MICHAEL JACKSON AT 57:  GONE BUT STILL ROCKING ON

Jerry Harkins

            The late Michael Jackson was a talented song and dance man who appealed primarily to young people and who created a cultural presence that was exotic if not bizarre.  He died on June 25, 2009, the victim of what a jury decided was involuntary manslaughter by his physician.  Oceans of ink were employed to report every aspect of his funeral and the myriad legal maneuvers that followed and the media are still not finished with him.  This would be more understandable had the last six years been a slow news period.  It has, however, been anything but.  Journalism has been blessed not only with an unprecedented global economic crisis but also with a cornucopia of man-bites-dog stories including, of course, the sudden death of journalism as we knew it.  So why the continuing preoccupation with Mr. Jackson?

            On the road to Jerusalem, Jesus advised a prospective follower not to bother burying his dead father.  “Let the dead,” he said, “bury their own dead.”  This, of course, is terrible public health policy but it might help the press get past its obsession.  It would also be an excellent strategy for politicians like Peter King, Republican (of course) of New York (well, Long Island) who used the occasion of Mr. Jackson’s funeral to denounce him as a pervert, child molester and pedophile.  As Ms. Throckmorton once said when a heckler interrupted her introduction of a favorite student with the accusation that "Miss Kelsey-Paige is a cocksucker!" “Nevertheless.”  Nevertheless, Mr. Jackson was acquitted of those charges by a jury of his peers.  Okay, Michael had no peers so Pete is free to ignore the presumption of innocence, the principle, “…axiomatic and elementary, [that] lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law”  (Coffin et al v. United States, 156 U.S. 432, 1895).   Nor need he bother with the Biblical injunction,  “Judge not that ye be not judged” (Matt. 7:1).  Finally, as both a Republican and an Irish American clod, Mr. King is probably unaware of Chilon of Sparta and his saccharine idea that we should speak nothing but good of the departed.

            Chilon notwithstanding, I’m not sure one is compelled to make up good things to say about a dead icon.  For example, was it absolutely necessary for President Obama to call Michael, “…one of the greatest entertainers of our generation, perhaps any generation.”  Of course it’s a matter of definition.  If the President was thinking of the top thousand song and dance men, he was probably right.  Michael was surely among them.  But Berry Gordy of Motown Records was, if possible, even more enthusiastic.  “I think he is simply the greatest entertainer that ever lived,” said he.  And Maya Angelou mourned for all of us.  “In the instant that Michael is gone, we know nothing. No clocks can tell time. No oceans can rush our tides with the abrupt absence of our treasure.”  Even before his death, Guinness World Records had named him the most successful entertainer of all time, and American Music Awards had acclaimed him artist of the century.

Michael Jackson was certainly a phenomenon.  Seven hundred fifty million records sold, 13 Grammies, 13 Number One singles, 16 gold singles.  Only eight singers had more of those.  One is his sister Janet who has 21 and counting.  Another was his father-in-law, Elvis, who had 54.  Statistical comparisons of artistic achievement are invidious, but Jackson was far from being the greatest anything.  Note that no one says greatest singer or greatest dancer or greatest songwriter.  Any such claim would be instantly seen as ludicrous.  But “entertainer” is a more ambiguous category.  The special charisma of Michael Jackson was that of the old fashioned freak show.  Here was a black singer in white face, a 50-year old countertenor who spoke in a whisper, a wealthy man with a taste for the amusements of childhood, a celebrity with a truly bizarre sense of fashion.  A poet of really exotic assonant rhyme schemes, as in his most famous effort, “Bad.”

Your Butt Is Mine

Gonna Take You Right

Just Show Your Face

In Broad Daylight

I'm Telling You

On How I Feel

Gonna Hurt Your Mind

Don't Shoot To Kill

Come On, Come On,

Lay It On Me All Right...

Here is the rhyme pattern:  a, b, c, d, e, f, a, g, h, b.  This is followed by:

Because I'm Bad, I'm Bad-

Come On

(Bad Bad-Really, Really Bad)

You Know I'm Bad, I'm Bad-

You Know It

(Bad Bad-Really, Really Bad)

You Know I'm Bad, I'm Bad-

Come On, You Know

(Bad Bad-Really, Really Bad)

And The Whole World Has To

Answer Right Now

Just To Tell You Once Again,

Who's Bad . . .

Not immortal, of course, but not bad for hip hop.  And then you have this masterpiece:

The Girl Is Mine 
(She Mine, She Mine, She Mine)


The Doggone Girl Is Mine


(She Like The Way I Rock, The Way I Rock, The Way I Rock, The Way I Rock)


I Know She's Mine
 (She Mine, She Mine, She Mine)


Because The Doggone Girl Is Mine


            (She Like The Way I Rock, The Way I Rock, The Way I Rock, The Way I Rock)

Just beat it, beat it, beat it, beat it

No one wants to be defeated

Showin' how funky and strong is your fight

It doesn't matter who's wrong or right

Just beat it, beat it

Just beat it, beat it

Just beat it, beat it

Just beat it, beat it

The artistry here is in the ambiguous relative pronoun it coupled with the ambiguous moral philosophy.  What is to be beaten?  The doggone girl?  The singer’s penis?  The video shows a fight between two gangs of post-adolescent males.  Maybe the lyric urges the participants to beat each other.  Is the song or the singer taking sides?  Who is in danger of being defeated by what?  Defeated while showing how funky and strong you are?  Funky has two meanings:  smelly and strongly syncopated (said of a dance rhythm).   In another form, it refers to a depressed state of mind.

            Michael was, in fact, a great dancer and a decent singer but, as a songwriter, he was on the wrong side of mediocre.  Not terrible but his music is pedestrian and the lyrics tend to be part of the percussion: loud, choppy and vulgar.  There have never been a lot of singer-songwriters who were good at both and many who have been good at neither.  Songwriting is difficult and is almost always best left to professionals, preferably to a team of professionals, a composer and a lyricist working together.  There are exceptions, of course.  The Great American Songbook is graced by sole practitioners like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim.  I choose these three because they are all brilliant but very different as lyricists.  Berlin’s lyrics tend to be simple:

Have you seen the well-to-do

Up and down Park Avenue

On that famous thoroughfare

With their noses in the air?

Porter’s words are both catchy and sophisticated:

If we’d thought a bit of the end of it

When we started painting the town,

We’d have been aware that our love affair

Was too hot not to cool down.

Sondheim is sparer, is a sense more difficult and much more contemporary.  The first verse of “Finishing the Hat” from Sunday in the Park with George has a take on lost love that might have appealed to Michael Jackson:

Yes, she looks for me . . . . Good.

Let her look for me to tell me why she left me

as I always knew she would.

I had thought she understood.

They have never understood, and no reason that they should.

But if anybody could . . . .

                       We don’t often think of these songwriters as singers but all three frequently sang

their own songs in public and even in films.  Irving Berlin loved to sing and he gave definitive performances of such hits as “God Bless America” and “Oh How I Hate to Get up in the Morning.”  You would say he was a stylist more than a vocalist.  Cole Porter had a problematic voice and a tendency to swallow words but you enjoyed hearing him because he was having such a good time.  And, ah, Stephen Sondheim.  His studio recordings are essential tools for anyone trying to learn how to sing his songs.  Better still watch him teach others.  You can get an idea of his skill by watching a You Tube video of Sondheim conducting a master class on the single phrase “Maybe next year” from “Send in the Clowns.”

            The difference between Sondheim and Jackson begins with a similarity.  In terms of poetics, both were influenced by the beat poets of the 1950’s, Sondheim directly and Jackson probably indirectly.  I’m referring here not to the content of their poems or lyrics but to their structure, the architecture of the lines which critics sometimes refer to as “free-form.”  In a sense it is.  We are given not the fairly rigid iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets but what seems to the ear a more informal, conversational flow of words and ideas.  A good example is the first line of the first poem in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s seminal 1958 collection A Coney Island of the Mind:

In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see

                                                                  the people of the world

            exactly at the moment when

                        they first attained the title of

                                                                        ‘suffering humanity’

Like sprung rhythm and other forms of accentual verse, this is meant to imitate conversational speech but within a highly disciplined metrical framework based on stresses rather than syllables.  Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet “The Windhover:  To Christ Our Lord” begins:

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-

   dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

     of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

   High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

Accentual verse need not deal in intellectual speculation.  It is very common in English probably for the same reason the iamb is:  it is natural and memorable.  Thus:

Baa, baa, black sheep,

Have you any wool?

Yes, sir, yes, sir,

Three bags full;

One for the master,

And one for the dame,

And one for the little boy

Who lives down the lane.

            Sondheim argues that poetry and lyrics are very different forms.  If so, surely one of those differences is that lyrics often make little or no sense.  Take, for example, one of the greatest songs of the Great American Songbook, “Speak Low (When You Speak of Love)."  It ought to be great with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ogden Nash:

Speak low when you speak of love,

Our summer day withers away too soon, too soon

Speak low when you speak of love

Our moment is swift, like ships adrift,

We’re swept apart too soon

Speak low darling, speak low

Love is a spark lost in the dark, too soon, too soon.

The first line is a variation of Don Pedro’s advice to Hero in “Much Ado About Nothing” (Act 2, Scene 1) where it makes slightly more sense than it does here.  There is no obvious connection between the fragility of a summer day and a lover’s tone of voice, ships do not drift swiftly, and how can a spark be lost in the dark?  But all that is mere pettifoggery against the pure pleasure of hearing the song sung by Barbra Streisand, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday or any of the other singers who have recorded it.  Aristotle notwithstanding, it’s a great song.

            Not so, “Bad.”  It’s a lousy song turned into great entertainment by its use in the video as a dance number derivative of or, maybe, an homage to the gang rumble scene in “West Side Story.”  There is nothing wrong with entertainment.  As the poster for the MGM film “Entertainment!” claimed, “Boy, Do We Need It Now.”  But “Bad” cannot stand alone as a song sung by a real singer.  You can’t sing it and neither could Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley or Luciano Pavarotti.

            A great song or even a good song is forever.  Entertainment is usually ephemeral and meant to be.  Yesterday’s jokes baffle today even as our pleasure in them remains in fond memory.  So, Michael, rest in peace.  In the words of Bob Hope who really could lay claim to the title of World’s Greatest Entertainer, “Thanks for the memory.”