Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  His problem was how to become bigger than the biggest; it was a matter of semantics. Paul McCartney attempted to reverse some Lennon/McCartney credits so they read McCartney/Lennon, denying their clean alphabetical consistency; in the mid-eighties Jackson took to calling himself the King of Pop. It didn’t seem to matter that the King had been coined some decades before. The King of Pop – that’ll do. Astonishingly, the media bought it – to a degree – presumably in hope that their fawning compliance might lead to an interview exclusive. But still this wasn’t enough, and a little while later Jackson’s people sent out a correction to the media stating that he was now to be referred to as the King of Rock, Pop and Soul, and they sailed hundred-foot-high statues of the deity down the Hudson, the Thames and the Danube to ram the point home. No ordinary pop star, this.

  If Bad had been hard to read, 1991’s Dangerous was full of seriously weird stuff in extremely plain view. On ‘Who Is It’ (UK no. 10, US no. 14) it became obvious that the megalomaniac hero set in stone and launched down the world’s major waterways was not an invention of a CBS marketing man: ‘I am the damned, I am the dead, I am the agony inside a dying head.’ Rolling Stone described Dangerous as ‘a man, no longer a man-child, confronting his well-publicized demons and achieving transcendence’. It was as if fans and critics alike were unwilling to hear what Jackson was, in his clenched, tortured vocal style, screaming at us.

  ‘Blood on the Dancefloor’, released in 1997, was his most remarkable late-period single. Not his best, but a distillation of his style: it was strained, blanched, dehumidified, purified to the point where almost the entire song, as it exists, is a vocal tic. Dah! Wheeep! Ehh! There’s a story bubbling underneath, one where Billie Jean returns, only this time her name is Susie and she’s no longer satisfied with claiming paternity; she wants to kill you. Like late-period Joe Meek, ‘Blood on the Dancefloor’ sounds like the product of someone on the far edge of sanity. But unlike the Buzz’s ‘You’re Holding Me Down’, ‘Blood on the Dancefloor’ was another UK number-one hit for the King of Rock, Pop and Soul.

  It would be his last. There had been allegations before, hush money paid, blind eyes turned, but when another child came forward with lurid tales of ‘Jesus juice’ at Neverland, it was the tipping point. Statues on the Danube and semantics couldn’t save him now, and Michael Jackson spent his final years as a hunted animal, humiliated by an ITV – ITV! – reporter, moving to Dubai, a King in exile. Even Elvis never had it this bad, and at least his records kept selling; the last single Michael Jackson released was called ‘One More Chance’, released in time for Christmas 2003. It entered the chart at five and dropped out of the Top 20 the following week, as if he was an indie band with a hardcore following of a few thousand, as if he was a mere mortal.

  Like Elvis he had been caged from an early age, a social scientific experiment – ‘How will endless fame and fortune affect the subject?’ Like Elvis there was a totality of pop to Michael Jackson – the look, the voice, the dance moves, the complete performance. And like Elvis, he was deemed irrelevant and useless at the time of his death. He wasn’t thought to have made a good record in over a decade. Although he was only fifty, no one seemed surprised when his heart gave out.

  The day after Michael Jackson died, the front page of The Times featured a picture of him before he left the bosom of Motown, before Thriller’s fifty zillion sales, before his hair caught fire, before the oxygen tent, the chimpanzee, the sleepovers. Before the rumours that went beyond anything J. M. Barrie ever dreamed up. Remember him this way, the picture said; remember the eleven-year-old genius.

  1 This muted reception was due to the choice of first single, a duet with Paul McCartney called ‘The Girl Is Mine’ which must have seemed a safe bet but was entirely unrepresentative and light years from the chic pleasures of Off the Wall. ‘Billie Jean’ was released as a single the following March, the same month that, dressed in a soon-to-be-ubiquitous black-sequinned jacket, single sequinned glove and black fedora, Jackson performed the moonwalk for the first time on a televised Motown anniversary party. At which point his career went supernova.

  2 Bad was a letdown, but it had a few career highlights. ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’ was a sweet two-step treat that could’ve come from a forties musical; ‘Smooth Criminal’ had a slippery Sir Hiss of a bassline and a catchy, oblique hook – ‘Annie, are you OK?’ – that rendered it the album’s one instant classic. ‘Man in the Mirror’, which failed to even reach the UK Top 20 as a single, was a piece of vapid self-help that somehow ended up being the song most associated with Michael in the immediate aftermath of his death, recharting at number two.

  52

  HIGHS IN THE MID-EIGHTIES:

  PRINCE AND MADONNA

  He only knew her for a little while

  But he had grown accustomed to her smile.

  She had the cutest ass he’d ever seen …

  Prince, ‘Girls and Boys’, 1986

  Q: Why did you decide to go into music?

  A: Because music is the main vector of celebrity. When it’s a success, its impact is as strong as a bullet hitting the target.

  Madonna, Smash Hits, April 1987

  Twenty-four-hour music television, the brainchild of a TV-spawned pop star, the Monkees’ Michael Nesmith, began broadcasting in August 1981 with the Buggles’ ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’. MTV was everywhere within eighteen months, marking the beginning of the end of Top of the Pops’ reign of unimpeachable power in Britain. If new pop and post-punk had gleefully and rapidly rewritten rules, taking music forward in a constant revolution of purpose and invention, their aftermath was an era of momentum for its own sake. Things got ever shinier, greed and need replaced innovation: conservatism was a force and a problem both outside and within eighties pop.1

  Two new names appeared in this froth of newness. Both stood out from the crowd, both clearly demanded attention, worship, devotion: Prince and Madonna. These were names that couldn’t have existed at the dawn of modern pop, names that baited royalty and religion.

  Both based their sound on electronically processed dance music, allowing them the opportunity to change style from record to record in a way that seemed innovative, one step ahead of the pack, like Dylan or Bowie before them. Both had egos the size of mansions. Both had a new hunger for success, for money. Both used MTV to become stars, and both used movies (Desperately Seeking Susan, Purple Rain) to make the jump from stardom to superstardom. Sex! Religion! Gigolo! Whore! Purple! Cone bra! No one could accuse Prince or Madonna of underplaying their hands. And, eventually, both challenged Michael Jackson’s place at the very top of the pop empire; by the eighties’ end Madonna had (arguably) toppled him in the popularity stakes, and Prince had (certainly) creatively eased past Jackson with the most streamlined, silver-finned R&B of the decade. These were their similarities. In other respects they were quite different.

  Prince had first appeared with the itchy falsetto disco of ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’ (US no. 11 ’79) and was presented – not least by himself – as a teenage prodigy. He grew up in the largely white city of Minneapolis: ‘The radio was dead, the discos was dead, the ladies was kind of dead. If I wanted to make some noise, if I wanted to turn anything out, I was gonna have to get something together. Which was what we did. We put together a few bands and turned it into Uptown.’

  He wanted to be everybody’s lover and – unlike most disco acts – was quite at home with lyrics about oral sex, incest and Dorothy Parker. This set him apart. By 1983 he was channelling Sly Stone and the Beach Boys on ‘Little Red Corvette’ (US no. 6), and a year later Newsweek was calling him ‘the Prince of Hollywood’ as Purple Rain – starring Prince as the Kid – grossed $80 million.

  Prince was hyperactive, more productive than any major star since the Beatles; some of his most commercial songs – ‘Manic Monday’, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ – were tossed off as demos for others less prodigiously gifted to take to number one. There was always more in the locker.


  Madonna, on the other hand, was the most grasping pop star in history. She was all Blonde Ambition, a triumph of the will. If her roots were always showing (suburban, Italian American, Catholic), it was still almost impossible to feel her soul. Rosaries were for show, crucifixes were worn like candy necklaces; if she ever went to confession it didn’t come across in her lyrics. She was a highly sexual, strong woman commodifying her own sexuality. She was a billboard. She was a material girl and proud of it.

  And if you listen to The Immaculate Collection it succeeds on almost every level. Like Lesley Gore before her – with Quincy Jones, Jack Nitzsche, Thom Bell – Madonna used the best young producers (John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez, Stephen Bray, William Orbit, Stuart Price) to get to the top and stay at the top. Each step was perfectly conceived, each single a stop on the way to her ultimate destination – iconhood. ‘Holiday’ and ‘Lucky Star’, in 1983, were instant club classics, floor-fillers for the masses, with a delicate ache to take ‘just one day out of line’; 1984’s ‘Like a Virgin’ and ‘Material Girl’ (the video for which had her playing Marilyn Monroe for the first time) were pubescent pop, there to antagonise and irritate, and to set up her persona; ‘Into the Groove’ (her first UK and US number one in ’85) was the invitation for everyone to partake, with its cool, crooked finger – ‘I’m waiting!’ And the world succumbed. A few career-hardening singles later, Madonna could take eighteen months out and return with an event single, ‘Like a Prayer’, which (because it had to be) was her best yet. At this point, in 1989, she owned pop, and it was hers to lose.

  The role-playing had been there from the start. ‘There was a real transformation,’ said former schoolfriend Kim Drayton. ‘In the sophomore year she was a cheerleader with smiles on her face and long hair; very attractive; then by her senior year she had short hair. She was in the thespian society, and she didn’t shave her legs any more, you know, like all of us did, and she didn’t shave her armpits. Everyone was like, “Oh, what happened to her?”’ Dancing became her escape route. The eldest girl in a family of eight children, her mother had died when she was just five. Her dad had been a defence engineer for General Dynamics; he worked long hours, and Madonna didn’t get on with her stepmother, who made her help out changing nappies. ‘When all my friends were out playing, I felt like I had all these adult responsibilities … I saw myself as the quintessential Cinderella,’ she said. So she danced in the backyard to Motown 45s with her black schoolfriends, and she went to gay clubs in Detroit where she didn’t feel men looked at her like a hard-ass. By the time she arrived in New York and hung out at the Danceteria in 1982, she had the moves if not yet the look or the voice.

  Three years on she recorded ‘Into the Groove’ and, for me, it was her peak. The most sublime example of pop on pop since ‘Do You Believe in Magic’, it was all about saturating your mind and freeing your body, a three-minute, unrelenting chime of joy: ‘Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free’. She came from nothing, a real-life Cinderella, and she made some of the greatest records of the eighties, became a true legend. It’s ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ with an exceptionally happy ending.

  So why do I struggle to love Madonna? On one level it was her lack of specialness – take away the drive and she’s fine, she’s good. She’s as good as Kim Wilde. Her voice had a squeaky cuteness, a predatory squeaky cuteness that contradicts itself. On another, less personal level, she was a cultural sponge. Once Madonna co-opted a fashion, a look, then it belonged to her. Try imagining anyone who has emerged in her wake pulling off the Monroe look – even someone as big as Christina Aguilera, Kylie Minogue or Lady Gaga: immediately you think, it’s a bit Madonna. In this respect, she’s been an awful role model for women2 and has done a lot of harm without giving much back.

  Prince was always more playful, at once generous and controlling, a benevolent dictator – the Tito of pop. He started a label called Paisley Park, writing and producing for the likes of the Time, Sheila E. and Apollonia, the busty co-star of Purple Rain; then he spent $10 million building a white modernist Paisley Park studio complex. His jammy finger marks were all over the label’s output, at every level. For the cover photo of the Time’s ‘Ice Cream Castle’ he instructed Paul Peterson to wear an orange suit. He also wanted Mark Cardenas to wear blackface, which was an affectation too far. According to Peterson, ‘He said, “If you wear blackface people will notice you.” Well, he would have been right there.’

  Unlike Madonna, Prince was all contradictions: black funk and white rock, the sound of the future pilfering from the past’s cabinet of curiosities, and – like Little Richard before him – unending lust and adherence to the Bible. This was fully realised on 1984’s international breakthrough album, the soundtrack to Purple Rain. It was put in capsule form on ‘Darling Nikki’, a violent grind of a track that referenced female masturbation but, if played backwards (Prince had done his Beatles homework), the fade included the spoken lines ‘Hello. How are you? I’m fine, because I know the Lord is coming soon.’

  It must have caused a few punters who had bought the album for ‘Take Me with U’ to go bright red. Purple Rain was like a condensed CV, each track pointing in a different possible future direction, splendidly and unquestionably announcing the arrival of a legend. The first single taken from it, ‘When Doves Cry’, was also his first US number one (UK no. 4) and, just for larks, it didn’t include a bassline.3 ‘Take Me with U’ was eighties Merseybeat – as if Prince was seeing Purple Rain as an update of A Hard Day’s Night – dressed up with some gorgeous lovelorn strings and a dynamic, slightly disturbing, Brian Wilson-like intro and coda. ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ (another US number one) was synth glam, a varispeed ‘Rock and Roll Part 2’ in double time, its lyrics indecipherable beyond a camp religious intro, panting sounds and a clarion call of ‘Let’s go crazy! Let’s get nuts!’ The title track was a cold, lengthy plod that resurrected the emotional mudbath of John Lennon’s ‘Mother’ and the dead-handed thud of the Band; a parody of white rock’s self-pity, it may not be a coincidence that this is the song that brings Prince’s character, the Kid, deliverance in the movie.

  Purple Rain spent a dozen weeks at the top of the US album chart. Prince’s place at the table was confirmed when the British press gave him the kind of nickname which they reserve for only the biggest pop stars, the ones who can rise no higher: Macca Wacky Thumbsaloft, Dame David Bowie, Wacko Jacko, Madge and Ponce. You didn’t need the ire of the Sun or the National Enquirer when Smash Hits was there to remind superstars that no one, but no one, is untouchable.

  With the Kid and his busted-up success story, Prince showed a sleight of hand not seen since David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. Purple Rain was the pop event of the year, and it was a skin he could easily shed. The sequel, 1985’s Around the World in a Day, was built on a bed of the romantic woozy strings from ‘Take Me with U’; from its psychedelically ornate cover on, it was the Lovin’ Spoonful put through a Paisley Park filter; the title track and ‘Raspberry Beret’ were sunny-afternoon high jinks, sweet utopian pop. No wig-outs or workouts, just marshmallows. It wasn’t given a major push, as if Warner Brothers didn’t think it could hold the same crossover appeal as Purple Rain. Critically and commercially, in the conservative environment of the mid-eighties, it felt like Prince was being upbraided for not giving us Purple Rain 2, for going too far. None of the singles from it even reached the Top 20 in Britain. We should all hang our heads.

  Prince shrugged, moved on, and brought two new cohorts to the fore in 1986. ‘It is true I record very fast,’ he told MTV. ‘It goes even quicker now the girls help me … the girls meaning Wendy and Lisa.’ Guitarist Wendy Melvoin could barely contain her pride in Rolling Stone: ‘I’m sorry, no one can come close to what the three of us have together when we’re playing in the studio. Nobody!’ She was right. By the time of Parade in 1986, and its companion movie Under the Cherry Moon, Prince was untouchable. He could indulge his fantasies of upper-class English girls on screen (Francesca Annis and a you
ng Kristin Scott Thomas were the love interest in Under the Cherry Moon) and still come over as impish rather than creepy. He’d try and be the romantic suitor, try to keep his flies zipped up, but always had that glint in his eye within a matter of seconds. ‘Girls and Boys’ (UK no. 11 ’86) was great, but ‘Kiss’ (US no. 1, UK no. 6 ’86) was greater, a super-parched dancer containing killer eighties map refs: ‘you don’t have to watch Dynasty to have an attitude’. Within a year Prince released a double album, Sign ‘O’ the Times,4 which contained no filler at all – he had found Paisley Park hired hands who could keep up with him, egg him on to greater heights of screwball abandon. ‘Starfish and Coffee’? And a side order of ham. ‘Wear something peach or black,’ he asked fans before his 1987 shows. With a new addition, the writhing dancer Cathy ‘Cat’ Glover, he made the Sign ‘O’ the Times tour the most spectacular of the eighties, pushing her up against a giant silver heart during ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’ which then tipped up, dumping the two lovebirds backstage. He didn’t miss a single beat. And, again, again, he moved on.

  Madonna also kept plugging away at a parallel film career, though she didn’t have a predilection for English gents with country houses to blame for the box-office failure of Who’s That Girl and Shanghai Surprise.5 Given their similar tastes, it’s no coincidence that Madonna’s best album, 1989’s Like a Prayer, bore a heavy Prince footprint. It was a tightrope-walking blend of the spiritual and carnal; Prince aside, no one had pulled this stuff off since Elvis. There was even a duet between the two pretenders to Jacko’s throne (the crisp ‘Love Song’), which must have made the King of Pop frown just a little.