Think of what it took to be Michael Jackson, pop star chameleon forever mutating in the spotlight: the outrageous level of talent, the unbearable amount of scrutiny, to say nothing of the constant revising around race and gender.
"This prosthetic idea of the human," is how Susan Fast describes it in Michael Jackson's Dangerous, her new book about the 1991 album that announced Jackson's break from his pop mega-idol past into a more polyvalent present.
Dangerous is, for many, the beginning of the end for Jackson, even though it sold many millions of copies and generated several hits. It followed Thriller and Bad, two of the most important and widely loved albums in pop history.
But Fast, a professor in the English and cultural studies department at McMaster University in Ontario, thinks Dangerous is important, too, and sets out to rehabilitate it both as an album and as a site of Jackson's engagement with cultural politics.
That task can't be done without touching on his body, which Fast calls "a work in progress, fully open to and trusting in limitless experimentation." For someone at the centre of pop culture, Jackson was far ahead of his time in terms of how he negotiated and altered his identity on the fly - a subverter in the pop spotlight.
Virtually all of his creative moments were moments of transition, and Fast makes a strong argument that Dangerous was among his most disruptive. In this book, the 100th entry in Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series, each one devoted to a single album, Fast employs close readings of lyrics, musical production choices and video presentations to underscore little discussed aspects of Jackson's creative output.
Fast contends that, at around this time, lurid media interest in Jackson's perceived oddity began to eclipse formal appreciation of his work. So she breaks Dangerous into thematically rich sections: Jackson breaking with his old self, then switching to familiar modes to make bold political statements and then coming full circle.
She's also interested in the normative aspects of Jackson's masculinity, an area of his identity that she says is often outright ignored, noting that Jackson's "sexualized performances" were, for many, "too stylized to be believed." But talking about the video for In the Closet, in which he cavorts - somewhat awkwardly - with the model Naomi Campbell, Fast notes: "It seems, perhaps too oddly for some to contemplate, that he knows his way around a woman. Failure? I don't think so. Threatening? Probably."
Fast's book has an unwitting partner in The Michael Jacksons, a photo and essay collection by Lorena Turner devoted to those who make impersonating Jackson their job.
This is an eclectic, centerless group - Turner found her subjects on the street and through online solicitations - leading perhaps unavoidably to imprecise ethnography. With someone as fluid as Jackson, the avenues for interpretation are wide open. Turner's subjects are men and women, black and white and beyond; heavily made up or merely playing dress-up, capable dance mimics or those who prefer just to whisper sweetly.
The photos are striking. No two Jacksons look quite the same. Many are in thrift-store finery. Some use makeup to lighten their skin, some to accentuate or de-emphasise certain features.
This is a photo book that should be a movie, or at minimum a YouTube series. It would have been especially revealing to pair each of the photos with interview excerpts or detailed narratives. Turner did extensive interviews with her subjects, but apart from a few case studies at the end of the book, she does not include them, hampered perhaps by the varying degrees of self-awareness among her study group.
She notes that most of the subjects choose the lighter-skinned Jackson of the late 1980s and early 1990s as their visual guide, but doesn't explore why. For most of these performers, she writes, Jackson's "skin colour does not suggest a failed allegiance to blackness, as it did for many people of earlier generations, and his altered features do not signal self-hatred. In fact, many performers celebrate those transformations in their representations of Michael. They are not race, or gender-obsessed; their Michael Jackson is neither black nor white, male nor female, but a hybrid, uniracial person like themselves."
©2014 The New York Times
