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| quote: | Originally posted by saluyamo
Would Micheal Jackson be authentically white? |
I encourage you to read the essay 'Understanding Michael Jackson', by Armond White. I think it's only found in this book:
| quote: | Michael Jackson's new face stares right at you from the cover of his album Bad (Epic) looking lost and accusatory. In the Martin Scorsese music film for the single "Bad", it has even frightened grown children who screamed their outrage in the international press. But michael's face may be outside the legitimate realm of music and film criticism. As he says on "The Way You Make Me Feel", the album's most infectious cut, "Ain't nobody's business 'cept mine and my baby."
Only the intimates of Jackson's life have a right to complain - or be surprised - at the physiological changes he has made of himself. The skin lightening, eye widening, nose sharpening, chin clefting, plus hair weave and processing are mad-scientist variations on the ethnic grooming and image creation that have long been part of the Black performer's understood contract with the white-controlled world of show business.
Most artist submit to some degree. Jackson's only gone the Jewish entertainer's nose-job ritual - known as the "Hollywood circumcision" - several organs better.
Almost a hundred years after minstrel shows, Jackson has engineered the ultimate critique/reversal of the blackface tradition. His plastic surgery answers the exploitation and humiliation that have always loomed ambiguously before Black performers who were ready to give the marketplace the face or hairstyle it demanded.
Jackson has speculated on the possibility of becoming the perfect model entertainer. He has cribbed notions of showbiz decorum from that most desperate integrationist, Diana Ross - specifically in terms of music and vocal nuance. But another important touchstone has been the pencil-thin, art-deco stylization of Fred Astaire in movement and dance. As a recombinant showbiz entity Michael Jackson has surpassed both of them. He's the assimilation ideal made flesh; showbiz excellence evolved into lightning-quick speed and efficiency.
Jackson's development, his growing up in public, matters to so many people because he makes the processes of cultural exploitation so plain. From his beginnings as a tinytot James Brown to his current eccentricity as the owner of a hyperbaric chamber and exotic menagerie, he has followed the steps of previous entertainers - becoming an icon for millions, then seeking a personal refuge for his own sensitive/fantasy needs. But the imperatives set before Jackson, structuring his maturation , are to be an artist, an individual, and a Black person. That's one obligation more than Elvis Presley or the Beatles had to deal with. And being Black is more complicated than the other goals.
Racial Identity impinges on every move Jackson makes. So it's too simple and insensitive to say that he's trying to be white. His new face is just a manifestation of the compromises he's forced into as private and public person; as a naive young man in an industry of predatory cunning; and as a powerful Black cultural presence skeptically admitted into a largely white hierarchy.
Michael Jackson has become the social and ethnic anomaly he was raised to be. Having achieved with Thriller (1982) the greatest success of any performer in two decades (over 40 million sold, ushering in the music video age), Jackson has fashioned himself into what the Western world has ordained: an androgynous, uniracial creature of presumably limitless appeal. His acceptance of this role may certainly indicate a weak ethnic and political foundation (a moral slackening for which his parents should weep). But it's not simply the psychopathology people are eager to cite. The Bad Album shows that Jackson is in control of his various projections. The success of his art is that he expresses his dilemma well enough for us to understand his neurosis in a larger sense.
Think of Michael Jackson's new face as the Portrait of Dorian Grey for a modern, racially stressed culture. Yet the evidence of brainwashing, self-denial (rather than self hatred), and willed infantilism denotes more than a Black person's horror story - consider the pop-star-turned-grotesque examples of Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, Keith Richards, et al.
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