The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (82 page)

Darryl tells the leader to leave him alone, that he’s tired of him “messin’” with him. Finally he takes off his gloves and jacket and says that if the leader really wants to see what is bad, then he will show him. At this point we (and Darryl) are still in a morally ambiguous position, because we cannot ascertain the particular nature of Darryl’s challenge, whether it will be a show of neighborhood machismo that revels in theft and crime, or whether it will be to subvert neighborhood conceptions of what is “bad,” similar to what happened between Darryl and the Latino student’s subversion of the code of success in the white world. This is an implicit appeal to the culturally encoded practice that uses words like “tough” and “bad” to mean something different, often their opposite. Jackson skillfully displays the dual tensions that define Darryl’s world and that, in much more detail and depth, defined Edmund Perry’s world. Moral choice is seen against a background of several factors that must be considered when one judges the actions of inner-city youth who resort to a life of crime to “make it.” Jackson’s moral vision, unquestionably formed by his own religious views, is able to appreciate these subtleties and promotes a vision that combines compassion and criticism.

The next scene shows Darryl and the fellas at a deserted section of the subway, awaiting a lone man walking down the corridor. Darryl, under the pressure to prove his “badness,” is poised to pounce and prey upon the man, but at the last moment decides to tell him to flee. The man speaks no English, reinforcing the fact that victims of ghetto machismo or criminal activity are often other underclass and struggling people. The fellas become angry with Darryl, and declare, “You aren’t down with us no more,” and Darryl responds, “You ain’t bad, you ain’t nothin.’” Here again, Jackson’s own moral perspective is informed by an understanding of human nature that acknowledges that all human beings embody the potential for wrongdoing. But as is clear in his reading of the story, all human beings have the ability to contribute to their own future by the choices they make
and the options they exercise. This is no static conception of human nature and identity, no social determinism that locks human beings into predestined choice. It is rather a Christian understanding of human nature that appreciates the complexity and ambiguity that surrounds our moral choices, that posits an ambivalent disposition toward the desires that occupy our social landscape, and that accentuates the historical formation of the virtues we attempt to nourish.

At this juncture, the scene, until now black and white, blooms in full color, as dancers emerge from either side of the columns in the subway, rupturing the realism that has informed the video to this point. From then on, Darryl’s message is communicated in Jackson’s powerful singing voice, accompanied by extraordinarily skillful dancing that choreographs his message to the fellas. Jackson reverses the power arrangement between Darryl and the fellas that has defined their relationship as he sings:

At the climax of his melodied oration, Darryl comes face to face with the leader of the fellas in a dramatic encounter reminiscent of the machismo-laden stare-downs between prizefighters. Darryl scorns their wrongdoing in a fusion of speech and song that is the strongest evocation of the African-American religious rhetorical practice of “whooping,” “chanting,” or “tuning” since the advent of rap music. Darryl’s lyrical preachment is accented by the antiphonal response of his amen chorus of backup dancer/singers, who meet his every word and gesture with a rising spiral of vocal support that crescendos with a hissing noise meant to seal their message and admonish their hearers.

At the end, Darryl and the leader lock arms and finally engage in a soul handshake, sealing the leader’s respect for Darryl, as he intones, “That’s the way it goes down, huh?” The soul handshake reinstitutes the possibility for personal and social solidarity between Darryl and the leader, functioning, as it did with the Latino student, to strengthen the ties of mutuality and community. As the fellas depart, one of the brothers removes his hat, acknowledging the power of Darryl’s perspective, even as the scene returns to black and white and Darryl’s garb returns to his jacket and street clothes.

Jackson’s “Bad” video premiered on a CBS television special that aired August 31, 1987, before a national viewing audience. It conveyed a moving message about struggling with racial identity, forms of machismo, and the problems of underclass black men in a potent mix of song and dance. It also testified to the national, even worldwide, influence of Jackson’s African-American secular spirituality.

Perhaps the most poignant and powerfully explicit display of Jackson’s brand of secular spirituality was reserved for the 1988
Grammy Awards Show
, beamed to millions of people around the world. As the auditorium faded to dark, a white screen was shown, silhouetting Jackson’s lithe image, his head topped by a dark-brown fedora, his palm facing outward to the right on the end of his stiffened right arm, and his left leg extended, capped off by his trademark high-water pants, with a blue shirt circled at the waist by a white sash, and white socks and black shoes. As the audience screamed, strains of harmonies filled the air, and Jackson enacted ten seconds of solo dance movements, pantomiming some of his most agile poses. As the screen rose, Jackson began to sing, in an impassioned voice, a slow gospel-cadenced version of his song, “The Way You Make Me Feel.” As Jackson gyrated on stage, the female dancer-actress Tatiana, famous from the video version of the song, emerged from the side of the stage. Jackson was also joined by four dancers who, with him, re-created the moves performed in the video.

Jackson then did a phenomenal foursquare version of the moonwalk, the dance that he made famous. The auditorium again faded to dark, with the spotlight on Jackson. He bowed, took the microphone handed to him, and began singing stanzas to “Man in the Mirror:”

As he sang, the camera panned into his face as people from either side of the stage emerged from the wings. To his left were two singers, including Siedah Garrett, coauthor of “Man in The Mirror.” To his right were three singers, including contemporary gospel great Andrae Crouch.

Jackson was singing, with their support, about the necessity for beginning the change in the world with one’s self. As he stated in
Moonwalk:

As Jackson, Crouch, Garrett, and the others continued to sing, the choir from New York’s New Hope Baptist Church emerged from the back of the stage, augmenting the vocal power of Jackson’s message. The religious nature of Jackson’s interpretation became visually apparent, and the implicitly religious sensibilities of his performance became explicitly captured in the religious symbols surrounding Jackson. Jackson spun and fell on his knees, dramatizing his message of the dialectical relationship between personal change and social transformation. Back on his feet, Jackson pleaded once more for the world to change. Again he fell to his knees, but this time he succumbed to the spirit and passion of the moment and remained there. Jackson was spontaneously touched by what was occurring, as if he were a spectator to the event, as if he were only a vehicle, an agent of a transcendent power. Jackson was as shaken by the power of the message as if he were hearing and delivering it for the first time, a lesson that great gospel singers and preachers have mastered. Andrae Crouch then moved over from the side of the stage, as if he were in a church service where someone was “slain in the spirit,” and after wiping Jackson’s brow, he helped him to his feet. Jackson, with new vitality breathed into him, “got happy” again, turning several times, spinning joyously, and spontaneously jumping up and down, shaking his hands, and doing a complex walk-skip-jump movement.

Jackson’s choreography of his religious joy, as he transformed the Grammy stage into a sanctuary, was infectious, and his audience, his faithful congregation, responded in the ecstatic glee of emotional abandon to his every move, groan, and gesture. Jackson exhorted them by telling them that everyone has to make a change, that the black man has to make a change, and that the white man has to make a change. As he dropped to his knees yet another time, the twenty-person choir moved ever closer to him, cutting off the stage and reducing it to a diamond, both in its shape and substance. It was priceless and invaluable because Jackson was projecting the power of African-American spirituality forward and having it rearticulated back to him in the reverberating emotion of the audience and the escalating ecstasy of his singers. Jackson went down, like a martyr figure delivering a messianic message, sinking to his knees that his audience might, as he repeatedly implored them, “stand up, stand up, stand up.” Jackson then resorted to his best exhortative deep-throated vocal to release a volcanic melisma and syllabic repetition of the word you, in “you-you-you-ou-ow-ow got to make a change,” catalyzing a tumultuous response in the Grammy audience.

At the consummation of his homily in song, Jackson whispered, “Make that change,” and his congregation came to their feet, thundering their applauded amen at Jackson, yielding their total love and trust to his expressed desire to change the world by their changing themselves. The camera displayed a felicitous
complicity in the spirit of the moment and scouted the audience for the converted and the committed, finding them scattered throughout the auditorium’s scene of pandemonium.

Quincy Jones was clapping in recognition of his young charge’s genius and in graceful acknowledgment of their amazingly productive and satisfying partnership over the last decade. Prince, typically unsmiling, was nonetheless on his feet, giving Jackson his due. Jody Watley was smiling broadly and clapping with joy. Behind her was Anita Baker, raising her hand in testimony to the spirit’s presence and ejaculating an incendiary “yeah” in verbal testimony to her spiritual enthusiasm. There, too, was Little Richard, a cultural icon himself, whose face was brushed with a deep and clear joy, perhaps vicariously exulting in Jackson’s glorious fulfillment, a fulfillment denied Little Richard, a real pillar of rock ‘n’ roll. (Jackson would return the joy later, as he was the first to his feet when Little Richard playfully chided the recording academy for not recognizing his original genius by awarding him a Grammy.) Finally there were the Houstons, Whitney and Cissy, exhibiting in their individual persons what Jackson combined: powerful forms of traditional, black, gospel-inflected music wed to crossover-rich, hookladen music supported by diluted but still driving African-American beats.

Jackson’s performance revealed a crucial aspect of his vocation: a theatricalization of spirituality, a festive choreography of religious reality that is often present in his live performances. The manner in which Jackson is able to evoke a virtually religious response from even secular concert attenders, a response that transcends mere emotional expression or simple cathartic release, is astonishing. He articulates a vision of the world that, although it includes idiosyncratic and fantastical elements, nonetheless communicates powerful religious truths and moral themes that are expressed in his riveting music and videos.

Michael Jackson seizes the parameters of the artistically possible and expands them to dimensions beyond most of our imaginations. He increases the influence of black religious experience and practices by articulating through televisual media his brand of African-American secular spirituality and institution-transcending piety, rife with appropriate religious and cultural imagery. He also transforms the stage into a world-extending sanctuary on which he enacts rituals of religious ecstasy, moral courage, and spiritual passion that mediate substantive concerns about love, peace, and justice, simultaneously subverting cultural consensus about what constitutes the really “bad” and the “good.” He embodies a postmodern version of African-American secular spirituality that has the opportunity to spread its influence into the next century and to ensure the presence in the larger American and world culture of some of the most poignant and creative art developed from an enormously rich and resourceful tradition.