Greil Marcus on Michael Jackson

[rich]

another interesting (and, to me a bit more incisive) is this by Hilton Als

After "Ben," the metaphors Michael Jackson used to express his
difference from his family became ever more elaborate and haunting:
there was his brilliant turn as an especially insecure, effete, and,
at times, masochistic scarecrow in Sidney Lumet's 1978 film version of
the Broadway hit The Wiz. There was his appropriation of Garland's
later style—the sparkly black Judy-in-concert jacket—during the 1984
"Victory" tour, his last performances with his brothers, whose
costuming made them look like intergalactic superheroes. And there
were the songs he wrote for women—early idols like Diana Ross or his
older sister, Rebbie—songs that expressed what he could never say
about his own desire. "She said she wants a guy/To keep her
satisfied/But that's alright for her/But it ain't enough for me,"
Jackson wrote in the 1982 Diana Ross hit song "Muscles." The song
continues: "Still, I don't care if he's young or old/(Just make him
beautiful).... I want muscles/All over his body." The following year,
Jackson wrote "Centipede," which became Rebbie Jackson's signature
song. It begins: "Your love/Is like a ragin' fire, oh/You're a snake
that's on the loose/The strike is your desire." In bars like the
Starlite, and, later, in primarily black and Latin gay dance clubs
like the Paradise Garage on Manhattan's Lower West Side, the meaning
was clear: Michael Jackson was most himself when he was someone other
than himself.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22951

On 7/30/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> Greil Marcus' "Lipstick Traces—A Secret History of the Twentieth
> Century"—points to the Punk/Situationist connection and has
> particularly biting things to say about Michael Jackson, the commodity:
>
> 	MICHAEL JACKSON
>
> 	Michael Jackson stands in the White House Rose Garden with
> 	President Ronald Reagan to receive an award for allowing his
> 	Thriller hit "Beat It" to be made into an anti-drunk-driving TV
> 	commercial. On newscasts covering the event, a bit of the
> 	commercial is shown: a skeletal hand grasps the hand of one
> 	still living. The suggestion of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel
> 	ceiling, where Adam touches the hand of God, is inescapable;
> 	so is the feeling that Michael Jackson is becoming a kind of
> 	god. The newscasts cut back to the Rose Garden: "Isn't this a
> 	thriller," says the president. Previously, for $5.5 million dollars,
> 	Jackson had allowed his great Thriller hit "Billie Jean" to be
> 	turned into a Pepsi commercial.
>
> 	For television there are in fact two commercials, and both are to
> 	be weighted with satisfying intimations of hubris, of tragedy. In
> 	the first, young black breakdancers are seen slippin' and slidin'
> 	over city streets; Jackson and his brothers appear, and the
> 	dancers halt in awe. Led by a tiny pre-teen virtuoso, they
> 	bounce back, and affirm their authenticity as folk dancers
> 	against—no, with: the commercial is saying that in America
> 	anyone can grow up to be Michael Jackson-the authenticity of
> 	the star as star. Soon it would be announced that the tiny
> 	virtuoso had broken his neck breakdancing, and had died.
>
> 	As with the rumor that Annette Funicello lost an arm while
> 	waving to a fan from a bus, the story wasn't true: radio stations
> 	and newspapers that carried obituaries ran corrections. But it
> 	was only a warmup. During the filming of a second Pepsi
> 	commercial, in which Jackson descended a stage to join his
> 	brothers in praise of the drink, explosions of light heralded his
> 	presence, and he was burned. The resulting publicity was so
> 	productive, for both Pepsi and Jackson, that some were sure
> 	the accident had been faked. The day before the official debut
> 	of the commercials, on the 1984 Grammy Awards telecast
> 	where the advertisements, which were themselves advertised,
> 	were presented to the public like new records, like art state-
> 	ments—TV news shows, still featuring daily medical bulletins
> 	on Jackson's condition, used parts of the commercials as news
> 	footage. Jackson appeared to collect eight Grammys; as he
> 	stepped forward to accept the last, he removed his dark
> 	glasses.
>
> 	All of this took place in what situationist Guy Debord had called
> 	"the heaven of the spectacle." "I am nothing and I should be
> 	everything," a young Karl Marx had written, defining the
> 	revolutionary impulse. "The spectacle," as Debord developed
> 	the concept through the 1950s and 1960s, was at once the
> 	kidnapping of that impulse and its prison. It was a wonderful
> 	prison, where all of life was staged as a permanent show-a
> 	show, Debord wrote, where "everything that was directly lived
> 	has moved away into a representation," a beautiful work of art.
> 	The only problem was absolute: "in the case where the self is
> 	merely represented and ideally presented," ran a quote from
> 	Hegel on the first page of La societe du spectacle, a book of
> 	critical theory Debord published in 1967, "there it is not actual:
> 	where it is by proxy, it is not."
>
> 	"The spectacle," Debord said, was "capital accumulated until it
> 	becomes an image." A never-ending accumulation of
> 	spectacles-advertisements, entertainments, traffic, skyscrapers,
> 	political campaigns, department stores, sports events,
> 	newscasts, art tours, foreign wars, space launchings-made a
> 	modern world, a world in which all communication flowed in
> 	one direction, from the powerful to the powerless. One could not
> 	respond, or talk back, or intervene, but one did not want to. In
> 	the spectacle, passivity was simultaneously the means and the
> 	end of a great hidden project, a project of social control. On the
> 	terms of its particular form of hegemony the spectacle naturally
> 	produced not actors but spectators: modern men and women,
> 	the citizens of the most advanced societies on earth, who were
> 	thrilled to watch whatever it was they were given to watch.
>
> 	Pages 97-99
>