Shelby Adair Response #2

Michael Jackson “Monster Metaphors” in SID by Christine Gledhill

By Shelby Adair

Michael Jackson’s ability to step across racial and sexual boundaries in both his music and iconography is partially what has made him such a successful pop artist. The rumors and talk about his personal life, behavior, sexual orientation, and change of appearances is as popular as his music to the point that he is “more like a movie-star than a modern rhythm and blues artist” (Gledhill 314). There are three aspects that made Michael’s career so appealing: his voice, his dancing, and his image.

Since he began his career with the Jackson 5 on the Tamla Motown label, Michael’s vocal performance was rooted in the “Afro-American tradition of ‘soul’” in his pop music, characterized by “breathy gasps, squeaks, sensual sighs and other wordless sounds” which trademarked his musical style (300). His dancing style has also been part of his stardom and was compared to James Brown and Jackie Wilson even as a child. His image also attracted huge amount of attention of both black and white youth. The most notable elements of Jackson’s image are the physical changes that appeared over time, particularly the lightening of his skin tone and changes to the ‘African’ qualities in his face. When Thriller was released, his nose was less rounded and his lips were less pronounced and his large ‘afro’ hair was now in permed curls (301)—rumored that he was adopting a more white physical appearance. In any sense, his racial ambiguity caused by his new image most likely allowed him to breakthrough the unspoken MTV policy of the exclusion of black artists with his Thriller music video, the first video to cross the racial boundary (302).

In the music video, Michael starts out as an innocent ‘boy-next-door’ on a date with his girlfriend. Then he transforms into a werewolf and chases after the girl, who is now the victim of a traditional horror genre film and Michael is the monster. Gledhill claims that this is related to sexuality and that the monster represents the male sexuality as “naturally bestial, predatory, aggressive, violent” (310). Then when he transforms into a zombie, he is then asexual or even anti-sexual, which then plays with the viewer’s preconceived notions of Michael’s image off-screen and his own sexual vagueness (312). Does Michael have a sexual beast underneath his sweet exterior, or is he actually not interested in sex at all?

He is constantly challenging black African American male stereotypes in his songs and the way he rebels against standards of masculinity and sexual identity. What is most interesting about Michael’s image is the way he does this in the Afro-American tradition of popular music, and since he is a man, but be “used in context black men and black male sexuality.” By changing his physical appearances, seen in real life and the changing characters in the Thriller video, allowed Michael to present a sexual and racial ambiguity to the audience; this allowed him to step outside the existing range of “types” of black men.