, Usher and Justin Timberlake, whose most famous stage move to date involved ripping the bodice of Michael Jackson’s sister. When our male pop artists stop dancing, it signals an important change in the roles we expect them to play. Although dancing favors grace over strength, it also requires extraordinary athleticism—dance, in other words, is an act of balance. Today, though, we either want our men tough or cuddly. We want them to be either gangsta roughnecks or sensitive emo boys. The third way, the middle way, no longer exists. Jay-Z does not dance. Kenny Chesney does not dance. Bono does not dance. When we lose our dancers, we lose glamour and sensuality, we lose the exquisite interplay between physical and vocal performance. We lose a fundamental level of human expression. In some African languages, the words for “music” and “dance” are the same—Michael Jackson embodied that sameness through the 1980s. And pop music has been out of balance ever since.

Michael’s run as a beloved dancer ended in the early 1990s, when he became infamous for moves that involved grabbing his crotch. Looking back, this move seems to have been a premonition of the sex scandals to come, for his alleged crimes against little boys involved this very same sexual gesture—placing his hands below the waist. We’ve always been disturbed at the thought of Michael Jackson touching that part of the human body, whether it was his or someone else’s.

Before Michael’s disgrace (back when he seemed less like a predator and more like a naïf), he was a pop star of almost unparalleled popularity. After Elvis and The Beatles, he was it—the biggest. I miss the shared cultural experience that only a star of this magnitude could create. I miss the way MTV used to hype Michael Jackson videos, and the way everyone used to crowd around the TV to watch them. The short film Michael released in conjunction with “Thriller” is certainly the most influential music video of all time, the one that thrust videos into the realm of art, the catalyst that completed the transition of music from an audio medium to an audio-visual medium. Artists almost never break big today with radio airplay alone. For better or worse, there now has to be a video or a magazine cover or a talk-show appearance or some kind of eye candy to go along with the sound. These promotional opportunities existed before Michael Jackson, of course. But he and his groundbreaking visual marketing made them de rigueur across the music industry.

Michael also changed the notion of superstardom. He blew it up bigger than anyone in his generation, and bigger than anyone after. Bad sold 8 million copies in the United States. Off The Wall sold 7 million. The double-album HIStory sold another 7 million. With 27 million copies sold, Thriller remains the second-best-selling album of all time, behind only The Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits: 1971-1975. Stardom of that magnitude isn’t necessarily healthy for an artist. For fans, though, it creates a sense of awe—or, I should say, it created a sense of awe. Celebrities don’t really make us awestruck anymore. They annoy us with their ubiquity, like mosquitoes. In a weird way, they’re not famous enough. We now have more stars than ever before, but fewer mega-stars. Maya Arulpragasam, the Sri Lankan expatriate musician who records as M.I.A., once told me that when she moved to London she knew four words in English: “mango,” “elephant” and “Michael Jackson.” That’s the sort of fame I’m talking about—Muhammad Ali fame, Princess Diana fame—the kind of fame that elevates human beings to godlike status. There’s something awesome about the whole world singing the same song or watching the same music video, worshipping at the same altar.

The last shared experience we had with Michael was awaiting the verdict of his sordid child-molestation trial. Needless to say, that kind of sharing wasn’t nearly as fun for his onetime supporters, who had to face some unsavory facts: That he had dubbed his home Neverland, underscoring his arrested development with a Peter Pan allusion; that he had described lying in bed (platonically) with boys not his own; that he’d had a No. 1 hit in 1995 with a song called “You Are Not Alone,” which took on a creepy cast in light of the molestation accusations; that he had named his records Off The Wall and Bad and Dangerous—and that the older he got, the truer those adjectives seemed.

I miss the old Michael Jackson, the one whose music—whose whole persona—was blissfully lightweight. I miss the highness of his voice, the nervous “hee hees” and the crisp “woooos.” Michael drove straight-ahead dance music as deep into the mainstream as it could possibly go, embellishing it with rock flourishes like Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo on “Beat It.” At the time, black and white music didn’t co-mingle as much as they do today—recruiting Van Halen was thus a radical gesture. It’s been a long time since a guitar solo seemed radical.

Michael Jackson’s music was escapist, a term that takes on a negative connotation much of the time. But why should it? Fantasy and the suspension of disbelief are critical components of fiction, theater and movies—why is artificiality in music so wrong? Every artistic discipline is artificial to some extent, even documentary film. All Michael did was put the artifice on the surface. I mean, the “Thriller” video was a miniature zombie movie—it doesn’t get much faker than that. Michael even included a sweet little disclaimer at the beginning, reassuring us that “this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.” To my mind, “Thriller” was far less manipulative than, say, Rage Against the Machine releasing radical anti-establishment music on a major label, or 50 Cent rapping about his street life in Queens while residing in a Connecticut mansion. Michael was different. Michael was guileless. He made it perfectly clear when he was acting, which is why the last few years of his life have been so upsetting to those of us who’ve loved him—nobody in his right mind would choose to act the way he has.

We recently reported on the 25th anniversary edition of Thriller, which includes classic Michael Jackson songs remixed by will.i.am, Kanye West, Fergie and Akon. A big deal, for sure, one that played a part in our March issue cover.

However, if the thought of Fergie and Akon dueting with the King of Pop makes you groan, check out the newest MJ dedication mixtape, Man in the Mirror, by rapper and co-writer of the Kanye West song "Jesus Walks," Rhymefest. The album features Talib Kweli, Ghostface Killah and Mary J. Blige, and was produced by Mark Ronson.

The Chicago Tribune recently called the release "the best Michael Jackson album in nearly two decades". Throughout the mixtape, Rhymefest demonstrates his deep respect for Jackson, both musically and as a iconic personality. He even goes as far as to call himself the "number one Michael Jackson fan in the world."

Man in the Mirror is available for download, free of charge, at the online Rhymefest store. Rhymefest's debut album, Blue Collar, was released in 2006, and is available on his site as well (not for free, though). The follow-up, El Che, is set for release this spring. Rhymefest had this to say on his MySpace blog about the sophomore effort:

"[El Che is] more than just a marketing attempt to bring back militant rap. It is my name. It is the spirit of change that fills me. I must come into the new year and admit that my severely underrated debut release BLUE COLLAR almost wounded me until I decided that I must fight with a revolutionary zeal for what I believe and know to be true: Hip-Hop needs heroes. Big Daddy Kane. Rakim. KRS-ONE. Public Enemy. Hell, Biz Markie. Hip-Hop needs its heroes. Who will step up and be the great heroes of today? I can't give myself that title; however, I can show you how to bounce back like one."

Man in the Mirror tracklist:

1. The Cipher (Rhymefest & Michael Jackson)
2. Can't Make It (Rhymefest)
3. "Thriller" Skit
4. Get Up (Rhymefest ft Wale)
5. Dancin' Machine (The Jackson 5 ft Rhymefest)
6. Flip It Skit
7. Never Can Say Goodbye (Rhymefest ft Talib Kweli)
8. Mike The Mentor (Rhymefest ft Michael Jackson)
9. No Sunshine (Rhymefest)
10. Caught Up Skit
11. Foolin' Around (Rhymefest ft Dres)
12. Set The Mood
13. Breakadawn (Rhymefest ft Daniel Merriweather & alpha)
14. Windbreaker Skit
15. Higher Intro
16. Higher (Rhymefest)
17. Mark vs. Mike
18. All That I've Got (Rhymefest ft Ghostface Killah & Mary J. Blige)
19. Maybe Tomorrow (Michael Jackson)
20. Sunshine Skit
21. Coolie High (Camp Lo ft Rhymefest)
22. Family Reunion (ft Tito, Randy, Mike & Rhymefest)
23. Much Love Skit
24. Man In The Mirror (Rhymefest ft Michael Jackson)

Related links:
Rhymefest on Myspace
Paste: Kanye, will.i.am, more remix for Thriller anniversary
RhymefestStore.com

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

Like so many musicians in the spotlight (Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad*), Michael Jackson’s musical gifts have recently been eclipsed by his offstage antics. But here at Paste, we’re all about comebacks, and Jackson may just be the latest star to put the music forward (as opposed to, say, paying it forward).

The King of Pop is reportedly in talks to play a 10-night residency at London’s O2 Arena sometime in 2008. The shows would celebrate the 25th anniversary of Thriller, an album that was mildly popular when it was released. Paste, your official reunion tour and comeback strategy headquarters, will bring you more news on Mr. Jackson’s redemption when it becomes available.

On an extra credit note, MJ fans can look forward to a very special piece on the formerly gloved one in Paste's March issue. Get hyped!

*The Iranian president won his nation’s largest slam-poetry contest while still in college.**
**This is not true.

Related links:
MichaelJackson.com
Paste’s 100 Best Living Songwriters: Michael Jackson
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s official blog

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

Thriller's legacy? It was a killer set, plain and simple. When your album has "Billie Jean," "Thriller," "Beat It" and "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" on it, of course it's going to get coated in 20-30 layers of platinum. The cultural relevance, publicity storm and extracurricular Jacko weirdness don't even factor into it. Although most of this album has become part of the pop canon, the record's upcoming 25th anniversary presents an opportunity to marvel at the craft of these songs once again.

Of course, it also presents an opportunity to buy the album in yet another repackaging job. But Epic/Legacy Recordings isn't phoning this new reissue in. When Thriller's 25th anniversary edition arrives in shops on Feb. 12, it'll come equipped with four big-name remixes as well as period rarities.

Billboard reports that will.i.am will have his fingerprints all over the bonus material, contributing to three remixes of Thriller material. The Black Eyed Pea retouches "The Girl Is Mine" (hopefully removing Paul McCartney's entire vocal track in the process), "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)" and "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'." The latter track includes vocal work from everyone's favorite guest singer, Akon. But the ultimate meeting of the musical minds should occur when Kanye West remixes "Billie Jean," which seems like a definite perfect storm scenario.

Finally, there's a DVD featuring Thriller's many iconic music videos and Jackson's moonwalking take on "Billie Jean" at Motown's own 25th anniversary shindig in 1983.

Here's the complete package tracklist, including Thriller outtakes "For All Time," "Carousel" and "Someone In The Dark":

1. "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'"
2. "Baby Be Mine"
3. "The Girl Is Mine"
4. "Thriller"
5. "Beat It"
6. "Billie Jean"
7. "Human Nature"
8. "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)"
9. "The Lady in My Life"

Bonus tracks:
"Carousel"
"Someone in the Dark"
"Billie Jean" (demo)

Remixes:
"The Girl Is Mine 2008" with will.i.am
"P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing) 2008" with Michael Jackson and will.i.am
"Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' 2008" with Michael Jackson, Akon and will.i.am
"Billie Jean 2008" with Kanye West
"For All Time"

Meanwhile, we're still waiting to hear more about the rumored Jackson 5 reunion tour. The ball's in Michael's court right now, it seems.

Related links:
MichaelJackson.com
Michael Jackson talks Thriller to Ebony
YouTube: Michael Jackson - "Thriller"

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.