I Know I Am Someone: Michael Jackson, Thriller, and American Identity by Sara Tenenbaum B.A. in American Studies, May 2006, Brandeis University A Thesis submitted to The Faculty of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the degree requirements for the degree of Master of Arts May 15, 2011 Thesis Directed by James A. Miller Professor of English and American Studies © Copyright 2011 by Sara Tenenbaum All rights reserved ii Abstract of Thesis "I Know I Am Someone: Michael Jackson, Thriller, and American Identity" This thesis addresses the cultural phenomenon surrounding Michael Jackson's 1982 album Thriller and uses it as a lens through which to view and analyze the development of a distinct American, primarily youth, identity in 1983 and 1984. It is structured using a three-prong approach that first analyzes the sonic work of the music of Thriller, second explores the characteristics of Michaelmania and the youth identity being constructed within the Michael Jackson pop explosion, and third analyzes the backlash from both the white and African American communities against Jackson in that time to illuminate his subversion and danger to the status quo. I argue that Jackson's act of profound crossover during the Thriller era triggered within the American youth an equally profound act of identity formation that transcended racial stratification in America's past and created a foundational part of our contemporary identity that moves slightly beyond America's troubled racial history. Using both the voices of his fans and his critics to tease out the work his person and his music did in the early 1980's, I advocate we keep Jackson and his work foregrounded in our study of popular culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as his pop explosion fundamentally and permanently effected how Americans understand ourselves and our relations with each other. iii Table of Contents Abstract of Thesis iii Introduction: You Gotta Be Startin' Something 1 Chapter One: Help Me Sing It - The Music of Thriller 8 Chapter Two: This One's for the Girls in the Back – Michaelmania 38 Chapter Three: Sissified Man-Children and Reconstructed Noses – The Backlash 79 Conclusion: Yes I Believe in Me, So You Believe in You 100 Bibliography 107 iv You Got To Be Startin' Something On February 27, 1980, Michael Jackson sat at home watching the Grammy Awards on television. He watched the flickering screen as a parade of white artists and white presenters gave awards and praise to each other, only registering mild pleasure when "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" won for Best R&B Vocal Performance – Male. He recalled in his 1987 autobiography, "Although Off The Wall had been one of the most popular records of the year, it received only one nomination... I remember where I was when I got the news. I felt ignored by my peers and it hurt. People told me later that it surprised the industry too."1 As he watched himself win that night, anger and hurt coalesced into determination. "I said to myself, 'Wait until next time' – they won't be able to ignore the next album," he recalled. There's no doubt the perceived brush-off by his industry peers lit a fire under him, but we can also only imagine the frustration he felt after his most ambitious and exciting work to date was once again shoved into the stifling box of "black music" and left there to gather cobwebs. For, even with the spectacular string of number one hits that had introduced Michael Jackson to the American public as a child musical prodigy, and the decade of success and artistic growth that followed, he was still powerless to stop himself from being dismissed and relegated to the subgenre of "black music," cast out of the mainstream and back to the margins because of the color of his skin. Sitting in his house that night, Jackson decided once and for all that it was time to break through to the American mainstream in a way that could never be denied him. He would do it for himself, and for the other artists he admired and watched run into the insurmountable wall of race over and over again. It was time for the walls to crumble; he would be the one to break them down. He did with Thriller. That it should be the breakthrough at all is astonishing. It's as lean and lithe an album as the young man who made it. Thriller is nine songs long and clocks in at just over 42 minutes. Of those nine songs, seven were released as singles. Of those seven singles, three were given videos. All seven singles reached the top ten. Two of them – "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" – reached number one and made themselves comfortable there. All three of the music videos are considered to be pioneering examples of the genre. By the summer of 1984, the album had sold over 30 million copies worldwide. As scholars we try to resist grand, sweeping narratives because they elide the nuances of the complicated processes through which culture changes. That's often to our advantage, but 1 Jackson, Michael. Moonwalk. New York (Doubleday, 1988): 175-176. 1 sometimes we're so focused on making sure we're paying attention to the details that we are blind to the bigger picture. The record-breaking numbers associated with Thriller are sometimes dismissed as quantifying influence; assuming that just because a lot of people bought it or listened to it, its cultural impact is being magnified disproportionately. In this thesis I argue the opposite, almost to the extreme: that Thriller and Michael Jackson in 1983 mark the third and most recent pop explosion experienced in America and, as such, a singular and rare moment of identity creation and reformation. The pop explosion, as coined and defined by Greil Marcus talking about the Beatles, is "…an irresistible cultural upheaval that cuts across lines of class and race (in terms of sources if not allegiance), and, most crucially, divides society itself by age. The surface of daily life (walk, talk, dress, symbolism, heroes, family affairs) is affected by such force that deep and substantive changes in the way large numbers of people think and act take place. Pop explosions must link up with, and accelerate, broad shifts in sexual behavior, economic aspirations, and political beliefs… Enormous energy – the energy of frustration, desire, repression, adolescence, sex, ambition – finds an object in a pop explosion, and that energy is focused on, organized by, and released by a single, holistic cultural entity. This entity must itself be capable of easy, instantaneous and varied imitation and extension, in a thousand ways at once; it must embody, suggest, affirm and legitimize new possibilities on all fronts even as it outstrips them. This is a fancy way of saying that the capacity for fad must be profound."2 My intention is to use Marcus' framework of the pop explosion to explore the effects of Michael and Thriller in 1983, configuring it not as a total break with the past but as a powerful eruption of African American culture into the American mainstream. Though he does not utilize the tropes of Black Nationalism or civil rights explicitly in his lyrics, Jackson in both sound and image conjures black history and culture while simultaneously transforming them into a product so compelling that the white mainstream was helpless to resist it. At the time of Thriller's release the popular media was engaged in a debate about the future of the music industry. Sales declined steadily after the disco explosion in the late 1970's, radio had become noticeably more segregated than twenty years before, and in all the chaos MTV was ascending to cultural importance. Jackson and Thriller had an immediate impact on both. The sales of Thriller have been credited with reviving record sales industry-wide; the singles released crossed the color line onto Album-Oriented Radio (AOR) and obliterated the line between black and white music on charts, radio, and MTV. The television station, which had been steadily rising in popularity since its debut in 1981, had previously refused to air videos by black artists by saying they were the wrong musical format, R&B and not rock. Bob Pittman, the channel's 2 Marcus, Greil, "The Beatles" in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll ed. Jim Miller et. al., New York (Random House, 1976): 214. 2 founder and head, had relied on extensive market research of widespread, largely white consumer markets and determined that white suburbanites between the ages of 14 and 34 (MTV's target demographic) were not interested in black music, and would be more likely to stop watching if they saw a black face on their TV. There were very few exceptions, mostly for established acts like Tina Turner, and also for one Prince song that was deemed to have enough guitars to make it rock 'n' roll. "Billie Jean" became the first black video made for a black song put into heavy rotation by MTV despite the fact that it didn't fit the channel's supposed format. These boundary- busting moments were not unnoticed by the American people, who had been engaged in the debate about racism in the music industry along with the industry itself. The overwhelming popularity of Thriller made it an irresistible force, to borrow from Marcus; an undeniable cultural product that made arcane discussions of musical format and radio tradition seem hopelessly outmoded. The power of Jackson's performance, on television for the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever special, in music videos, and on stage, made him an object of desire and worship.