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Kobena Mercer’s article tracks the metamorphosis of Michael Jackson from being an innocent ‘teeny bopper’ to the sexually ambiguous, almost androgynous image seen in his Thriller music video. Michael Jackson is introduced to the world in an Afro-American central way through the Jackson 5. Their songs like ‘ABC’ evoked a sense of black pride and reassured the younger generations to embrace their color. But as Jackson started to reinvent himself, his look followed a similar suit. 

Jackson adopted an androgynous look, emphasized through plastic surgeries to give himself a sharper nose and tighter lips – features often accredited to Europeans. While Jackson had not yet “crossed over from black to white” (308), his new look allowed Thriller to breach the boundary of race, popularizing black music in white markets. This was done by playing with the imagery and style that was common in the marketing of pop and introducing racial diversity in the video. 

 

Miley Cyrus is yet another pop star who has gone the opposite way by appropriating black conventions. Just as Jackson altered the primarily white pop world by drawing on his race, Cyrus draws from popular dance moves that correlate with black culture. Most obviously her twerking performance with Robin Thicke during the 2013 VMA’s. She drew from a popularized form of black culture that was already familiarized by white society in order to re-launch her career and reconstruct her image from a Disney Star to how she is today. Similar to Jackson who reinvented his Jackson 5 image to being racially and sexually ambiguous in his music video. 

Additionally, Thriller comments on Jackson’s masculinity. The usage of a different monster imagery pulled on horror conventions which “inscribe a fascination with sexuality, with gender identity codified in terms that revolve around the symbolic presence of the monster” (310). So as Jackson metamorphoses into a werewolf, which holds a representation of bestial and predatory. While it implies a sense of masculinity, it does this through the sense of his innate sexuality. But his zombie transformation questions why kind of sexuality he possess as it is purposefully vague. As Jackson has done throughout his music video, “stars have used androgyny and sexual ambiguity as part of their ‘style’ in ways which question prevailing definitions of male sexuality and sexual identity”, which is used through the embodiment of monsters (314).