by Hilton Als
As it turned out, upper- and middle-class whites—that is, white-collar workers—didn’t much identify with blacks or poor whites. By the nineteen fifties, it had become clear that white manual laborers could only hold on to the dream of whiteness by living among their own kind. In “If I Had,” one of the fifteen tracks on his 1999 album, The Slim Shady LP, Mathers writes from the perspective of the dude with the Confederate flag tied around his head, dreaming of restitution. “I’m tired of being white trash, broke and always poor,” Marshall says. “Tired of taking pop bottles back to the party store. / I’m tired of not having a phone, / tired of not having a home to have one in if I did have it on. / Tired of not driving a BM, / tired of not working at GM.”
Mathers’s elders could not keep blackness away from their children, who had to attend the city’s public schools, which were predominantly black. There, Marshall found his voice—in black music. He also ran up against race hatred.
When he was nine years old, a black classmate attacked Mathers a number of times—at recess, in the school bathroom. Once, the same bully knocked his skinny white victim down with a heavy snowball; Mathers sustained severe head injuries. Subsequently, Mathers’s mother filed a claim against the school, saying the attacks had also caused her son to have debilitating headaches, intermittent loss of vision and hearing, nightmares, nausea, and a tendency toward antisocial behavior. The lawsuit was dismissed in 1983, when a Macon County judge in Michigan declared that public schools were immune when it came to such lawsuits.
Mrs. Mathers-Briggs’s failed litigation must have felt like a failure of language. Unlike her son, she never learned to control it. How could she not bend the law to her will? Her hysteria, telling tales about her victimhood, had worked on Marshall, making other kinds of knots in his head. Why should the courts be any different? (Her tendency to treat the wrongs that had been inflicted on her son and thus herself as an occasion for a public airing was not restricted to Mathers’s defense. Indeed, after her son’s second album came out, his mother sued him for defamation of character.)
Mrs. Mathers-Briggs had a penchant for showing off the knocks and bruises incurred by living. Just like an American. Mathers’s inheritance was the Mrs. Mathers-Briggs show. He brought it with him when he left her to marry his audience. But he refined her hysteria, controlled it, gave it a linguistic form. By becoming an artist, he served and separated from Mother. He served her divorce papers by making records where he talked about their marriage. And then he married her again by talking about her again. But a mom that is your Mrs. can never forgive you for believing you are someone different, and not herself. That separateness belies her existence.
That the slings and arrows of Mathers’s outrageous misfortune in and out of school, in the outside of Detroit’s black world, did not deter him from falling increasingly in love with black music is a testament to his interest in and commitment to exploring difference—his and theirs. Unlike many of the whites he grew up with, Mathers never claimed whiteness and its privileges as his birthright because he didn’t feel white and privileged. Being emotionally beaten up at home, having his ass kicked at school, slinging hash in a number of fast-food joints after he quit school in the ninth grade, all contributed to Mathers’s sense that he was about as welcome in the world as any black man. And rap’s dissonant sound was the soundtrack to all that. The music’s form—with its barrage of words and double entendres, shouting and silence, conversation and singing—was as familiar and natural to the burgeoning artist as the short story form was to Flannery O’Connor.
That Mathers should be open to a musical culture not his own is interesting. For some artists—white as well as black—there is the sense that delving into “otherness” allows them to articulate their own feelings of difference more readily. One thinks of the white, French-born photographer and art director Jean-Paul Goude and his 1981 masterwork, Jungle Fever. The book is a visual diary of Goude’s fascination with and exploration of the world of colored women—black American, Puerto Rican, Tunisian—and their erotic pull on Goude’s imagination. Jungle Fever is as emotionally explicit as Mathers’s lyrics. The sound of blackness—rap, soul, funk—freed Mathers to feel articulate and alive to his white pain: black music allowed him to be present as an artist, and to tell the world who he was since he was a translator in a lexicon he could never make his own: he was white. And that was his freedom.
To say, as many critics have, that whites steal from blacks who originate important work in music or fashion is beside the point. Black American style has had a prevailing influence on the way Americans dress and create music for decades now, long before Black Panther wives were covered in Vogue. What makes Mathers particularly annoying to his detractors is his brave acknowledgment of how whiteness sells blackness in America, not just as a style, but as a feeling, which Mathers—along with most black artists—knows is not divisible. In “White America,” which appears on The Eminem Show, Mathers says:
Look at these eyes, baby blue, baby just like yourself, if they were brown, Shady lose, Shade sits on the shelf, but Shady’s cute, Shady knew, Shady’s dimples would help, make ladies swoon baby, ooh baby, look at my sales, let’s do the math, if I was black, I would’ve sold half.
Of course, part of Mathers’s genius lies in his ability to market his story to the white counterculture. He knew he wasn’t the only wigger out there. From the beginning, he wrote for the white counterculture as much as he produced music that blacks could identify with. This bears some resemblance to Sly Stone’s marketing technique in the early nineteen seventies. Sly produced funk, but his lyrics were all about love, peace, and understanding. He made black dance music for white hippies.
Nowhere in his music does Mathers ever claim he wants to be black, like some sad, inner-city Elvis. Critics who assume he does are missing the point, along with so much else. In the superficial writing that has grown up around his white hair and white T-shirt, the pathos at the heart of his lyrics is gilded over if not missed altogether. His “rage” is that of the disillusioned romantic. Mathers can’t quite believe the world is the world. Nor can he believe there’s not enough love in it—especially for him. He writes with the hyperrealistic vividness of the romantic who can recall every slight, real or imagined. On “Kim,” a song about his estranged wife that appears on The Marshall Mathers LP, Mathers sends this letter from home:
How could you?
Just leave me and love him out of the blue
Oh, what’s the matter, Kim?
Am I too loud for you?
Too bad, bitch, you’re gonna finally hear me out this time
At first, I’m like all right
You wanna throw me out? That’s fine!
But not for him to take my place, are you out of your mind?
This couch, this TV, this whole house is mine!
How could you let him sleep in our bed?
Look at Kim
Look at your husband now!
The operative word here is “look.” Given Mathers’s background, where all eyes were turned on Mom as she made scenes, could Mathers feel he was real? That he existed? Moms and bullies sucked all the air out of the room. In order to be heard, he did what born writers do: he learned to listen—to himself, and to others, to stories. And like most born performers, he longed for his work to be seen. As a teenager in Detroit, he began rapping on the underground music scene, where he made a name for himself. He released an album, but it didn’t do much. He was given a second chance at fame when the music producer and rapper Dr. Dre got a hold of the disc, liked the lyrics, and commissioned Mathers to record something else. He was given the money and time to fine-tune his sense of difference through the hard work of making words carry meaning in a country where intellection is viewed with suspicion. Yet instead of looking at Mathers’s words—the core of his art—which would generate analysis, discourse, a complicated response, his gang looks at his public persona, which is relatively simple. He’s the rude American boy with a cl
ass chip on his shoulder. But what does that boy see, feel, think? Why the anger over how humanity has fucked up the Garden of Eden, a place that is nothing if not a metaphor for love? Love of man for woman, black for white, all the things Mathers feels he has seen too little of?
Instead he looks for love in the music. As one of the producers behind the popular black rapper 50 Cent, Mathers gets to mentor blackness. A movie could be made of all this. Sam Peckinpah, the master of blood and grit and male vanity, could direct this flick. We open on Mathers as a boy; he looks up, adoringly, at his mother, as she looks intently but blindly at herself. He’s sitting near her feet as he sings a song—not one of his own, he’s too little to imagine writing one. Perhaps a song from Lee Breuer’s brilliant stage play Gospel at Colonus, where five blind black men sang Mathers’s autobiography first: “Who is this man? What is his name? Where does he come from? What is his race?”
MICHAEL
1.
THE FEMALE ELDERS tell us what to look out for. Staring straight ahead, they usher us past the Starlite Lounge, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, and whisk us across the street as soon as they see “one of them faggots” emerge from the neon-lit bar. This one—he’s brown-skinned, like nearly everyone else in that neighborhood, and skinny—has a female friend in tow, for appearances must be kept up. And as the couple runs off in search of another pack of cigarettes, the bar’s door closes slowly behind them, but not before we children hear, above the martini-fed laughter, a single voice, high and plaintive: Michael Jackson’s.
It’s 1972, and “Ben,” the fourteen-year-old star’s first solo hit, is everywhere. The title song for a film about a bullied boy and his love for a rat named Ben (together they train a legion of other rodents to kill the boy’s tormentors; eventually Ben helps kill his human companion), the mournful ballad quickly became Jackson’s early signature song—certainly among the queens at the Starlite, who ignore its Gothic context and play it over and over again as a kind of anthem of queer longing. For it was evident by then that Michael Jackson was no mere child with a gift. Or, to put it more accurately, he was all child—an Ariel of the ghetto—whose appeal, certainly to the habitués of places like the Starlite, lay partly in his ability to find metaphors to speak about his difference, and theirs.
2.
The Jackson 5 were America’s first internationally recognized black adolescent boy band. They were as smooth as the Ink Spots, but there was a hint of wildness and pathos in Michael Jackson’s rough-boy soprano, which, with its Jackie Wilson– and James Brown–influenced yelps, managed to remain just this side of threatening. He never changed that potent formula, not even after he went solo, more or less permanently, in 1978 at the age of twenty. Early on he recognized the power mainstream stardom held—a chance to defend himself and his mother from the violent ministrations of his father, Joe Jackson (who famously has justified his tough parenting, his whippings, as a catalyst for his children’s success), and to wrest from the world what most performers seek: a nonfractured mirroring.
After “Ben,” the metaphors Michael Jackson used to express his difference from his family became ever more elaborate and haunting: there was his brilliant turn as an especially insecure, effete, and, at times, masochistic scarecrow in Sidney Lumet’s 1978 film version of the Broadway hit The Wiz. There was his appropriation of Garland’s later style—the sparkly black Judy-in-concert jacket—during the 1984 Victory tour, his last performances with his brothers, whose costuming made them look like intergalactic superheroes. And there were the songs he wrote for women—early idols like Diana Ross or his older sister, Rebbie—songs that expressed what he could never say about his own desire. “She said she wants a guy / to keep her satisfied. / But that’s all right for her, / but it ain’t enough for me,” Jackson wrote in the 1981 Diana Ross hit “Muscles.” The song continues: “Still, I don’t care if he’s young or old, / (just make him beautiful)...I want muscles / all over his body.” The following year, Jackson wrote “Centipede,” which became Rebbie Jackson’s signature song. It begins: “Your love / is like a ragin’ fire, oh. / You’re a snake that’s on the loose, / the strike is your desire.” In bars like the Starlite and, later, in primarily black and Latin gay dance clubs like the Paradise Garage on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, the meaning was clear: Michael Jackson was most himself when he was someone other than himself.
Ross was more than an early idol; she served as a kind of beard during a pivotal period of Jackson’s self-creation. During the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties, as he moved away from being a Jackson but was not willing to forgo his adorable-child-star status, Jackson “dated” a number of white starlets—Tatum O’Neal, Brooke Shields—but once those girls were exhibited at public events two or three times, they were never seen with him again. Ross, on the other hand, was a constant. Gay fans labeled her as the ultimate fag hag, or sister, who used her energetic feline charm to help sexualize Jackson. But intentionally or not, the old friends perverted this notion in the 1981 television special Diana. In it, the two singers wear matching costumes: slacks, shirt, and tie. The clip was shown over and over again in the clubs: Jackson dances next to Ross, adding polish to her appealingly jerky moves; he does Ross better than Ross.
The anxiety of influence is most palpable on the spoken-word introduction to his 1979 album Off the Wall, the first of his three collaborations with the producer Quincy Jones. Here, Jackson can be heard struggling against his own imitation of Ross’s breathy voice (a voice canonized in Diana, her brilliant Bernard Edwards– and Nile Rodgers–produced 1980 album featuring the militaristic hit “I’m Coming Out,” which has subsequently become a gay anthem of sorts). It was during this period that a number of black gay men began to refer to Jackson as “she” and, eventually, “a white woman”—one of the slurs they feared most, for what could be worse than being called that which you were not, could never be? As his physical transformations began to overshadow his life as a musician, Jackson’s now-famous mask of white skin and red lips (a mask that distanced him from blackness just as his sexuality distanced him from blacks) would come to be read as the most arresting change in the man who said no to life but yes to pop.
3.
The chokehold of black conservatism on black gay men has been chronicled by a handful of artists—Harlem Renaissance poet Bruce Nugent, playwright and filmmaker Bill Gunn, James Baldwin, and AIDS activist and spoken-word artist Marlon Riggs among them—but these figures are rare and known mostly to white audiences. In black urban centers across the U.S., where Jesus is still God, men who cannot conform to the culture’s edicts—adopting a recognizably heterosexual lifestyle, along with a specious contempt for the spoils of white folk—are ostracized or worse; being “out” is a privilege many black gay men still cannot afford. Bias-related crimes aside (black gay men are more likely to be bashed by members of their own race than by nonblacks), there’s the bizarre fact that queerness reads, even to some black gay men themselves, as a kind of whiteness. In a black, Christian-informed culture, where relatively few men head households anymore, whiteness is equated with perversity, a pollutant further eroding the already decimated black family. So in their wretchedness, and their guilt, the black gay men who cannot marry women, and those who should not but do, meet on the “down low” for closeted gay sex and, less often, love and fraternity.
During Jackson’s childhood in Gary, Indiana, black conservatism would have reigned. Among U.S. cities with a population of 100,000 or more, Gary—a steel town twenty-five miles southeast of downtown Chicago—has the highest percentage of black residents, mostly Southern transplants, mostly Christian, and steadfastly heterosexual. Both of Jackson’s parents’ roots were in the South. His mother, Katherine, was a devout Jehovah’s Witness. She suffered Joe’s various infidelities and cruelties to their nine children with the forbearance of one whose reward will come not in this world but the next. (Joe Jackson has never adopted his wife’s faith.) In her 2006 study, On Micha
el Jackson, the critic Margo Jefferson discusses this split in parenting, the fractured mirroring in the home:
Katherine Jackson’s pursuit of her faith was analogous to what she had been doing all along: housekeeping. Dirt and disorder were the enduring enemy in the household. Germ-free spiritual cleanliness was the goal in her religion. The Witnesses say you are not pure in heart unless you are pure in body. You must follow scriptural condemnation of fornicators, idolators, masturbators, adulterers and homosexuals...So while Katherine works to lead their souls to God, Joseph works to bend their minds, bodies and voices to his will for success. Not that Katherine objects: she has her own suppressed ambitions. The boys become singing and dancing machines. And little Michael becomes a diligent Witness.
For her children ever to have raised the issue of Katherine Jackson’s complicity with her husband’s drive for his sons’ stardom (and thus his own), and with his various cruelties—Jefferson writes, “He put on ghoulish masks and scared his children awake, tapping on their bedroom window, pretending to break in and standing over their beds, waiting for them to wake up screaming”—would have meant the total loss of family: she was the only emotional sustenance they knew. And who would object to the riches Joe Jackson’s management eventually yielded, despite his hard-line style? Two years after his fifth son, Michael, began to sing lead in the family band in 1966, they were signed to Motown Records, where they would remain for more than a decade. And despite their uneven career paths, none of the Jackson children would ever lack for financial security again.
4.
In his 1985 essay “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” Baldwin wrote of Michael Jackson:
