I was listening to Smooth Criminal, and thinking about how Michael Jackson would use pop culture references, in his videos and songs, from movies/actors to popular History and incorporate it in his work without making it feels like it was suffocating under them. He was so transcendental, experimented with everything, his oeuvre, his body. He had a way of being there, common, ordinary, American through his love and recognition of pop culture. But also completely alien and strange.
He was such a product of America (excess) but also represented everything American society abhors i.e. transcendence. Someone who can’t be fixed. Someone who always changes, who refused to be stuck. But still you can recognize him. It’s Michael Jackson. He existed. He’d do everything and wanted to be everything, and was heavily punished for that because American society loves to fix people into an identity, a category. “YOU’RE THIS AND MUST ACT LIKE THIS.” And there you have this sensitive androgynous black guy, with skinny pants, soft voice, then strong voice, dark-skin, light-skin, his nose big, then tiny, doing r’n’b, then rock. Creating his own genre. He was his own genre. He never hide his influences, and never hide he was made up of everything around him, even the rotten, toxic, irrelevant stuff that could kill him. He mastered them.
That someone would intrigue all the time, surprise, excite curiosity. Seeing someone reinventing himself all the time right before your eyes was unique. I’m writing something about this, about childhood and reinvention and fictions. I remember my mother would always something like “Michael Jackson act like a child. He such a child.” He was an artist, and I wonder if becoming an adult is a sort of death because we stop reinventing ourselves, experimenting, trying because we’re scared of failure and pain. Too afraid to fictionalize ourselves. This idea that children are strangers to adults, that Michael Jackson was a child and a stranger. Children are always building, unafraid to make shit up, and they don’t really know about shame. This is what art is, this is trying, building and experimenting. Even if you can fall. And as a black man in America being so great, and complex, and strange (like a free child) and allowing himself to be so free, breaking boundaries and subverting that fucked up concept of identity, it’s sure that people were going to punish him, to put him in his place, to do everything to correct him. His weirdness was pathologized.
He did what he wanted to do, all of that in that rigid, lethal culture for people like him. He embodies to me something Albert Camus said:
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
vaporwave
janainaart
kaledo-art
romaincrisis
izzy806
jacobvanloon
dededos
