Part 10 (1/2)

I'd like to set the record straight right now I have never had my cheeks altered or my eyes altered I have not had my lips thinned, nor have I had deres are ridiculous If they were true, I would say so, but they aren't I have had my nose altered twice and I recently added a cleft to my chin, but that is it Period I don't care what anyone else says-it's e that disturbs many people, and earlier in the week one person who has been observing Jackson offered an explanation: ”I think people find it upsetting, because they know they're looking at racis at a tacit admission that to make it in a white world, you have to be white It's an indictment It's a face that says, 'You made me this way I can't be really black if I want to be really famous' And people don't want to look at that face, because they don't want to look at their own racism”

This may well be true, but if so, is that really what is on theat Jackson,at somebody who represents dark truths, or somebody who eood or siest star of all stars? Maybe they are looking at all these things At one point in the evening, the dinner's host, Ossie Davis, stares at Jackson for a longand resonant as scripture ”God bless the child,” he says, ”that's got his own”

ONE LAST NEW YORK tale remains to be told

It is in the hectic moments after the Grammy Awards show is over, and the blocks around Radio City Music Hall are jammed with celebrity watchers On the street behind the hall, a crowd of a couple hundred mostly black fans stand on the other side of a police barricade, hoping for a gliure darts out the backstage door and into a long white liins to inch its way down Fifty-first Street A s to peer into its darkened s ”Hey,” says somebody, ”I think that's Michael Jackson in that car” Iin to call out to the car, ”Hey, MikeyMikey, is that you? Come out and talk to us, Mikey!”

After a few moments, the top of the limousine rolls back, and up pops Michael Jackson The people in the crowd break into a wild cheer and start to surge forward, holding out their hands toward the star, but some policemen rush in and keep them away from the car On the liinstoward him Jackson turns and smiles at the fan and holds out his hand The fan, who is only a few feet away, reaches out to Jackson, but before the two can touch, the car speeds up Jackson stands for aat the face of the disappointed fan, then sely forlorn smile, waves, and drops back into the limousine

In one, and Michael Jackson is carried back to the inviolable world in which he lives

WE ALL KNOW what happened next Michael Jackson's world didn't stay inviolable In 1993, he began the year by playing at a preinaugural gala for President Clinton, and a thy TV interview to Oprah Winfrey, in which he tried to dispel the ru of his skin (the latter, he said, was the result of a skin disease, vitiligo) Then in August, Jackson was hit with public charges that he had sexually abused an underage boy The police raided Jackson's house, looking for evidence; his sister LaToya clai boys in his room; Jackson was forced to cancel a ide tour that was under way; and Pepsi ended its long relationshi+p with the singer In early 1994, lawyers for both Jackson and the boy's father announced that the matter had been settled out of court for an undisclosed suation was eventually dropped, and Jackson steadfastly maintained his innocence, despite the settlees were true or not, Michael Jackson had fallen, froht of the ruan to take on an even deeper creepiness for many people Michael went on to hter To some people, it see prize for Michael to claim for his own, in htThen, in 1997, Jackson had his own child; the event became the unfortunate subjectThere was also speculation that Jackson had fathered a child of his own largely to offset his own strange ie

For my part, I don't know really what to say any Michael Jackson has been the hardest part of asseht of leaving hiuess I should own up to what I once thought of him-that Michael Jackson was an artist of immense talents and possibilities-and I should also own up to what I think of hiedy

I'e, unkind, and horribly coerced childhood, and later, when he would finally win his drea that dreas, perhaps Michael Jackson had long been living in a no-win di to learn fro less than a demiGod He allowed statues to be built of himself, and he insisted that his had been the ain make music that is pleasurable to hear, but I don't think it can ever really ain He lives in-as critic Dave Marsh once pointed out-a trap, and while , no doubt so the best proofs I've seen in my lifetime of William Carlos Williao crazy,” and rock & roll's America has had few purer products than Michael Jackson

Still, I'll never forget that night back in March 1983, when onstage in Pasadena, California, at the Motown anniversary show, Michael Jackson gave his first public perforraceful, electrifying version of ”Billie Jean” Dancing, spinning, sending out ilares at the overco andhis own blend ofquite like it-ain-even if so ht was simply Michael Jackson's moonwalk to his own ruin

upstarts: over & under the wall, & into the territory's center

SKIRMISH ONE: DISCO, POP'S INTERNAL WAR

At the outset of the 1970s, rock & roll still prided itself on its aspirations to revolution Frolitter rock, it was music that not only articulated and vented the frustrations of cultural outsiders, but that also won those upstarts a station and voice that they enuine revolution took place within the bounds of pop culture-and rock & roll hated it The upheaval was called ”disco,” and it subverted not just rock's familiar notions of fun and for It was a music that, without rhetoric or stridor, seized and transfored star systems, and it empowered cultural outlanders that rock & roll had snubbed or siest coest pop le- beat proved to be the h of the last twenty years or so In short, disco-the pop revolution that was quickly overthrown by an ungrateful pop world-figured out a way to outlast its own denoble death

So how did this cultural rupture happen? How did disobcome both one of the most popular and reviled mileposts in pop music's history?

To answer these questions, one has to look at the confluence ofthat produced the disco explosion Musically, disco was a logical outgrowth of how soul music had developed in the 1960s, and how it had adapted in order to survive in the early 1970s From the terse protofunk of James Brown and the spare but accentuated dynamics of the Stax-Volt sound, disco derived its obsession with a si beat; and from the pop savvy of Motown, as well as from the suave romanticism of such Philadelphia-based producers and writers as Thom Bell (who had defined the Spinners' sound) and the team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff (orked with the O'Jays, the Intruders, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and Teddy Pendergrass, aant, swooning, sexy surfaces that were their own irrefutable rewards But disco was more than music as sound, or sound as style or artifice It also aimed to reaffirm one of music's most time-worn purposes: na together an audience that shared a certain social perspective and that foundIn this sense, disco had roots in traditions as urbane as Big Band and Swing music; as rowdy as blues-style juke joints and country-western honky-tonks; and as sexually irrepressible as early rock & roll and its cleaned-up public exposition, ”Ah, disco extended (in fact, revived) some of the most joyful ambitions of 1960s pop In the early 1960s-before Motown or the Beatles-the ely perceived pop music as little more than a medium of transient dance styles, like the Twist, Mashed Potato, and Hully Gully, that lived out their heady but brief vogues in crowded and intoxicating public venues, such as New York's Peppere, and numerous other discotheques scattered across America and Europe When the 1960s exploded with the British Invasion and soul, it beca-though clearly, dancing was now enerational identity and power, than ever before But as rock becaradually abdicated the dance floor Though it isn't often acknowledged, the San Francisco hippie coether in the city's ballrooly to the colorful psychedelia that was being invented by such community bands as the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead; indeed, dancing, even s or sex, was how that scene first publicly realized its ideals of communal ecstasy But within a season or two, the scene's folloere dancing a lot less Instead, they were now paying serious attention to the new music, to its lyrical pronouncements and aural constructions, and as often as not, they did so fro you listened to, and for whatever the nules, Pink Floyd, the Allman Brothers, or even early David Bowie, there was little about theirwas soer-it was not so that an audience did The star was eed to pay, to watch and listen, to revere

Still, there were audiences for who was a vital social bond and an essential sensual act, though they were largely audiences that had been shut out by rock & roll's developing styles and pretensions Certainly, for the early 1970s black audience-which had enjoyed so of an alliance with the rock er offered much embrace, or much satisfaction For the various Hispanic audiences, and for numerous other ethnic minorities, the reality was even more exclusionary: Pop accoue or diluted sense, as in the pyrotechnic Latin rock of Santana In addition, there was one other large audience that had been shut out of rock's concerns, and that was the gay underground-an audience for who proved an important assertion of identity and coradually (and perhaps a bit unwittingly) began to for each other'sup around the East Coast and Europe, and as the DJs at these clubs began searching out some of the hippest dance-oriented black, Hispanic, and European pop to play for these audiences As the trend grew, the DJs refined their style of progra back and forth between two turntables, the DJs ais in such a s were consistent, each track blending into the following track,the dancers Like the music of the 1960s, disco was supposed to be a celebration of community and ecstasy-only this ti these ideals were the saotten or expatriated by the established rock world

THIS EMERGING DANCE movement turned out to be one of the most pivotal and radical developments in 1970s rock In fact, it upended pop's common values and its known hierarchy Whereas, for the vast majority of the post-Beatles audience, it was the artists and their statements that constituted rock's reed on some new values What mattered in disco's ethos wasn't the apotheosis of the artist, but the experience and involvement of the audience itself Consequently, disco elected a new system of pop heroes On the ro out this new egalitarianism on the dance floor On the practical side, the heroes were the people who kne to shape and manipulate sound in order to construct moods and ers ere the real auteurs of disco style and ers and instrumentalists-were an essential backdrop, but they weren't the focus of the action; disco fans didn't go to disco shows to watch disco stars Indeed, what disco declared was that our pop stars weren't our representatives, but that we could (and should) be the stars in our own scenarios of pleasure and empowerment To some pop fans and critics, this assertion-namely, that ”everybody is a star”-see disco audience, it a less than a vision of empowerment: It said that whatever the reality of your existence, you could refuse to be defined by o out in public, and act out your worthiness, as if you were entitled to all the acts and trappings of luxury that were flaunted by the dominant culture In other words, you could appropriate those trappings In other other words, strike a pose; there's nothing to it

In time, disco's obsessions with dressiness would becoan enforcing dress codes that sie that the original disco audience had meant to usurp, rather than simply emulate But in the early 1970s, disco's ”everybody is a star” : It had the effect of eays, blacks, and ethnics that had, for too long, been disdained or displaced by a rock world that had beco coalition of outsiders-pop's equivalent of a silent est audience in pop's history, though in a thoroughly unprecedented way In fact, disobcame a mass revolution at pretty round phenomenon Because disco was a music played in clubs, a music without clearly identifiable central stars, a nored at first, its massive popularity was almost invisible Indeed, for a year or two, the disco world was a network of clubs, dancers, and music makers that didn't so much enter the pop mainstream as simply form an equally viable alternative to thathits without benefit of radio orto, the disco world had seized and exercised its oer by the most effective means possible-by alvanic effect on the business and culture of popular enuine mainstream assimilation was inevitable, and that the music itself would be co-opted and marketed as a formula Indeed, by 1974, disco had been codified The beat ruled-it was a tightly unifor 4/4 pulse, without patience for rhythid li aant, coy, and tuneful, as in Van McCoy's ”The Hustle”; it could be taut and sweetly funky, as in shi+rley and Company's ”Shame, Shame, Shame”; it could be sexy and evocative, as in the Hues Corporation's ”Rock the Boat” and George McCrae's ”Rock Your Baby”; it could be propulsive and soulful, as in Average White Band's ”Pick Up the Pieces” The following year, disco even launched its first certified star: a foran as asmic ”Love to Love You Baby”), and would shortly beco artist

In the ination in an incendiaryDonna Summer, Labelle, KC and the Sunshi+ne Band, Wild Cherry, and Silver Convention-had already scored Top 10 disco hits But the genre's biggest ht Fever-a filave a syht life provided a transcendent identity for certain East Coast working-class ethnic youths More significant than the fil theothers, it rapidly sold over 25record in pop history at that time

Disco's triunaled the movement's end Actually, disco had been taken out of the hands of both its creators and its audience Saturday Night Fever's (and disco's) biggest stars were the Bee Gees-a group of British pop stars who had created a glossy adaptation of the for careers In addition, in the rush to exploit disco's hit abilities, several other established pop stars-including the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Elton John, the Eagles, and Rod Stewart-had also started acco their music to the disco style and its audience Suddenly, disco's pulse was omnipresent: It dominated file and club where recordedaudience It wasn't just that theall known -from the hits of the Beatles to the dark beauty of Beethoven-beca 4/4 foran to rubway

As disobcame the pop norm, a counterreaction set in-in swift and fierce ter to sport T-shi+rts emblazoned with hostile decrees-”Disco Sucks” and ”Death to Disco” And then, in July 1979, a hard rock radio DJ froame at Comiskey Park into an anti-disco rally As he incited the audience to chant ”Disco sucks,” the DJ piled disco LPs into a wooden crate in center field-and exploded the crate It was a supree was plain: The mainstream pop audience wasn't about to allow a coalition of blacks and gays to usurp rock's primacy Indeed, it seemed hardly coincidental that, at a tian as president, and enter its e period of cultural denial, that disco's drea audience would invite rabid antipathy Instead of opening up the pop world to a new consensus, disco hada field of diverse, often onistic factions

SO DISCO WAS ended Even as the Village People-a gay goof that grew tiring quickly-beca band in America, the pop industry and media were already in retreat from disco By 1980, disco was clearly a dirty word Record sales pluht, and numerous artists, producers, and executives-even entire record labels and radio stations-fell into an irreclaimable oblivion Disco had been overthrown, in part by its own excesses, and in part by a rising ugly racist and anti-gay sensibility

But in eniously-or at the very least, it has had a considerable legacy In fact, in the 1980s, its rhythent audiences: the neave croho-from the Tom Togest co disco's dance structures to their own conceits; also, hip-hop and rap uistic and textural innovation on disco's foursquare rhythest stars-including Michael Jackson, Prince, and Madonna-would have been unthinkable without the breakthroughs that disco made in both style and audience appeal It's also true, of course, that disco didn't necessarily h, discoas one of , that truth is more dominant in the 1990s, in hip-hop, rave, and techno, than it was in the 1970s, at disco's height Disco also reasserted another vital truth: that dancing could be an act of affirmation-that it could unite people, could redees, and could even eotten In the end, the question isn't why disco enjoyed such phenomenal success The real question is, why didn't more of 1970s rock & roll stand for those same worthy values?

SKIRMISH TWO: ROCK & ROLL'S POLITICS

Does dedication to rock & roll entail any political coes of the Los Angeles Herald Exaan's attesteen's hard-bitten Americanism as a round-about endorsement of the president's addled social policies (see this book's earlier chapter) At the ti that to esteesteen and yet also support the reelection of President Reagan was (to my mind then and my mind now) to embrace a likely contradiction in ideals-that, in effect, the two interests sisteen, I believe, an's action, he told a Philadelphia audience: ”It's a long walk froovernment that's supposed to represent all the people to where we are today”) Several readers agreed with ly, professed strong fondness for both the singer and the president-did not In fact, some bristled at the idea that a love for rock & roll was tanta this matter up because so about my stand But I also reinvoke it because, at the tian-Walter Mondale presidential election) ere about to select a president, and to be honest, I've never cast a vote for that office without soht ly Just as there are people who believe that to follow certain religious convictions necessitates voting or acting in a specific political manner, I believe that to value rock's contribution to popular culture requires (or eventually produces) given sociopolitical creeds, including a commiteneral But if, as soer speaks for the sociopolitical disposition of American youth-or worse, if the political disposition it speaks for is as ungenerous as post 1930s' Republicanis from 1940 to the year 2000, and probably beyond)-then maybe the rock movement has finally turned feckless and e a humiliation of rock's traditional intractability? Has the musical tradition of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Bob Dylan, Sly Stone, and Marvin Gaye finally grown to see conservative endorse the punk revolt of the late 1970s, coreat ”new ned to overthrow the staid, cautious, apolitical ripped the pop scene in the aftermath of the frenetic 1960s?

Well, yes and no True, the sex Pistols, the Clash, and Graham Parker carved a hard line across the face of rock complacency, except their distinctly British brand of sociopolitical passion see to the American rock sensibility of the late 1970s and early 1980s-that is, until US record coly refined surfaces, while disregarding its political foundations Whatever true punk revolution there was, by the mid-1980s it would merely look cute, poppy, and clearlyRepublicans can (and do) e the s, or consequences

While much of the best mid-1980s music (which in the case of such British bands as Eurythmics, Culture Club, and others mixed black rhythmic forms within a sleek pop outline) still advanced a liberal, pointedly anti-racist point of view in the context of British society, in Ainally interpreted by a force like MTV as fun-nificance (of course, this was back in that cable network's pre-”Rock the Vote” period; ”Rock the Vote” has turned out to be a smart and effective force, not to mention a nice redemption of the station's early political stupefaction) To be sure, many 1980s bands-from Husker Du and the Minutemen to Rank and File and Lone Justice-fashi+oned a new and virile brand of politically informed rock, but until 1984, radio and MTV pretty ed) such adventurous sounds and outlooks In fact, with rare exceptions-steen's Nebraska and Born in the USA, and the odd funk or country single-precious little overtly social-minded American rock music won public favor in the early 1980s

Of course, soht in rock and soulout a political stand-that, by exa achievements of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and Gene Vincent was to enerational diversion, not cultural insurrection Even so, the choice had far-reaching political consequences: Rock & roll, remember, was veheer music” Presley, and others like hiht a previously much feared and despised audience and sensibility into A predilections, and because of his actions, that ”outsider” style (and its rated to an unprecedented extreme This developnificant advance of the civil rights cause

By the mid-1960s, rock & roll was clearly politicized-but then so was everything else The racial disquiet of the 1950s had given way to an ile, while an ee part by the explosive sensibility of the Beatles) was quickly being turned to fodder for the self-realizing horror of US involvement in Vietnam Initially, it was such left-derived folk activists as Peter, Paul, & Mary; Joan Baez; and Bob Dylan who recognized not ht have on their predoh not yet rock-oriented) audience, but also understood the ht have on social problems When Dylan crossed over to a pop context (a move initially interpreted by the folk crowd as a sellout), he si rock & roll as a -American mainstream entertainment

More remarkable was the extent to which all this political music affected the business of music While a company like MGM (under the direction of Republican hopeful Mike Curb) purged its roster of incendiary thinkers (like the Velvet Underground), other corporate structures (including CBS, Warner Bros, Atco/Atlantic, Decca/MCA and even the famously conservative RCA-the latter the hoely supported the activisood ideals (For exao's first album: ”With this albuies to the people of the revolutionAnd the revolution in all its forms” Was this simple-minded sedition or simply sound commercialism?) Then, in the late 1970s, after the furor of Vietnaate had started to die down and when the battle over civil rights seeh only momentary) stability, and after acts from such record companies as Elektra/Asyluns of Jerry Brown and Ji for rock-two upheavals occurred that dramatically altered the temper of American rock The first was the punk revolt, a an in the United States as an aesthetic insurrection yet was adopted and expanded in Britain (by such acts as the sex Pistols and Clash) as fierce, radical-doaret Thatcher-led mood Consequently, the US radio and record industries eschewed punk, looking on its gri

The other disturbance was more decisive The bottorandiose record sales in half andsimple survival seem more necessary than comfortable political ideals In short, financial recovery became the first priority of the uls (not to an, with his pro financial bounty to the corporate sector It wasn't Reagan (of course) who saved the music industry's ass Rather, it was that cleaned-up descendant of punk alluded to earlier-a largely dance-inforland's most radical cultural export of the mid-1980s became one of America's favorite urban trends Who said, ”This ain't no party/This ain't no disco”?

Where does this leave us? Has rock & roll come full circle, so that it is once ely without political ? Or rather, in 1984, did A to the right-to jingoisressive racial prejudices? Did the rock ”vote”-the vote of those who see rock & roll as soo, in 1984, to Ronald Reagan, a overnor, once bandied the notion of engaging in a ”blood bath” with A dissidents?

I would like to think not-I'd like to think that rock still speaks to our best ence and compassion-but that may not be realistic Rather, itfor ical unaniions and as disparate as the differences between the United States and the United Kingdonize that rightist rockers enius, just as Frank Sinatra, Merle Haggard, Ray Charles, or even Neil Young made the misfortune of their politics seem secondary to the depth of their art Maybe in the years ahead ill stop thinking of rock as a folk-art forarding it as so opulence After all, given rock & roll as a spawn of American myth and wide-eyed ambition, unkind possibilities were never far beneath the music's surface

But there is another, better possibility, which has nothing to do with right or left, party or rhetoric: Na questionus eit has on our passions and dreams, and on our view of the world around us After all, music has the ability to address our hearts personally-to reach me at the same moment it reaches you, no matter our political bonds or differences, despite the caprices of our govern leaders If that stays true-if rock & roll continues to reach our hearts, and in doing so bids us to find purpose in its raw exhilaration-it will remain an inducement to freedom, and that is the best one could ever ask of any A