When MTV was launched, it was a "whites only" club. Rick James famously protested the rules while other black artists knew better than to challenge the status quo, like Lebron James who knows better than to point out NBA games are fixed.
In time there may have been FCC hearings, rules written, new commissions formed, taxes raised, race identification boards convened, and so on, to solve the problem.
Michael Jackson is different. He wrote some songs that proved to be perennial bestsellers, produced by Seattle's Quincy Jones. Then Michael produced videos. Ones MTV could not ignore. No hearings, no rules, no taxes, just raw talent crushing evil. That is the free market in action.
Marshall McLuhan wrote:
“The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely “well-adjusted,” he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power, is manifest in the famous story , “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” “Well-adjusted” courtiers, having vested interests, saw the emperor as beautifully appointed. The “antisocial” brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the emperor “ain’t got nothin’ on” The new environment was clearly visible to him.”
Much is made of Mr. Jackson's idiosynchrosies. There is the question of his affection for children, especially boys. All artists who show affection for children get accused of child molestation eventually. Captain Kangaroo, Lewis Carroll, Cardinal Bernadin, the list goes on. Usually the accusations start with people who themselves are child molesters, but it is human nature for people to believe charges so vile. There is a difference between child-like and childish. Michael Jackson had a child-like innocence, and his detractors are childish.
Then there is Mr. Jackson's adventures in cosmetology. While I think his efforts lamentable, I always thought of a book that came out when Michael and I were youths, Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, in which a man had a dermatologist turn his skin dark enough to pass for black. The white man then experienced life in USA as a black, and wrote about it. The book was a big deal at the time.
Was Michael Jackson doing the reverse? Was he experimenting with "white like me?" I have none of Michael Jackson's money or talent, but even i was willing to experiment on myself with a risky new orthodontist technique for straightening teeth, at a super premium price.
Of course, if he was doing any such thing, he would have communicated this in his art. I'll leave it to others to analyze his music, but I think I caught something in his dance. Michael was a student of all of the greats, and embraced and extended the best. Even the moonwalk was borrowed, although Jackson will own it forever. There is one gesture in his dance that has no precedence in dance: when Michael grabs, ahem, himself. The gesture is universally insulting. But there you have it, smack dab in the middle of his act, Michael grabs himself.
Someone once joked only in America can a poor black boy grow up to be a rich white man. Maybe Michael Jackson did report back what it is to be White Like Me in America, up front, out in public, for the whole world to see.
May God grant Michael Jackson eternal peace.
