I just got around to reading the comments to Gerald’s post on Michael Jackson. As a professional musician (I play guitar and sing for our summer rent and bills) who has spent a great deal of time playing across the genres of blues, soul, jazz, and R&B I think my view on the matter may offer something different and, perhaps, of interest.
First of all, let me be clear: I reject the notion that art can be neatly parsed into professional terms that bracket away the personal life of the artist. So, what I have to say is not an attempt to try and set anything aside for a purely musical analysis. In the interest of order and intelligibility, I would like to comment on two aspects that are, in fact, intertwined if not indistinguishable at the level of any credible first person account: Michael’s music and Michael’s identity.
Music
For all those who dismiss the musical prowess of Michael Jackson, I would ask them to attempt to replicate his art. To put it more bluntly: Join a cover band and try to pull off credible versions of his stuff from the Jackson Five material to “Invincible,” his last studio album (which would include trying to find people talented enough to play it with you). Speaking from experience, you can’t just execute Michael Jackson with great technique, you need all the intangibles (and more).
For example, you cannot simply sing to emulate his staccatoed phrasing and wide range with perfect tone; you have to sang (a well-known technical distinction in Black musical circles, e.g. “I know she can sing, but can she sang?”). Then, to get the beat just right, it is not a matter of being “on the one” every time, like a metronome; you’ve got to be able to keep a tight groove that breathes just enough to let the body move (another well-known somatic approach to rhythm in dance-based musical genres, especially Latin and Afrocentric music: the beat is for the body).
My point is this: playing the basic forms and beats of a genre or style is one thing, but to really be able to play—and dance too!—Michael Jackson’s music (or Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, and a few others) you need him to hold you by the hand and teach you. I came into the scene pretty late with little more than a good ear and years of playing at church, but I gave Stevie, Ray, and Michael a long listen (I also did the same for Bob Marley). From continuing to do that, I have gained more in my playing and my ability to communicate myself through my instrument than ever before. Even then, it is still a daunting task to play Michael’s music in our Neo-Soul/nu-Jazz band, Gruvment.
Now, I also have combined that listening with heavy doses of listening to some older cats like Wes Montgomery, Muddy Waters, Freddie King, Django Rhienhart and some current virtuosos like John Scofield, Pat Metheny, Adam Rogers, and John Mayer (yes, he fits in that category to me), but, while they inspired me to shed and work on chops, phrasing, and style, Michael Jackson (and the others I mentioned) taught me how to let a beat be itself and suck you in in the process without sounding too loose.
So, is “pop” a silly throw away genre? Sure, in some cases. But in this case, unless you hold some expertise that I have yet to come across (which very well may be the case), hold your verdict. What Michael means to me musically is the most sophisticated approach to Black American music we have had to date—none more evident by its ability to communicate globally (for better or for worse).
Seeing the range of poor to pretty decent execution of his material by the very best in the field at his memorial on Tuesday (Mariah sounded liked a hot mess) I think the bar is set for everyone, not just a semi-professional type like me. Michael Jackson, like the short list of greats before him, is to be reckoned with musically if you want to play in the tradition of the evolving Black American music scene, period.
Identity
Michael Jackson had a tragic life. Whether he emerges the hero or the villain is not for me to say, after all, it hardly would makes any sense to cut it so cleanly. What Jackson did do in his life (including his music) is struggle to become a person in ways that were tortuously strange to everyone watching. From his move from Black to blanched, to his boyish face that became an androgynous profile, his life was a mystery cloaked in the questions of abuse, pedophilia, and unrequited love.
The idea that such a tragic life should dismiss him from being worthy of our attention is, to me, the strangest thing of all. Why is his identity—even in mourning—so controversial?
To me, he is a another Quixote: A man trying to live out a fairytale, who’s life is a paradox at best, and a contradiction at worst. For Miguel de Unamuno, Don Quixote was an embodiment of the “tragic sense of life,” a sense of life fulfilled not in the type of the Quixote, but in Christ.
I am not sure if I am ready to join Michael Jackson to Unamuno’s Christological reading of Cervantes, but I am compelled to say that Michael Jackson’s life is one we should not be ashamed of being fascinated with. It is not a lost cause to wonder why his identity was so strange to most of us—even those who wish he would go away—in some way or another.
For me, at the deepest level of introspection, the identity of the man who was objectified in abuse from prepubescence and, in turn, objectified and subjected himself (and, perhaps, others) for the rest of his adult life via the excesses of celebrity, body-transformation, traumatic escapes and repressions, and musical innovation, is not so strange at all: he is myself. In a way, I am Michael Jackson. We all are.
It may sound too glib or cheesy to make such a bombastic claim, but, for me, any quixotic life—none more puzzling than the mystery of Christ—that presents us with deep questions of identity is a call to conversion, to re-identification, that forces us to face ourselves, our sister and brother, our enemy, and, in the end, God.
Rest in Peace Michael.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In