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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
If you think the Postal Service had a hard time with the Elvis stamp, just wait until they get around to Michael Jackson.
Nov 13, 2001 | I'm not sure if I dreamed this or saw it on television. It was a downtown Manhattan bus, stopped on some side street, abandoned, dead in the middle of the road. I could see Michael Jackson's face on the side of the bus, but it was clouded by a thick coat of flinty, brown-white dust.
Real or imagined, I know I saw the image sometime after Sept. 11. The advertising for Michael Jackson's new album, the unfortunately titled "Invincible," was all over the place -- on phone booths, billboards and of course on the sides of buses. And if what I saw was true -- hell, even if it wasn't -- the image alone, in its fiery new context, seemed like some Tourette's burst of weird symbolism. Because we live in a strange time, when everything we see speaks of something else, something sinister. Before, a huge advertisement on the side of the bus -- they're called "skins" in the advertising business -- might have been just another big-budget broadside to sell records. Now it looks like another insult forced upon the world without care or research.
Michael peering out from under the dust is postmodern T.J. Eckleberg. He's the eyes and ears of a dirty world gone even more awful. For me, it asks one pair of questions: Is he judging us, or is he just completely doped up?
In my hometown, Philadelphia, the Jacko buses volley up and down our main drags, gleaming in the autumn sun as weirdly imposing as they were meant to be. More than once, I've been walking down the street with this friend or that, stopped dead in my tracks. "Have you seen his face lately?" I'd say. "It's like a death mask." My friend would stare at the bus, and then turn quiet as we walked through the office district, or Chinatown, the world bustling about two people paralyzed in thought by the strange lizardly gaze of Michael Jackson, King of Pop. Whatever that means.
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If you turn on VH-1 these days, you're liable to see a whole bunch of things that should turn the stomach of even the strongest pop aesthete: Bono murdelyzing "What's Going On" with the help of Ja Rule or Justin Timberlake or whomever; Robert Downey Jr. lip-synching a new Elton John song, presented as a bona fide act of ars dramatis; and an episode of "Behind the Music" dedicated to the short, sad career of Blind Melon. But the strangest, most abandonedly fucked-up thing you will see on VH-1 -- or for that matter, anywhere on television -- is the movie in miniature that MJJ Productions has made to promote "You Rock My World," the first single on "Invincible."
The long-form video in length alone is meant to remind us of Jacko's "Thriller" glory days, when with John Landis, the KoP made the "Citizen Kane" of music videos. "You Rock My World" is very different.
As best I can tell, this is what happens: There is a girl, or money, or something that a noble private eye type (played by Jacko) and an incredulous Chris Tucker have tracked to a Casbah-type location. The Casbah looks like it might have been rejected by Duran Duran for the "Hungry Like the Wolf" video. Michael Madsen apparently works at or frequents the place, and the upstairs office -- any Casbah's heart of darkness -- is occupied by, get this, Marlon Brando! Brando apparently has the girl/thing in his possession, and is in no particular hurry to remit her/it to Jacko; he orders his goons on the singer, whereupon there is a bit of dialogue that goes something like this:
SLEAZY GOON: Is that all you got? Heh? (Mumbles.)
JACKO: (Motions a sort of "go screw yourself" gesture by sliding his hand up along his throat to his chin.)
SLEAZY GOON: You ain't got nothin'! You're nothin'!
JACKO: (Moving closer, in front of a posse we barely knew he had; stares into SLEAZY GOON's eyes.)
And then it's the same old thing: Jacko and his crew bust out a couple of "West Side Story" moves; then, apropos of nothing, Jacko yells, "HHHOOOHHHH!" The music comes in, and he grunts little Jacko puppy noises in a way that we perceive as musical.
I bring this up to illustrate a few things. One, there is so little new under the sun for Michael Jackson. Two, "You Rock My World" -- if not the whole of "Invincible," both the album and marketing campaign -- relies on celebrity endorsements in a desperate effort to remind us that, yes, This Is Michael Jackson, You Love Michael Jackson and This Is The Same Old Michael Jackson. And three, these endorsements are used to distract us from Michael Jackson's face.
It's true. In a long video in which he is the star, Michael wears a broad-brimmed hat, and a do-rag under that. The hat darkens his face in shadows for almost the entire song.
In 10 minutes plus, Michael Jackson's face is visible here for 15 seconds. And I swear, just the sight of it is enough to make you gasp -- not for the pop thrill, but for its freakish pall.
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If Don DeLillo was right in saying that Mick Jagger's lips represented the anus of a culture, then what part of our society is the face of Michael Jackson? Because the truth is, there's not really much face left in Michael Jackson's face. But fossils of it remain all over pop culture.
