Starting Something: Synthesizers and Rhythmic Reorientations in Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”

Abstract

In 1983, Michael Jackson brought the world to its feet by spinning into the moonwalk while performing “Billie Jean” on live television during the Motown 25 special. In this article, I chart how the analog synthesizers in “Billie Jean” both helped facilitate Jackson's movement towards black futurity and connected him back to black rhythmic histories encapsulated in disco and funk. By unpacking how he moves with and against these synthesizers in the music video and subsequent live performance, I consider the ways in which this relatively new musical technology allowed Jackson to transmit a black queer phenomenology to his audiences.

Keywords:

• blackness
• music technology
• phenomenology
• queerness
• rhythm
• sound

Acknowledgments

I thank the journal editors for including my work, the anonymous readers from the Souls editorial collective for their generous feedback, and everyone who engaged with my article as I continued to grow its ideas, particularly Francesca Royster, Kareem Khubchandani, and Stephen Marshall.

Notes

About the Author

Christine Capetola is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research mobilizes sound and vibration as analytics for studying identity formation and historicizing the recent past. Her dissertation, Hyperaural Blackness, traces the aesthetic and political resonances in how black pop stars in the 1980s and the contemporary artists who cite them utilized(d) digital music technology to navigate—and disorient—hypervisible representations of race, gender, and sexuality. She has a chapter on the vibrational aesthetics of Janelle Monáe's music forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture. Christine is a music writer for Bitch Media and blogs about contemporary pop and R&B on her website, www.christinecapetola.com.

Notes

1 Alexandra Vazquez, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 19.

2 Michael Jackson Vemo, “Michael Jackson - Billie Jean,” YouTube, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi_XLOBDo_Y&feature=youtube_gdata_player (accessed December 1, 2018).

3 Michael Jackson, Moonwalk (New York: Harmony Books, 2009), 264.

4 Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 40–1.

5 As Wonder said of the Moog in a 1972 interview, “I feel it… is a way to directly express what comes from your mind. It gives you so much of sound in a broader sense. What you’re actually doing with an oscillator is taking a sound and shaping it into whatever form you want.” Penny Valentine, “Stevie Wonder’s Moog Music: A Classic Interview from the Vaults,” The Guardian (2013). http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/30/stevie-wonder-rocks-backpages-interview-1972 (accessed June 27, 2018).

6 As the story goes, when David Bowie heard the song, he exclaimed, “I have heard the future.” See: OasisRecords1975, “Giorgio Moroder Interview (June, 2013),” YouTube (2013). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLqRjYT76gk (accessed July 1, 2018).

7 Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), 112.

8 Francesca Royster, Sounding Like A No-No: Queer Sounds & Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 4–9.

9 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Global California (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2007), 44–5.

10 Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015), 3. For more on the resistance of objects see: Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

11 Royster, Sounding Like a No-No, 2.

12 See Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Gayle Wald, It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2015). The Black Arts Movement was the artistic arm of the Black Power Movement.

13 Nelson George, Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise & Fall of the Motown Sound (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 140.

14 Jackson, Moonwalk, 179.

15 Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Culture, 1970-1979 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003).

16 Thriller (1982) “Liner Notes.” Album Liner Notes. http://albumlinernotes.com/Thriller__1982_.html (accessed July 1, 2018); “Fairlight CMI (Series I – III).” Vintage Synth Explorer. http://www.vintagesynth.com/misc/fairlight_cmi.php (accessed July 1, 2018); Michael Jackson interview with Jesse Jackson – 2005,” YouTube (2005). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pawGvkUF0-I (accessed March 22, 2016).

17 “Michael Jackson Keyboard Sounds of His Signature Songs Then and Now,” Keyboard Magazine (2009). http://www.keyboardmag.com/artists/1236/michael-jackson-keyboard-sounds-of-his-signature-songs-then-and-now/27406 (accessed July 1, 2018).

18 “Yamaha CS-80,” Vintage Synth Explorer. http://www.vintagesynth.com/yamaha/cs80.php (accessed July 1, 2018).

19 Chad Allen. Personal interview. 23 February 2016

20 “Michael Jackson Keyboard Sounds of His Signature Songs Then and Now;” “Thriller (1982) Liner Notes.” Jackson is rumored to have lifted the bass line from a Hall & Oates song. See “Michael Jackson Remembered: Daryl Hall on the Ultimate Video Star,” Rolling Stone (2009). http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/michael-jackson-remembered-daryl-hall-on-the-ultimate-video-star-20090709 (accessed July 1, 2018).

21 Richard J. Ripani, The New Blue Music: Changes in Rhythm & Blues, 1950-1990 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 3–6.

22 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America (Oxford and New York: New York University Press, 1997).

23 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 67.

24 Joseph Vogel, “Freaks in the Reagan Era: James Baldwin, the New Pop Cinema, and the American Ideal of Manhood,” The Journal of Popular Culture 48, no. 3 (2015): 478.

25 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 5.

26 Royster, Sounding Like a No-No, 29.

27 Ibid., 119; 126.

28 Musser, Sensational Flesh, 1.

29 José Esteban Muñoz, “Vitalism’s after-burn: The sense of Ana Mendieta,” Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory 21, no. 2 (2011): 197.

30 Tamara Palmer, “‘Billie Jean’ and MTV: A Lot Has Changed in 30 Years,” The Root (2013). http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2013/03/billie_jean_and_mtv_a_lot_has_changed_in_30_years.html (accessed July 1, 2018). For the music video see: Michael Jackson VEVO, “Michael Jackson – Billie Jean, YouTube (2009). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi_XLOBDo_Y&feature=youtube_gdata_player (accessed July 1, 2018).

31 Although bands in other countries such as Australia and Britain had started releasing promotional videos as early as the mid-1970s, the music video as an art form did not begin to take off in America until the initial airing of Video Concert Hall on November 1, 1979.

32 Mark Graham, “The First 30 Videos That Played On MTV,” VH1 News (2013). http://www.vh1.com/news/51387/mtv-first-30-videos/ (accessed July 1, 2018).

33 Royster, Sounding Like A No-No, 131. Technically the first video by a black artist to air on MTV was Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” in 1982, but Jackson’s was the first video by a black artist to appear consistently on MTV.

34 Jocelyn Vena, “Michael Jackson Answers Fan Questions in 1996 Thailand interview,” MTV (2009). http://www.mtv.com/news/1615349/michael-jackson-answers-fan-questions-in-1996-thailand-interview/ (accessed July 1, 2018).

35 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrah, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6.

36 Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982).

37 Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

38 Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics & Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 119.

39 Theo Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?: Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011), 6, 160–162.

40 See Valentine, “Stevie Wonder’s Moog Music: A Classic Interview from the Vaults.”

41 As Peter Shapiro notes of disco dancers, “The economy was in tatters and people wanted to do what they did during the Great Depression—dance.” See Shapiro, Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (New York: Faber and Faber Inc., 2005), 195.

42 George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Pop Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xv.

43 The Latina woman on the billboard is 1980s video regular Raquel Peña, who also appeared in Bryan Adams’s “Cuts Like a Knife.” See: Marc Tyler Nobleman, “The Girl in the Video: ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Cuts Like a Knife’ (1983),” Noblemania (2014). http://www.noblemania.com/2014/07/the-girl-in-video-billie-jean-and-cuts.html (accessed July 2, 2018).

44 Besides offering a commentary on Jackson’s present (in 1983) feelings of homelessness in both the pop music industry and America at large, the scene with the billboard is also an ominous setup for how increasingly uncomfortable Jackson will feel with his body by the end of the decade. The split screens of Jackson’s body throughout the video additionally represent this discomfort.

45 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 21.

46 Tavia Nyong’o, “Have You Seen His Childhood?” Journal of Popular Music Studies, no. 23 (2012): 42.

47 MartyMcfly07, “Michael Jackson—Billie Jean [Live 1983] [HD],” YouTube (2011). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi_XLOBDo_Y (accessed December 1, 2018).

48 Phil Gallo, “‘Motown 25’ Revisited: 10 Things to Know About the 1983 TV Special,” Billboard (2015). http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6487354/motown-25-revisited (accessed July 1, 2018).

49 George, Where Did Our Love Go?, 193.

50 J. Randy Taraborrelli, Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness (New York: Random House Publishing, 1993): 234–240.

51 Jackson, Moonwalk, 47, emphasis in the original.

52 Ann Cvetkvoich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 4.

53 Jackson, Moonwalk, 209–10, emphasis in the original.

54 Judith Hamera, “The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dance Work,” PMLA 127, no. 4(2012): 755–56.

55 Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 3, emphasis in the original.

56 Maeve McDermott, “‘Leaving Neverland’: Celebrities react to Michael Jackson documentary.” USA Today (2019). https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2019/03/04/leaving-neverland-celebrities-react-michael-jackson-documentary/3053120002/ (accessed April 1, 2019).

57 Amy Kaufman and Gerrick D. Kennedy. “Michael Jackson’s Fans Fight Back against Sundance Documentary ‘Leaving Neverland.’” LA Times (2019). https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-michael-jackson-documentary-sundance-backlash-20190127-story.html (accessed April 1, 2019).

58 Nyong’o, “Have You Seen His Childhood?,” 45.

59 Although it is not labeled abuse, Jackson documents some of his father’s behavior in his autobiography, Moonwalk.