Michael Jackson's Queer Musical Belongings

Abstract Many of Jackson's performances can be read as queer, but his treatment of rock music is particularly so. Jackson appeared to use rock either to upset normative gendered and racialized codes or to exaggerate them in order to play with hegemonic power; as an “outsider” to the genre of rock music and as someone whose own performances of gender and race fit uneasily with the norms of rock, he used the genre to play, queerly, at and with convention, in the sound of his music, the narratives of some videos, and in live performances; especially significant is his choice of Jennifer Batten as lead guitarist. Jackson's queering of rock music may have equally, if not more, to do with race than with sexuality or gender (if, indeed, these can be untangled). Acknowledgments Early drafts of this essay were presented at Dalhousie, the University of Guelph, and at the 2010 IASPM Canada meeting in Regina; I thank students and faculty for their insightful comments which strengthened my arguments. My thanks also to Stan Hawkins and Kip Pegley for reading through various drafts and offering, as usual, astute observations, and to Jennifer Batten for generously (and quickly) answering several factual questions via email. I also wish to thank my research assistant Laura Wiebe for the many ways she assisted me in the writing of this essay, including her comments on content. This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Notes [1] A similarly hostile account is given by Robert Walser Walser, Robert. 1994. Prince as Queer Post-Structuralist. Popular Music and Society, 18(2): 79–90. Print[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], who wrote that Jackson's “songs and videos are filled with misogyny, gynophobia, and rape fantasies” (“Prince” 84); he echoes these sentiments in his book Running with the Devil Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP. Print [Google Scholar], where he refers to Jackson's “narcissistic misogyny” (117). In both cases, Walser points to the video for “The Way You Make Me Feel” as an example (along with Dirty Diana and Thriller in his article on Prince), but offers no further reading of this video or any other of Jackson's work to support his claims. I am unsure how Jackson's narrative of romantic pursuit can be characterized in these ways. There is nothing in this video to suggest hatred or fear of women, or that Jackson fantasizes about raping the woman in the video (unless Walser interprets Jackson's pelvic thrusts as a “rape fantasy” rather than a stylized expression of lust. This, to me, would be a gross misreading). Further, the woman rejects Jackson's advances until the very end of the video, which places her firmly in control and him at constant pains to outdo himself in order to her impress her, finally enlisting an entire crew of dancers to assist him. Narcissism might well be a good characterization of the video, since like so much of Jackson's work, the narrative is really a vehicle through which he demonstrates his virtuosity: it is much more about him than about the girl. The question is: why such potent language (using a sledgehammer to kill a non-existent fly, it would seem), unless there is something threatening about what Jackson is doing? [2] A detailed analysis of Jackson's treatment by the “mainstream” (white) media contrasted with that by black journalists in publications such as Ebony and Jet would be revealing. I am certainly not the first to point out the different ways in which he was assessed in these publications, as well as the different personas he revealed to each. He seemed to play up his “eccentricities” for the mainstream media, while appearing much more “normal” to the black press. See Amir Khan's article, this issue, note 2, for a corroborating quote from journalist J.J. Sullivan. [3] One need only go to fan sites and read comments, especially in the wake of Jackson's death, or to Youtube to watch countless fan videos and read through their comments, to get a very different sense of how his work was received. [4] See also Erni, although his article explores discourse about Jackson, especially media discourse, but also what Jackson said about himself, in building a case for his queerness, and how this queerness played out in relation to the 1993 allegations of sexual abuse. [5] Since so little excavation of queerness in Jackson's performances has been done, it is premature to make a comparison to Prince, but such a comparative study is warranted. [6] My thanks to Kip Pegley for bringing this to my attention. [7] So much media attention has been focused on Jackson's violence and anger in the dance sequence at the end of the “Black or White” short film that other, perhaps more interesting aspects have been largely ignored. Margo Jefferson, again, explores some of the sexual imagery in the dance, focusing especially on Jackson's crotch-grabbing, about which she says: “In retrospect, the crotch clutch seems at once desperate and abstract. It is as if he were telling us, ‘Fine, you need to know I'm a man, a black man? Here's my dick: I'll thrust my dick at you! Isn't that what a black man's supposed to do? But I'm Michael Jackson, so just look but you can't touch” (102). It wasn't real, it was symbolic. Not a penis but a phallus. For a penetrating discussion of Jackson's anger as culturally situated (rather than gratuitous, as some seem to think it was) see Amir Khan's article, this issue; for reference to Jackson in relation to “black rage” see Brian Rossiter's article, this issue. [8] My thanks to Jennifer Batten for clarifying this information. The three white keyboard players were Rory Kaplan and Chris Currell on the Bad tour and Brad Buxor on History. [9] Of course Prince also had a white woman guitar player in his band—Wendy Melvin—but she was not a lead player; her role was very different from Batten's. [10] Some years ago Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick articulated the possibilities of such an expanded understanding of queerness: “a lot of the most exciting recent work around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can't be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, post-colonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses” (8–9). [11] I realize that I am stretching the parameters of Halberstam's discussion of queer time. Her use of the phrase refers to those who do not organize their lives normatively, especially through sanctioned ideas of reproductive time (adulthood means marriage and children, for example, but also through such things as the unquestioned celebration of long lives (however dull they might be) over those that may be short, but intensely lived. Batten's queering of musical time in this performance does work as a disruption of time in a similar sense, I would argue, providing that we take the deeply social ways in which musical genre operates into account. [12] A similar example can be found in the posthumously released single “Hold My Hand,” which is a duet between Akon and Jackson. The two sing in precisely the same range and one has to listen closely (and be intimately familiar with Jackson's vocal timbre and performative nuances) in order to distinguish them. [13] Margo Jefferson also comments on this performance, which she calls “strangely spectacular,” opting not to call it queer, but rather commenting that it “brought masculinity and femininity together in just proportions” (104–05). [14] “Dirty Diana” is a complex case, for it does conform to those examples of heavy metal in which the “threat” of women is confronted “head on,” through the figure of the femme fatale (Walser 118). What makes it interesting is that Jackson locates the figure of the groupie squarely within rock music discourse, that he chose to tell this story through the language of rock, not pop or R&B (his narratives about other threatening women are not about groupies per se). The genre allows for a stylized rendering of the groupie tale, and, unlike many rock narratives that celebrate the attention of groupies and the sexual prowess of the artist (Rolling Stones’ “Star, Star,” for example), here Jackson presents Diana as a stalker who is after his fame and fortune. There are a number of femmes fatales in Jackson's work (Billie Jean, Diana, Susie from “Blood on the Dance Floor,” the unnamed woman in “Dangerous,” for example) and these representations of women deserve further sustained analytical attention. [15] He intimated during his 2005 trial on allegations of child abuse that the accusations were based on race—see Fast. [16] The opening groove of “Threatened,” which returns during the choruses, can also be considered as “rock,” but the rest of this song is generically hybrid.

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