Tris McCall

The first comparisons we heard were to Elvis. But that didn’t sit right at all. Elvis was a different kind of King: one who brought black popular music to a mass audience by demonstrating that it could mean everything in the world to a non-black listener. Chuck D said he was a racist, simple and plain. Chuck has rapped a lot of wrong things over the years, but I don’t think any were as unfair as that one.

When Elvis went into Sun Studios to grab his crown — and for many years after — pop music was child’s play. Real stars didn’t make pop, and they sure as hell didn’t stay in Memphis. They went to California and starred in sorry entertainment with Gidget. We know this from Elvis’s own choices: he and Colonel Parker decided they’d rather do Fun In Acapulco than “Heartbreak Hotel”. Better to be a mediocre movie star than the world’s greatest rocker. These days it’s fashionable to blame Elvis and his management for shortsightedness, but it’s easy for us to say now. The pop charts weren’t a destination for an entertainer then. They were a means to an end.

By the time Thriller dropped, the industry had figured out how to make gazillions of dollars off of pop records. Consequently, “pop musician” became a respectable career path for the lucky few who made it to hit radio. Michael Jackson did appear in movies — he even managed to make The Wiz vaguely watchable. But movies were a sideline. Jackson made more impact as a music video star (the first, and still the greatest) than Elvis did in all of his feature films put together.

Since MTV has spaced on its mission, you can’t really be a music video star anymore. Beyonce and Lady Gaga qualify, just barely; they don’t do anything that Michael Jackson didn’t do better. In the years since Thriller, the industry seems to have forgotten how to make gazillions of dollars off of pop records. The starmaker machinery still groans away in Los Angeles, but it appears to be running short of toner. The suits like to blame the Internet and file-sharing. I believe it’s far more complicated than that; but that’s a discussion for another day. Michael Jackson’s early adulthood coincided with the zenith of pop music mass-marketing. Conditions had never been quite as favorable for pop blockbusters than they were in the early Eighties, and they’d never be as favorable as they were again. Jackson’s own talent had plenty to do with that, but probably not as much as I think it did, and I am a crazed, rabid, one-glove-wearing fan who nearly broke my neck trying to moonwalk too close to the staircase of our suburban house in Springfield, New Jersey. Because of the time during which he made his most famous records and the unparalleled hysteria that followed their release, it is next to impossible to compare Michael Jackson’s career to that of any other pop star.

Me, I like to compare Michael Jackson to Jackie Robinson.

Here’s something about Michael Jackson and Thriller that people forget: “The Girl Is Mine” was the lead single. They had “Billie Jean”, and “Beat It”, and “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”, and “Baby Be Mine” in the can, and they released “The Girl Is Mine” first. Paul McCartney shows up to do a not-quite-serious duet vocal that almost sinks the track, and it didn’t even matter to CBS. Those who felt at the time that Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones were pandering to white MOR pop fans had all the ammunition they needed to make their argument. But I’d like to think that the real purpose of “The Girl Is Mine” was to sneak a fight between a black guy and a white guy onto mainstream radio, and to do so in advance of several singles that were, by their very nature, assaults on the color bar. Consider the possibility that they were more theorized than it seemed: McCartney’s limp insouciance might well be meant to stand in for white complacency. And as for Jackson, it’s pretty clear that he’s not singing about a woman.

And could you blame him for his frustration? In 1982, MTV would not air videos by black people. This was definitely part of the station’s brand launch; it was also nearly its undoing. Younger people sometimes don’t believe me when I mention this — they say things like “oh, you mean there were separate shows for ‘urban’ videos?” No, it wasn’t like that at all. If you mugged Nina Blackwood for an ‘81 MTV playlist, you wouldn’t find any black people on it, period. Music Television was a whites-only club as exclusive as any in Johannesburg, or Columbia, South Carolina. Jackson didn’t even bother making a video for “The Girl Is Mine”; even after he’d turned the station inside out with “Thriller”, he opted against spots for “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”, “P.Y.T.”, and “Human Nature”.

Many of you know the tale of Walter Yetnikoff’s strongarm tactics against the network: he allegedly told MTV that if they refused to air Michael Jackson, he’d pull all of the other CBS clips from the channel. He could get away with that because Columbia Records was part of a gigantic corporate entity and MTV was still a start-up. The story is misleading because it suggests that MTV acted alone. As anybody with a cursory knowledge of Eighties mainstream radio can tell you, the video channel was by no means the only media outlet with a Blacks Keep Out sign on the fence.

It was just the most desperate. MTV may have been bankrolled by the majors, but there were plenty of folks certain that it wouldn’t catch on. We have a nice retrospective appreciation of roly-poly fish heads and Martha Quinn’s floral dresses, but early MTV aired quite a bit of not-ready-for-prime-time crapola. No matter how strategically segregationist your marketing strategy may be, there’s only so many times you can air the guy from A Flock Of Seagulls with his middle finger on the synthesizer before it starts getting ridiculous — especially when you’ve got the “Billie Jean” video collecting dust on your desk.

So it’s not surprising that MTV was the first to cave. Once they did air Michael Jackson, everything else on the channel looked sloppy and amateurish by comparison. Yes, we’re all lo-fi appreciators and communitarian punk rockers here, but even the most relentless egalitarian will lose his shit in the presence of glass-shattering talent. (And in case you haven’t noticed, most of America isn’t made up of relentless egalitarians.) After “Billie Jean”, the playlist had to change; otherwise, the station would have been hobbled by its incongruity. “Thriller” can’t be followed by “I Wanna Be Lifeguard” — it’s just unfair. Prince and Lionel Richie were in, Blotto and Dog Police were out. The station would continue to control its melanin level — it still does — but the whitewash was over for good.

If Yetnikoff tried the same trick with commercial radio, he didn’t get far; at least not at first. “Beat It” rocked harder than Billy Squier, but the heavy music deejays wouldn’t cooperate. We no longer think of Michael Jackson as lyrically provocative (although he always was), but in ‘82, he was a young and dangerously androgynous black man singing about unwanted pregnancy, gang violence, abuse, and miscegenation — and it scared the holy hell out of the MOR programmers. His blatant queerness was an issue for new wave stations that had no problem airing David Bowie and Human League. Top 40 is a self-defining institution, so at least we could count on Casey Kasem. But the best place to hear Michael Jackson was on MTV.

He used the videos to obliterate the barriers that separated black and non-black audiences. In 1980, the music that played on my block bore no resemblance to the songs that played on the African-American side of town; to me and my playmates, “urban” music meant the Billy Joel songs that explicitly addressed the city. By ‘83, we were all listening to Michael Jackson. Maybe his motivation was money; we all know how he drew his sales goals in condensation trails on the mirror every morning. He must have realized he needed to penetrate white America to stack that kind of bank. Certainly he made no political statements. Then again, he didn’t need to. No black nationalist ever did a better job of forcing mass American culture to confront an African-American face. That he obliterated that face beyond recognition almost underscores the point: Michael Jackson’s image became a symbol, and it can’t help but feel unreal to exist as a walking signifier.

Critics of Michael Jackson like to point to the brevity of his productive seasons: he doesn’t have Paul McCartney’s discography, let alone Van Morrison’s, so we’re not supposed to take him seriously as a songwriter or as an artist. I love Paul McCartney and Van the Man, but they never had to shoulder the burden that Michael Jackson did. They didn’t have to pry the padlocks off mass prejudice with nothing but force of personality. They weren’t up against a color bar. Jackie Robinson got a late start; he didn’t pile up the sort of career numbers that you’d expect from a typical Hall of Famer. But everybody who saw him play called him electrifying. Likewise, nobody who saw Michael Jackson in 1982 could ever dispute his utter mastery of pop music. Nobody has ever done it better. If you were there, you knew.

I first saw him perform on Soul Train; I also remember watching rebroadcasts of the Jackson 5 cartoon when I was very small. Normally I resented child stars for getting the attention that ought to be accruing to me. But here was a kid so stupefyingly talented that he transcended any petty resentments I might have had. Half a decade later, he worked the same magic on the entire country. The rappers who came in his wake — and, honestly, all rappers came in his wake — would invade suburban living rooms and set all the furniture on fire. It was fine; that furniture had to go. I’m grateful to every one of them. I’m more grateful to Michael Jackson for clearing the path.

Commercial radio resegregated in the early Nineties; I think they called it “alternative music”. Much of the work that Michael Jackson did was undone by faceless white guys wearing flannel. By then, Michael Jackson had lost his marbles, predictably, and in public, too. He became an easy target. I pulled for Dangerous to do the same thing to grunge that Thriller had to post-punk, but honestly, I knew it was too late. You can’t except the same guy to turn the world upside down twice — even George Washington only had one revolution to fight. Jackie Robinson died young, too; he was only 53. In 2010, we don’t focus on his endorsement of Richard Nixon or his cranky anti-drug crusading. We remember a ballplayer who made history for all the right reasons. Thankfully, now that he’s gone, the image of Michael Jackson the lunatic child molester and plastic-surgery disaster is already beginning to fade. It’ll never go away completely, and I can even accept that it’s a part of the story. But it’s a sidebar at best — and as all of the tawdry stuff recedes further into the haze of celebrity nonsense, it’s a sidebar that’ll grow smaller and smaller.

In conclusion, let me put it to you this way:

When I was in college, much effort was given by my progressive professors to debunk the “great man” theory. History, we were taught, was made not by single actors but by social movements. Valorize a long line of heroes and you tend to reduce history to a statue garden. Well, maybe. There’s good patricidal fun to be had in throwing stones at idols, but I never stopped thinking my progressive professors were wrong. My proof for this wasn’t Abraham Lincoln, or John F. Kennedy, or Bella Abzug, or Captain America. My proof was always Michael Jackson. In 1983, anybody who didn’t believe in the great man theory didn’t have a television set. Talent, grace, and charisma are all real, and magnificent, and historiography that doesn’t make room — lots of room — for these qualities feels curiously cold and impersonal. Michael Jackson had Columbia Records in his corner, and that’s certainly a sturdier platform than most charismatic artists get. But Columbia Records didn’t shake the globe. Michael Jackson did. Call Mr. West a bigmouth (he will surely agree) but he’s right about this: everybody in this pop game is trying to be like Michael Jackson. They’ve realized what Elvis and Colonel Parker didn’t; something we all learned in ‘82: a pop star is something like a magic bullet. They can fire you out of the biggest gun they’ve got, but once you’re out there, it’s still your own speed and force against gravity. If you’re fast enough, and strong enough, there’s no barrier you can’t penetrate.

Final words continue tomorrow.