There’s a “perennial unwillingness to come to terms with the premature or violent death of heroes,” Jonathan Sumption wrote in the New York Review of Books. True.
[rssbreak]
The sudden death of Michael Jackson, the (justly) self-styled King of Pop, on June 25, sparked general incredulity. The common reaction was voiced in terms like “surprise” and “shock,” followed by Michaelmania redux, with a revivifying and profitable effect on the late superstar’s songbook and record catalogue.
We have been here before. Elvis Presley and John Lennon and, lest we forget, James Brown. These pop stars’ deaths seemed transcendent because they weren’t only singers – unlike, say, Karen Carpenter or John Denver – but also cultural heroes, artists inseparable from the zeitgeist that they both participated in and projected.
But there is another aspect to the frenzy that Jackson’s death and public memorial this week has occasioned, and that is the attempt to solve the puzzle of his personal racial identity as well as that of racial identity in general.
In last week’s Harlem tribute, for instance, there was no question that Jackson was black, or African American, nor should there have been:
Whatever the reasons for his loss of skin pigmentation, that usual visual marker of “blackness,” it was clear to anyone watching his career flashbacks that Jackson was comfortable interfacing with black people and utilizing street traditions and ‘hood aesthetics, borrowing from and extending them in his art, his song and dance and filmmaking.
In the make-believe Neverland of Hollywood, however, where Jackson preferred to live, work and play, he could afford to render visual blackness just one more option in a personal Identikit.
He could metamorphose into a zombie, a white woman, a Fred Astaire acolyte, an Elizabeth Taylor insider, a Paul McCartney pal, Lisa Marie Presley’s husband and a man-boy with a Chaplinesque fondness for youth (that may or may not have been more innocent than Chaplin’s for girls). For him, race was rubbery, a mask like so many others in an Eden of plastic surgeons and elastic standards.
Some of Jackson’s critics (or persecutors, as some of his critics were) saw his racial adaptability as proof of inauthenticity, of his failure to “keep it real.”
But what Jackson saw clearly, whether he truly suffered from vitiligo or not, was that the secret to entertainment success in the United States (and a goodly portion of the Occident) is to sound or act “black,” to market “black” style in some way but to look or be “white.” Black stars who can accomplish this feat, who can “cross over” (as the lingo goes), will reap many benefits.
Yes, this point is also true – in reverse – for many white stars, from Justin Timberlake to Madonna. Even the banjo, so closely associated with white country music, descends from black slave musicians who brought this instrument, the banguirre, from West Africa to North America.
While previous black stars had to approximate white status to increase their popularity, Jackson, a consummate showbiz entrepreneur, took the ultimate step, becoming if not white, then at least whiter than he was.
This transformation aided his “raceless” commercial appeal even if some labelled him “wacko.”
But this carping was idiotic. The inner logic – and propaganda – of globalization is that because we are all collectivized in one vast “integrated” capitalist marketplace, “race” and “culture” and “difference” don’t matter save as marketing ploys.
We Are The World, as sentiment and slogan, is, then, practically synonymous with the United Colors of Benetton.
Similarly, it made sense for the African-American King of Pop to annex the song catalogue of the Beatles, a “white” group who never hesitated to admit and demonstrate their artistic debt to African-American blues singers.
Despite Jackson’s accidental (or savvy) appropriation of a superficial “whiteness,” his retinue flaunted Nation of Islam gravitas and muscle and numbered a host of African-American professionals. When necessary, he could prove that he still had “the moves,” that he could still – and did – identify with the black working class from which he came. Hence he tended to debut his most revolutionary dances in front of primarily black audiences.
If Jackson “crossed over,” he was also always “going back.”
Yet his upbringing in a “raceless” and apocalyptic Christian sect (the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, i.e., the Jehovah’s Witnesses) as well as his insight into the interplay of colour lines and “minstrelsy” and money-making in the U.S. contributed, no doubt, to the adult superstar’s parenting of literally shrouded children (thus making their racial identification deliberately difficult) as well his own self-makeover into a human being defiant of racial categorization.
Indeed, it may make sense to view Jackson as a reverse Al Jolson, the white entertainer who made it big in blackface in 1920s Hollywood.
Or consider him the male heir to Josephine Baker, the tan-complected African-American danseuse and chanteuse who began her career as an “exotic,” half-naked, imported, Parisian “African” and ended it in the 1970s as a French grande dame, the Queen of the Music Hall, who richly deserved the state funeral she received. She remains a singular star in the French entertainment firmament.
Like Baker, Jackson opened his home to children of all persuasions. She had her “Rainbow Tribe” of children plucked from around the globe, and he had his amusement park for his own favoured tykes. (While Baker’s household did not suffer accusations of pedophilia, perhaps because she wasn’t rich or “weird” enough to attract them, she also spent money unwisely on hangers-on and a mansion, and so suffered her own ignoble bankruptcy.)
In the end, Michael Jackson was a great African-American singer-songwriter-dancer who executed a fantastic pop cultural coup by proving that whiteness is just as superficial as blackness – unless the artist claiming either truly has “soul.”
However, it would be an error to call him race-transcendent. No, he became “mixed-race,” which is, in reality, the only actual racial identity anyone can claim.
Blues And Bliss: The Poetry Of George Elliott Clarke, edited by Jon Paul Fiorentino (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), won the 2009 Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry.
news@nowtoronto.com
