Michael Jackson's Dangerous (33 13) by Susan Fast

Author:Susan Fast [Fast, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

Utopian performatives can be gleaned in, for example, three steps of a moonwalk (wasn’t that moment at the Motown 25 celebration utopian?), made possible through Jackson’s incomparable skill as a performer, his love of the fantastic, of larger-than-life spectacle, as well as his refusal ever to step out of character, on or off stage, so that the utopian impulse we might feel during his performances is carried into his, and by extension our, everyday lives. Jackson was interested in creating utopian performatives through astonishment, which Ernst Bloch considered “an important philosophical mode of contemplation … . Astonishment helps one surpass the limitations of an alienating present-ness and allows one to see a different time and place.”10 I’ve experienced such astonishment many, many times while listening to and watching Michael Jackson, both on and off stage, from the jaw-dropping way every nuance of the ballad “Human Nature” was channeled through his dancing body in live performance, to the mind-blowing precision and complexity of the group dancing in live performances of “Dangerous.” Steven Shaviro captures the power and beauty of Jackson’s utopian performatives (what he calls, after Bloch and Frederic Jameson the “utopian dimension”), by calling attention to “the modulations of Michael’s voice, the sinuous movements of his dancing, the way that his musical arrangements took disco and r&b and gave them both a smoothness and a slightly alien sheen … allowed to blossom into a new aestheticized state in which pop crassness had itself become a rare, almost Wildean, delicacy.11

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I’m making the assumption that you’re listening to Dangerous from start to finish as you read, a listening practice that’s become more or less obsolete, but one that was not, yet, when the album was released. So when you’ve come through the first six songs, battered and bruised (in a good way) by the force of those grooves, that noise, the angst, suspiciousness, intense sexual energy of Jackson’s voice, and the worldly complications espoused in the lyrics, there are two likely responses to the opening keyboard strains of “Heal the World:” relief or disbelief. Juxtaposed with what has come before it—a relatively unified, black, sound world that’s been sustained now for better than half an hour of listening—the saccharine strains of “Heal the World” seem out of place, if not completely out of character. Jackson obviously wanted extreme contrast, he wanted to shift abruptly into another world. Of course he was always capable of moving among musical genres, or blending them together—his crossover success was dependent upon such skillful manipulations. But such an abrupt turn to a mainstream (white) ballad form with vastly different production values was unheard of on his previous albums. Moreover, on his earlier records the ballads are conventional love songs—somehow it’s less corny to sing sweetly about love than it is about world peace—and his most self-reflexive song about changing himself as a means through which to change the world was generically tied to gospel (“Man in the Mirror”): no credibility gap there. But how do you

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