The following is an excerpt from the 100th volume in the series, Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast, out September 25.
1991’s Dangerous announced the end of Jackson’s innocence and the command of a complicated, conflicted sensibility. – Armond White
Dangerous is Michael Jackson’s coming of age album. I know this is a grand and seemingly-absurd claim to make, since many think his best work was behind him by this time. Let me explain. The record offers Jackson on a threshold, finally inhabiting adulthood—isn’t this what so many said was missing?—and doing so through an immersion in black music that would only continue to deepen in his later work. Yet he was unable to convince a skeptical public, at this point wholly indoctrinated by the media, that he was either capable of grown-up sentiments—by which I mean deep political engagement, adult expressions of sexuality, spiritual reflection—or interested in his black heritage. This in itself lays bare an interesting story, about what can in the end be told, believed, tolerated, condoned, accepted and by whom; a story about what it’s possible to see (and hear) and what gets distorted, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, by the fact that we often can’t move beyond mental pictures of things that “hold us captive.”
The portrait of adulthood that we get on this record finds Jackson struggling with some weighty stuff—politics, love, lust, seduction, betrayal, damnation, and perhaps above all else race—in ways heretofore unseen in his music. He gives us a darker vision of the world, one based more in realism than his characteristic theatricality. Maybe it’s theatrical realism, but nonetheless, it has a different feel from previous offerings; he seems, at times, to be at a genuine emotional breaking point, at others to be indulging in irony. Even the bright moments are surrounded by uncertainty, anger, betrayal, or ambiguity and taken as a whole, the album leaves little doubt that pain eclipses hope; this is not shiny, happy pop music. Jackson had covered some of this territory before, to be sure: the brilliant angst-ridden “Billie Jean” is the prototype. But on Dangerous it’s deeper and more sustained and its not only about deception of the fleshly kind—although that’s certainly there—but about losing oneself to desire, about the state of the world, systemic racism, loneliness, the search for redemption and community, and it’s dark. Not “paranoid” as so many critics have called it (why doesn’t he get to explore and return to themes he thought were particularly rich and provocative, as so many artists do, without being given this label?), but worried, gut-wrenched, horny, disappointed, suspicious, and knowing. In his review for Rolling Stone, Alan Light noted Jackson’s new “assertive” sexuality and called his best work, here and elsewhere, that which “reveals a man, not a man-child,” that his “finest song and dance is always sexually charged, tense, coiled,” that “he is at his most gripping when he really is dangerous.” While many may not have believed Jackson as “bad,” it’s difficult to deny that he really was perceived as dangerous by this point—that is, in fact, my argument in this book. In his 2011 monograph on Jackson—one of a scant few works devoted to a serious exploration of the music, which is pretty crazy for an artist of this caliber—Joseph Vogel comments that several critics, like Light, seemed sympathetic to the new direction taken on Dangerous; after Jackson’s death, Jon Dolan even made the perceptive comparison to Nirvana’s Nevermind, which toppled Dangerous from the number one spot on the Billboard charts and ushered in the age of grunge: “Jackson’s dread, depression and wounded-child sense of good and evil have more in common with Kurt Cobain than anyone took the time to notice.” Vogel fleshes this idea out in his essay written twenty years after the release of Dangerous:
Sonically, Dangerous shared little in common with the work of fellow pop stars like Madonna, Whitney Houston, and Mariah Carey. Its vision was much more ominous and expansive….[C]ontrary to conventional wisdom, by the end of 1991, Nirvana was as much `pop’ as Michael Jackson—and Michael Jackson was as much ‘alternative’ as Nirvana….If indeed it is considered a pop album, Dangerous redefined the parameters of pop.
Like Nevermind—or U2’s Achtung Baby from the same year—Dangerous offers a brooding, vulnerable leap into the breach, with as much, if not more, technical sophistication and a much broader stylistic palette. In fact I’d say its generic confusion is partly what makes Dangerous a difficult record to grasp. It certainly isn’t only lyrics that take Jackson down that road, but new ways of using his spectacular, agile voice, the dark, industrial grooves, a revived allegiance to the sounds of black music—past (soul and r&b) and present (hip hop)—his all-grown-up image and his dancing in the short films. Instead of producing another sleek crossover record full of hit singles, he offered up a table of gritty funk and gospel, punctuated by a dripping metal ballad, with one of the great, emotionally unbridled guitar players, Slash, in tow; no return to the crisp cheerfulness of Eddie Van Halen here. Only “Heal the World” and “Black or White” follow the time-tested Jackson crossover formula, with “Gone Too Soon” a brief nod to his love of Great American Songbook style; predictably, “Black or White” was his only number one Billboard Hot 100 single off the album—ironic given that the short film for this song, the first released, presented his strongest statement about race relations to date, was wholly misunderstood and condemned, and was the first real sign of his danger. There were fewer top ten hits on this record than he’d had since Off the Wall. Nor was his new direction blessed with the armful of Grammy’s he was by now used to carrying home. Still, it did sell over thirty million copies around the world. And musically, it did have a significant impact. For one thing, Nelson George suggests that Jackson’s new tense, clipped vocal style on Dangerous ushered in a whole new approach to r&b singing in the 1990’s and beyond, and Vogel remarks that “[Jackson’s] R&B-rap fusions set the blueprint for years to come,” a new approach, then, to making one important kind of grown-up black music.
Noise
Noise accompanies every manifestation of our [modern] life. Noise is familiar to us. Noise has the power to bring us back to life. Luigi Russolo
Bring the Noise. Public Enemy
Press play on your copy of Dangerous and you enter Michael Jackson’s decade of noisy music-making. The record begins with the sound of breaking glass, a sound heard again on a number of its tracks. His next album, HIStory, opens with what could pass for a futuristic engine misfiring as it starts up, followed by an explosion and Jackson’s muffled shriek. Invincible, likewise, with ominous low rumblings and a series of electronic bombs dropping. Although we’re swept right into the wicked groove of “Blood on the Dance Floor” without noisy preamble, the next track on that EP, “Morphine” is introduced by start-stop buzzings, bangings, and electronic tappings from which the funky, hard, industrial groove appears (it’s almost always that kind of groove that emerges from these noises—hard from hardness, noisy from noise). These records are birthed out of violent noise: breaking, exploding, screaming, reminiscent of Dark Side of the Moon or It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and maybe both were influences. The music comes through something to get to our ears, something traumatic.
Noise has been a key idea in many musics of resistance in the West. Sonically, it was the loudness of r&b and rock & roll and that noisy, persistent backbeat that caused hysteria in 1950’s white culture. Dick Hebdige wrote about punk that it disrupted the dominant culture by turning everyday objects into visual noise (safety pins as jewelry, garbage bags as clothing), to say nothing of the sound of the music: brash, unpolished, accompanied by screeching vocals. Long before any of that, Luigi Russolo and his Italian Futurist friends thought, at the turn of the twentieth century, that the noise of the modern, industrial cityscape would save music from mediocrity, conservatism and listeners from dire boredom. The politics in all these cases are different, of course, and need to be examined carefully within their specific contexts, but since there is a long and strong tradition in Western culture, especially white culture, that “music” is meant to be sound that is tamed through technical apparatuses such as form and tonality and aesthetic ideals of conventional beauty, bringing the noise means disruption of the status quo on some level and for some reason.
Probably the most politically important kind of noisy music in recent memory has been hip hop, where especially in the early days noise was a guiding principle, a means through which, as Robert Walser notes, “to express dissent and critique, and to articulate the identity of a community that is defined as, or that defines itself as, noise.” In her pathbreaking book on rap music—called, significantly, Black Noise—Tricia Rose talks about the politics of hip hop’s noisy and disruptive soundscape, quoting a middle-aged white male colleague: “they ride down the street at 2 a.m. with it blasting from the car speakers and wake up my wife and kids. What’s the point of that?” The point, sir, is to unsettle the rhythms of your normative, privileged life, to wake you up (literally) to the condition of those less privileged. This comment reminds Rose of a time when “slaves were prohibited from playing African drums because, as a vehicle for coded communication, they inspired fear in slaveowners.” In this context, records like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation, or N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton represent a kind of peak in the principle of using noise as a signifier for dissent and critique, creating some of the fattest, loudest beats, layers upon layers of samples including “non-musical” sounds like speaking, sirens and machine gun fire, white noise hiss, and dissonant interjections on the backbeat, “in search of,” Robert Walser writes, the “conflicted urban soundscape, where sirens and drills punctuate the polytextured layers of modernity.”
Jackson loved to experiment with sound and had always done so. Still, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his records get noisier than they ever had been in the wake of hip hop’s rise as both the most significant musical development of the time and as politically-important to the black American community. I’d go as far as to say that the incorporation of noise is as big a part of his embrace of this music as the sampling, scratching, beatboxing and guest MC’s we first hear on Dangerous. Well, we can hardly say that beatboxing makes its first appearance on this record: Jackson had been doing it for years before that, using it as a means through which to lay down initial grooves for many of his songs—listen to the demo for “Beat It” released on the This is It soundtrack. But with his more profound embrace of hip hop’s noisy soundscape, he clearly also incorporated the resistive politics of that music, in his own way, with his own message. He did not “[fall] out of step with the world of pop music,” as some critics assume he did; he adapted the sonic and political landscape of contemporary urban music in a way that allowed him to stay true to who he was as an artist—a technically-polished singer-songwriter-dancer, who was not a rebellious teenager, but a man in his early 30’s. He had a generation on his hip hop and alt rock contemporaries, whose more blunt and angry expressions of dissatisfaction with the world were not only youthful, but born out of a profoundly different approach to music-making, a different kind of masculinity, and a different worldview. Willa Stillwater makes an important point about what seems like Jackson’s late and perhaps somewhat tentative embrace of hip hop in her book M Poetica: by the time the radical politics of this music began breaking into the mainstream, Michael Jackson was the mainstream; his decision not to incorporate hip hop into his music “during its most crucial period of growth,” was a way of supporting the movement by refusing to co-opt it, an appropriation by “the establishment” that would have served to undermine it. In the lyrics to “Jam” Jackson references the baby boom, of which he is a part, coming of age and “working it out.” In effect, he suggests that his generation bears responsibility for the state of the world and for posing solutions. Perhaps he felt that it was time to step up.
Jackson’s music is all about precision, skill, polish, subtlety, marks of someone who’d been at it for a while, someone whose aesthetic was, in a way, modernist in its attention to structural detail and unity. Nelson George has commented that “Jackson is one of the few artists who actually straddles the soul and post-soul worlds. While his concepts of showmanship date back to the chitlin‘ circuit, Jackson is brilliant at adapting new styles…to his needs. Straddling requires remarkable balance and the ability to adjust.” The politics expressed on Dangerous are not as direct as those in hip hop; you have to dig deep for some of them. Toying with styles, conventions, with traditions of all kind, which he had absolutely mastered by the time of Dangerous, was often precisely where the source of his politics lay.
http://susanfast.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/mj-in-memoriam-five-years/comment-page-1/
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