25 years ago, Michael Jackson’s Bad was released, a hotly anticipated follow up to the record breaking Thriller. And while Thriller provided Jackson with undeniable stardom and officially made him the King of Pop, Bad allowed him to come spar with his critics: those who said he had lost his blackness; those who saw his shyness as weakness; and those who stoked the fires of paparazzi ready to denounce him as freak, writing headlines about Jackson’s affinity for sleeping in oxygen tents, his penchant for hanging out with Bubbles the chimp, or his number of cosmetic surgeries.
For director Spike Lee, the criticism about Jackson’s blackness seems to drive the first part of the newly released documentary Bad 25. Throughout, the film works to reaffirm Jackson’s blackness, analyzing the motifs of black urban dancing in a number of his short films (Jackson refused to refer to music videos – and after being reminded of the length and substance of his work, I can’t fault him for it). And while Jackson wasn’t as familiar with urban dancing – or setting really if his reaction to the Hoyt-Schemerhorn stop on the Brooklyn G line or the former projects in Harlem are any indication), he sought out choreographers who could bring this influence into his music and moves.
A heavy focus is often set on Jackson’s “Liberian Girl,” a song that beatifies the visage of the African woman. In one sense, this view could be skewed to show Jackson’s fetish with appearing feminine. In another, there’s an endearing look at the beauty of the disenfranchised – something that Jackson experienced ironically. Simultaneously, he was a rich, successful, powerful African American in the 1980’s and a target of prejudice and racism. He was both the desired and the shunned; the wanted and the feared.
The inclusion of urban dancing and the romanticizing of the exotic are two facets to Jackson that were brought in by outsiders “to make Michael a homie,” but something that appears inherent to his soul and core is the way in which he ends each short film with a “break down.” Often, the music stops, Jackson slowly falls to a kneeling position amongst his background singers and dancers, and he begins to rile the crew with rhythmic bursts of words and phrases that recall a church revival: Your sisters. Your brothers. Your fathers. Your mothers. They feel it. Can you feel it? You can feel it.
It’s hard not to be moved in these moments. They’re unadulterated film from the ends of his shoots. Organic and pure, they reaffirm that Jackson was the “perfect balance of soul and science” (says long-time music producer Quincy Jones).
Bad 25 doesn’t necessarily reveal anything about Jackson that we don’t know, but it reaffirms what we might have forgotten amidst the three-decade-long landslide of unmitigated media opinion and accusations that never amounted to anything beyond Barbara Walter specials and evanescent headlines.
It reminds us that Jackson’s professionalism and process should trump rumor and presumed wackiness. Jackson himself took aim at offensive speculation in “Leave Me Alone,” a song that embraces, hyperbolizes, and then discards tabloid conjecture about his interest in the elephant man, skin bleaching, and homosexuality.
In “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” James Baldwin ruminates on the phenomenon of Michael Jackson and notes, “Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated–in the main, abominably–because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.” If we look at Jackson in the 1980’s, it near impossible to disagree with Baldwin. Perhaps even now it would be accurate.
Jackson wrote and performed music that garnered him fame, wealth, and power, at the same time that it transcended race. 110million copies of a single album (Thriller) and 50million of another (Bad) exemplify the unifying power that Jackson had. And this is where fear comes from. The fear of amalgamation; the fear of inferiority; the fear of the dominance of an “other.”
