Sunday Samples 127 (one day late)

Okay, everybody in the world now knows that Michael Jackson died. And yes, it’s a big deal. But there’s a lot of reputation-burnishing going on out there, one piece of which I’d like to talk about today.

Everyone talks about the music video for “Thriller”, which was really great. It was practically a movie in its own right. But just as Rob Reiner can make North and Steven Spielberg can make The Lost World, so could Michael Jackson release a great, big stinker. And the one that comes most readily to mind is 1991’s “Black or White”. Yes, it hit number one — and fast — but at its heart it’s a pop-rock tune that by turns panders to the current vogues of dance and rap music. It’s got a decent message, but one which has gotten better (and bolder) treatments elsewhere.

But all that is beside the point. The full impact doesn’t set in until you look at the music video. What usually got aired (and what is being aired most places I see it now) is actually pretty good. In particular, it’s very well-known for the sequence using some of the earliest video-quality morphing software to transform a sequence of faces of varied race and sex into each other. Neat. But then there’s the framing.

The full version of the video opens with George Wendt yelling at Macaulay Culkin (fresh from Home Alone) over playing his rock music too loud, and backed up by Tess Harper playing a dishrag of a mother. The music Culkin plays has nothing to do with the actual song, nor does the stereotyped argument. It serves only to cartoonishly launch Wendt (and his armchair) from suburban USA to sound-stage Africa, where the music video proper begins, and Wendt is promptly forgotten. Two minutes that add precisely zero, except that Culkin (whose own presence is a form of pandering) shows up as a caricature in one of the rap interludes.

Okay, fine. “Thriller” had a framing story too. It was more integrated into its video, and made some remote sense, but this much is not entirely without precedent. But then there’s the ending. After the morphing sequence we cut to an overhead shot of the studio and overhear the director ask the last woman from the video “how do you do that?” as if nobody had ever heard of visual effects by 1991. Then we move over to see a panther — a panther — which had nothing whatsoever to do with the video slink off set, where it turns into Michael Jackson. For the next four and a half minutes — as long as the video itself was — Jackson dances around a sound-stage street with no music (but with foley-enhanced sound effects) smashing things and grabbing himself. If nothing else, this is what cemented his reputation for that style of dancing. Yes, some of the stuff he smashes has perfunctory divisive language on it, and there’s some vain attempt at symbology, but the whole segment boils down to “watch me dance”. And dancing without music gets really boring after a while. Definitely before four minutes is up.