The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (79 page)
Read The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Online
Authors: Michael Eric Dyson
Unlike Ralph Ellison’s character in his famous novel, and the bulk of black folk for a long stretch of our history, black youth suffer, not from invisibility, but from
hypervisibility
. The surplus sighting, and citing, of young black bodies—in crime stories on the news, in congressional hearings about demeaning imagery in pop music, in shopping malls where they hang out, in police profiles where they are stigmatized, in suburban communities where they are surveilled—has draped paranoia and panic around their very limbs. In all the wrong ways, black youth are overexposed. (Is it any wonder, then, that they dress in oversize clothing to hide their demonized bodies, to diminish the measuring of their alleged menace?)
And unlike James Baldwin and generations of black folk, black youth don’t suffer from namelessness. They suffer from
namefulness
, from too many names. The sheer nameability of black youth, the ease with which they are mislabeled, promotes among black youth a negative solidarity, a unity produced by the attacks they have in common. Like Thomas Hobbes, black youth understand that human beings wield power through calling names and avoiding names. As Hobbes knew, black youth also know that names venerate and vilify. Names influence events. Hip-hop culture has provoked the naming, really the misnaming, of black youth: sadistic, self-destructive, violent, brutal, narcissistic, nihilistic, pathological, immoral, and, for some, evil. Hip-hop has fought back. It uses strategies of naming, renaming, unnaming, and overnaming its own culture and the cultures—racist, rich, elite, bourgeois—against which it strives.
Instead of nostalgia, we need serious, rigorous analysis and critical appreciation of black youth. Instead of attacks on hip-hop culture, we need sharp, just, wellinformed evaluations of its artistic statements and ethical imagination. Black nostalgia must be replaced by an even stronger force: the historic black determination to remain undefeated by pessimism from within black culture, and paranoia from beyond its borders. We must not be prisoners of our present circumstances, of current events. We must be prisoners of faith.
THE PREDICAMENT OF POSTMODERNITY
Postmodernism has enjoyed a thrilling if problematic run as a leading intellectual
and cultural movement among some (mostly liberal or progressive)
academics. Postmodernism is composed of a complex, even ambiguous, set of
ideas and practices, such as blurring the boundaries between “high” and
“low” culture, rejecting grand narratives—for instance, “truth” with a capital
“T,”—embracing pastiche and fragmentation, and emphasizing playfulness
and irony in one’s intellectual exercises. A major criticism of postmodernism
is that some of its advocates avoid concrete history and politics while
rhapsodizing about difference, marginality, parody, and provisionality.
This may account for the many American postmodernists who have overlooked
the homegrown varieties of black postmodernism—and the challenges
they may pose to the European imports that have colored our understanding
of the concept. I have written about black postmodernism since I have
been an intellectual, attempting to add nuance and complexity—and black
political and rhetorical weight—to an intriguing intellectual debate.
MICHAEL JACKSON’S POSTMODERN SPIRITUALITY
Michael Jackson is unquestionably one of the greatest entertainers of the twentieth century.
His most recent troubles, including allegations of child molestation, have obscured the
essential fact of his career: that he has been an incredible singer, dancer, performer, and
interpreter of (African) American song over the past thirty-five years. Because we were born
merely two months apart in 1958—Jackson in August, me in October—I have always
marveled at his prodigious output and, perhaps, identified in some small way with his
struggles to artistically and personally redefine himself. From the moment Michael Jackson
burst on the musical horizon in 1968, his relentless perfectionism, Herculean work ethic, and
brilliant showmanship have provided a thesaurus for American musical giftedness. Only one
other figure of his generation—Prince—has rivaled Jackson’s genius and approached his
impact on the culture. I wrote this scholarly meditation on Jackson’s postmodern secular
spirituality after seeing him perform in New Jersey in the late ’80s. If Jackson never again
reaches the artistic heights he once achieved, he will have still given the world a glimpse of a
God-given talent used to uplift and thrill millions around the globe.
______________________
[Michael Jackson] will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so
many tables, for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man
who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has nothing on Michael.
—JAMES BALDWIN
______________________
Sometimes when you’re treated unfairly it makes you stronger and
more determined. Slavery was a terrible thing, but when black people
in America finally got out from under that crushing system, they
were stronger. They knew what it was to have your spirit crippled
by people who are controlling your life. They were never going to let
that happen again. I admire that kind of strength. People who have
it take a stand and put their blood and soul into what they believe.
—MICHAEL JACKSON,
M
OONWALK
MICHAEL JACKSON IS, ARGUABLY, THE GREATEST
entertainer
of the twentieth century. As an international superstar, Jackson has captured the devotion of a large segment of the world’s population in a manner reserved for a select few historic personages. Jackson strikes a deep, primal chord in the human psyche, fascinating us, perhaps, because he so easily and eerily represents us, even mirrors us (all of us) at the same time. Thus, if he is not a Nietzschean
Übermensch
, he is a Promethean allperson who traverses traditional boundaries that separate, categorize, and define differences: innocent/shrewd, young/old, black/white, male/female, and religious/secular.
Perhaps this is also why he frightens us. In his cosmos, Jackson is guided by a logic of experience that flees the comfortable core of life to its often untested periphery. In some senses, Jackson celebrates the dissolution of Yeats’s center and exults in the scamper for the edge. If at times his pace to the uncharted is dizzying, his achievements in the wake of his pursuit are dazzling, and at times monumental. It is the nature of these achievements that I want to examine in this essay. I understand Michael Jackson to represent a postmodern form of African-American secular spirituality that is primarily televisual and performance oriented in its medium of expression, and that wrestles in a poignant fashion with moral themes that reflect black cultural and religious consciousness.
However, to suggest that Michael Jackson’s art harbors religious significance and spiritual meaning is contentious for many observers of American culture. For some, Jackson is a self-styled Peter Pan figure who is securely nestled in a fantasy world of childlike make-believe, buffered by Disney characters and exotic animals.
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To others, Jackson is a surpassingly shrewd businessman, capable of amassing a catalogue of publishing rights to songs by such artists as Sly Stone and the Beatles.
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To others still, Jackson is a victim of the vicious processes of commerce that commodify his image and capitalize on his persona.
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Certainly these and many other characterizations of Jackson may ring true, but they do not reflect the central truth of his cultural significance, nor do they capture the peculiar and unique genius of his art. Above all else that he may symbolize, central to Jackson’s career is an abiding spiritual and religious consciousness that is expressed in his body of work as a performer.
Admittedly, part of the difficulty in discerning the presence of positive spiritual values and redemptive religious consciousness in Jackson’s art may be its nontraditional expression. In both its style and substance, Jackson’s spirituality exhibits elements that may be understood as postmodern.
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Postmodernism’s broad spectrum of expression—characterized by pastiche, quotation, fragmentation, stylistic merging, transgression, and eclecticism—suggests a dismantling of the hardened distinction between high artistic expression and lowbrow, popular cultural production. These and other postmodernist practices call into question settled beliefs and rigid formulations about art and culture in American life.
For some, postmodernist culture survives, in Roland Barthes’s phrase, as the “civilization of the image.”
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Jackson’s spirituality exhibits a keen awareness of the important function of imagery. His spirituality is filtered through the televisual apparatus, symbolizing (and symptomatic of) the Gutenberg shift in cultural consciousness marked by the move in our society from the literate to the cinemate,
and the hegemony of the visual over the verbal. True to form, Jackson’s spirituality is not primarily embodied in a series of written texts, nor is it exclusively articulated in song lyrics. Jackson’s postmodern spirituality surfaces in the brilliant, haunting, and sometimes disturbing images and visions portrayed in his music videos and (films of his) live performances.
For Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, postmodernism is linked to and materially precipitated by the globalization of American capital in the late 1950s, expressing the “logic of late capitalism.”
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His early analysis accentuated the negative aspects of postmodernism, with its loss of the sense of history and its exemplification of commodification. Recently, however, Jameson has at least acknowledged some positive characteristics of postmodernism, such as its stress on the wide accessibility of culture and its recuperation of the art of storytelling in literary texts.
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Other American theorists have uncritically adopted French poststructuralist readings of postmodernism that accentuated marginality, difference, and peripheralization as articulated by figures like Derrida and Lyotard, while ignoring the development of more indigenous expressions in the United States.
Ironically, as Cornel West has noted, these theorists have sought illumination of our American postmodern contexts by borrowing from such figures while neglecting exemplary postmodern African-American cultural producers, particularly artists and musicians.
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These artists and musicians, from Charlie Parker to Wynton Marsalis, from Romare Bearden to Betye Saar, have wrestled existentially and artistically with disenabling forms of otherness and difference. Thus their artistic production heralds unexamined but crucial resources for contesting the disempowerment that can result from political, economic, social, and cultural marginality.
As a result, these African-American artists offer the possibility of accentuating elements of postmodern cultural experience and artistic expression that are, in Hal Foster’s words, “resistant” and not “reactionary.”
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This suggests that these resistant forms of postmodernist production do not simply replicate older forms of artistic production in a nostalgic sense of mimetic play, but extend in their recuperative artistic process the boundaries of cultural expression. This may be viewed in Michael Jackson, who, while drawing upon the enormously skillful performance and dancing of James Brown and the electrifying showmanship of Jackie Wilson, yet manages to insert a unique brand of spiritual consciousness into his performances, yielding powerful forms of artistic, cultural, and religious expression.
Jackson’s spiritual and religious awareness can be glimpsed in his persistent preoccupation with images, symbols, and themes that are informed by his own religious background. Jackson was reared as a Jehovah’s Witness by his mother, whose faith he shared and, until recently, faithfully practiced. Although the particular character of Jackson’s religious reflections and moral musings were shaped by his experience as a Jehovah’s Witness, his art reflects perceptions and consciousness that are easily generalizable to the larger stream of African-American spirituality. Thus we may without extensive complication, for example, draw similarities between Jackson’s work and the artistic achievements of his musical comrades Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye.
Suffice it to say that Jackson’s religious sensibilities are expressed in his wrestling with religiously informed, morally shaped, and culturally conditioned themes that include an examining of the nature of good and evil; an exploring of the potentialities for transformation of the self, human nature, and society; a probing of the true nature of manhood in American culture, as opposed to disenabling versions of machismo; a confronting of the material lures and sexual seductions of everyday life in postmodern American culture; a proclaiming of the place of peace and love in transforming the world; and a surveying of the politics of American racial identity and awareness.
These themes recur in Jackson’s song lyrics and music videos, and form the basis for the articulation of his own vision of African-American secular spirituality. Jackson is acutely aware of the importance of a morally informed and spiritually grounded perspective on such themes. For instance, in speaking of his role in the “We Are the World” song-video-event that helped raise money for starving Ethiopians, Jackson, in his autobiography
Moonwalk
,
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illumines the spiritual theme in the song’s message and explains the impetus for his participation:
In early 1985 we cut “We Are the World” at an all-night all-star recording session that was held after the ceremony for the American Music Awards. I wrote the song with Lionel Richie after seeing the appalling news footage of starving people in Ethiopia and the Sudan. . . . I think that “We Are the World” is a very spiritual song, but spiritual in a special sense. I was proud to be a part of that song and to be one of the musicians there that night. We were united by our desire to make a difference. It made the world a better place for us and it made a difference to the starving people we wanted to help. (pp. 261–262)
While Jackson does not specify the “special” nature of the song’s spirituality, it is sufficiently clear that this spirituality bears social ramifications and is at minimum linked to expressing authentic and concrete concern for other human beings. In short, Jackson emphasizes the material consequences of his spiritual
Weltanschauung
, redeeming it from the possible infamy of an abstract mysticism that uncritically valorizes sentimental and emotive modes of expression. Furthermore, it is apparent elsewhere in Jackson’s text that this spirituality is a gift from God and must be expressed in the particular vocational calling for which God has chosen him, namely, his music and performance:
I’ve always joked that I didn’t ask to sing and dance, but it’s true. When I open my mouth, music comes out. I’m honored that I have this ability. I thank God for it every day. I try to cultivate what He gave me. I feel I’m compelled to do what I do. (p. 272)
In discussing the spiritual character of his gift, Jackson speaks about his mother’s faith:
She instilled in me a love of Him that I will always have. She taught me that my talent for singing and dancing was as much God’s work as a beautiful sunset or a storm that left snow for children to play in. Despite all the time we spent rehearsing and traveling, Mom would find time to take me to Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, usually with Rebbie and LaToya. (pp. 12–13)
Moreover, Jackson is driven by a desire to enflesh this spirituality, to enable others to perceive the vision that energizes and empowers him, and in the process to transform people’s lives with his art, with the stories that he sings and “tells”:
I’ve always wanted to be able to tell stories, you know, stories that came from the soul. I’d like to sit by a fire and tell people stories—make them see pictures, make them cry and laugh, take them anywhere emotionally with something as deceptively simple as words. I’d like to tell tales to move their souls and transform them. . . . In a way, songwriting uses the same skills, creates the emotional highs and lows. . . . There are very few books written on the art of storytelling, how to grip listeners. . . . No costumes, no makeup, no nothing, just you and your voice, and your powerful ability to take them anywhere, to transform their lives, if only for minutes. (pp. 5–6)
Jackson’s art, then, is intentional and goal oriented, and self-consciously related to the spiritual roots that have nourished its beginning and that continue to sustain its expanding identity.
Jackson’s spirituality, though, is a secular spirituality, which may at first appear to be an oxymoronic formulation. Jackson’s spirituality is secular precisely because its primary site of execution and expression is not the church sanctuary but the concert stage, and because it is not embedded in conventional ecclesiastical structures or transmitted in traditional religious linguistic or liturgical practices. Furthermore, his secular spirituality does not assume that a prior grounding in the shared language of a religious community is needed in order to grasp its basic premises.