Jackson’s choreography of his religious joy, as he transformed the Grammy stage into a sanctuary, was infectious, and his audience, his faithful congregation, responded in the ecstatic glee of emotional abandon to his every move, groan, and gesture. Jackson exhorted them by telling them that everyone has to make a change, that the black man has to make a change, and that the white man has to make a change. As he dropped to his knees yet another time, the twenty-person choir moved ever closer to him, cutting off the stage and reducing it to a diamond, both in its shape and substance. It was priceless and invaluable because Jackson was projecting the power of African-American spirituality forward and having it rearticulated back to him in the reverberating emotion of the audience and the escalating ecstasy of his singers. Jackson went down, like a martyr figure delivering a messianic message, sinking to his knees that his audience might, as he repeatedly implored them, “stand up, stand up, stand up.” Jackson then resorted to his best exhortative deep-throated vocal to release a volcanic melisma and syllabic repetition of the word you, in “you-you-you-ou-ow-ow got to make a change,” catalyzing a tumultuous response in the Grammy audience.
At the consummation of his homily in song, Jackson whispered, “Make that change,” and his congregation came to their feet, thundering their applauded amen at Jackson, yielding their total love and trust to his expressed desire to change the world by their changing themselves. The camera displayed a felicitous complicity in the spirit of the moment and scouted the audience for the converted and the committed, finding them scattered throughout the auditorium’s scene of pandemonium.
Quincy Jones was clapping in recognition of his young charge’s genius and in graceful acknowledgment of their amazingly productive and satisfying partnership over the last decade. Prince, typically unsmiling, was nonetheless on his feet, giving Jackson his due. Jody Watley was smiling broadly and clapping with joy. Behind her was Anita Baker, raising her hand in testimony to the spirit’s presence and ejaculating an incendiary “yeah” in verbal testimony to her spiritual enthusiasm. There, too, was Little Richard, a cultural icon himself, whose face was brushed with a deep and clear joy, perhaps vicariously exulting in Jackson’s glorious fulfillment, a fulfillment denied Little Richard, a real pillar of rock ‘n’ roll. (Jackson would return the joy later, as he was the first to his feet when Little Richard playfully chided the recording academy for not recognizing his original genius by awarding him a Grammy.) Finally there were the Houstons, Whitney and Cissy, exhibiting in their individual persons what Jackson combined: powerful forms of traditional, black, gospel-inflected music wed to crossover-rich, hookladen music supported by diluted but still driving African-American beats.
Jackson’s performance revealed a crucial aspect of his vocation: a theatricalization of spirituality, a festive choreography of religious reality that is often present in his live performances. The manner in which Jackson is able to evoke a virtually religious response from even secular concert attenders, a response that transcends mere emotional expression or simple cathartic release, is astonishing. He articulates a vision of the world that, although it includes idiosyncratic and fantastical elements, nonetheless communicates powerful religious truths and moral themes that are expressed in his riveting music and videos.
Michael Jackson seizes the parameters of the artistically possible and expands them to dimensions beyond most of our imaginations. He increases the influence of black religious experience and practices by articulating through televisual media his brand of African-American secular spirituality and institution-transcending piety, rife with appropriate religious and cultural imagery. He also transforms the stage into a world-extending sanctuary on which he enacts rituals of religious ecstasy, moral courage, and spiritual passion that mediate substantive concerns about love, peace, and justice, simultaneously subverting cultural consensus about what constitutes the really “bad” and the “good.” He embodies a postmodern version of African-American secular spirituality that has the opportunity to spread its influence into the next century and to ensure the presence in the larger American and world culture of some of the most poignant and creative art developed from an enormously rich and resourceful tradition.
Thirty-Four
BE LIKE MIKE? MICHAEL JORDAN AND THE PEDAGOGY OF DESIRE
This chapter on Jordan was first published in 1993 for the journal Cultural Studies, edited by renowned cultural studies scholar, and my dear friend, Lawrence Grossberg. I have written quite a bit about Jordan over the years, taking the measure of his social and political impact, as well as his athletic genius. In this chapter, I probe the racial and cultural dimensions of Jordan’s achievements, placing him in the context of black athletic aspiration during the twentieth century. For much of the past century, black sports had an unavoidably symbolic and representative character; many athletes were social as well as athletic pioneers, shattering barriers for the progress of the entire race. I even take a stab at explaining Jordan’s phenomenal ability in physical as well as metaphoric terms. I also specify the manner in which Jordan’s is a black game—with his playing style revealing postmodern elements of black cultural creativity. Unlike many fans, I was happy to see Jordan un-retire for the second time, if for no other reason than he proved that “old” guys could still perform at unprecedented levels and show the young bucks a thing or two. I took my son to see his first “last” appearance as an All-Star in New York’s Madison Square Garden, and again, in presumably his final “last” All-Star appearance in Atlanta in 2003. And later that year I watched Jordan lace up his sneakers for his final game in Philadelphia. Athletically, and culturally too, his likes will hardly be seen again. This chapter tries to capture his unique impact on his game and our world.
MICHAEL JORDAN IS PERHAPS THE BEST, AND BEST-KNOWN, athlete in the world today. He has attained unparalleled cultural status because of his extraordinary physical gifts, his marketing as an icon of race-transcending American athletic and moral excellence, and his mastery of a sport that has become the metaphoric center of black cultural imagination. But the Olympian sum of Jordan’s cultural meaning is greater than the fluent parts of his persona as athlete, family man, and marketing creation. There is hardly cultural precedence for the character of his unique fame, which has blurred the line between private and public, between personality and celebrity, and between substance and symbol. Michael Jordan stands at the breach between perception and intuition, his cultural meaning perennially deferred from closure because his career symbolizes possibility itself, gathering into its unfolding narrative the shattered remnants of previous incarnations of fame and yet transcending their reach.
Jordan has been called “the new DiMaggio” (Boers 1990, 30) and “Elvis in high-tops,” indications of the Herculean cultural heroism he has come to embody. There is even a religious element to the near worship of Jordan as a cultural icon of invincibility, as he has been called a “savior of sorts,” “basketball’s high priest” (Bradley 1991–1992, 60), and “more popular than Jesus,” except with “better endorsement deals” (Vancil 1992, 51). But the quickly developing cultural canonization of Michael Jordan provokes reflection about the contradictory uses to which Jordan’s body is put as a seminal cultural text and ambiguous symbol of fantasy, and the avenues of agency and resistance available especially to black youth who make symbolic investment in Jordan’s body as a means of cultural and personal possibility, creativity, and desire.
I understand Jordan in the broadest sense of the term to be a public pedagogue, a figure of estimable public moral authority whose career educates us about productive and disenabling forms of knowledge, desire, interest, consumption, and culture in three spheres: the culture of athletics that thrives on skill and performance, the specific expression of elements of African-American culture, and the market forces and processes of commodification expressed by, and produced in, advanced capitalism. By probing these dimensions of Jordan’s cultural importance, we may gain a clearer understanding of his function i
n American society.
Athletic activity has shaped and reflected important sectors of American society. First, it produced communities of common athletic interest organized around the development of highly skilled performance. The development of norms of athletic excellence evidenced in sports activities cemented communities of participants who valorized rigorous sorts of physical discipline in preparation for athletic competition and in expressing the highest degree of athletic skill. Second, it produced potent subcultures that inculcated in their participants norms of individual and team accomplishment. Such norms tapped into the bipolar structures of competition and cooperation that pervade American culture. Third, it provided a means of reinscribing Western frontier myths of exploration and discovery-as-conquest onto a vital sphere of American culture. Sports activities can be viewed in part as the attempt to symbolically ritualize and metaphorically extend the ongoing quest for mastery of environment and vanquishing of opponents within the limits of physical contest.
Fourth, athletic activity has served to reinforce habits and virtues centered in collective pursuit of communal goals that are intimately connected to the common good, usually characterized within athletic circles as “team spirit.” The culture of sport has physically captured and athletically articulated the mores, folkways, and dominant visions of American society, and at its best it has been conceived as a means of symbolically embracing and equitably pursuing the just, the good, the true, and the beautiful. And finally, the culture of athletics has provided an acceptable and widely accessible means of white male bonding. For much of its history, American sports activity has reflected white patriarchal privilege, and it has been rigidly defined and socially shaped by rules that restricted the equitable participation of women and people of color.
Black participation in sports in mainstream society, therefore, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Of course, there have existed venerable traditions of black sports, such as the Negro (baseball) Leagues, which countered the exclusion of black bodies from white sports. The prohibition of athletic activity by black men in mainstream society severely limited publicly acceptable forms of displaying black physical prowess, an issue that had been politicized during slavery and whose legacy extended into the middle of the twentieth century. Hence, the potentially superior physical prowess of black men, validated for many by the long tradition of slave labor that built American society, helped reinforce racist arguments about the racial regimentation of social space and the denigration of the black body as an inappropriate presence in traditions of American sport.
Coupled with this fear of superior black physical prowess was the notion that inferior black intelligence limited the ability of blacks to perform excellently in those sports activities that required mental concentration and agility. These two forces—the presumed lack of sophisticated black cognitive skills and the fear of superior black physical prowess—restricted black sports participation to thriving but financially handicapped subcultures of black athletic activity. Later, of course, the physical prowess of the black body would be acknowledged and exploited as a supremely fertile zone of profit as mainstream athletic society literally cashed in on the symbolic danger of black sports excellence.
Because of its marginalized status within the regime of American sports, black athletic activity often acquired a social significance that transcended the internal dimensions of game, sport, and skill. Black sport became an arena not only for testing the limits of physical endurance and forms of athletic excellence—while reproducing or repudiating ideals of American justice, goodness, truth, and beauty—but it also became a way of ritualizing racial achievement against socially imposed barriers to cultural performance.
In short, black sports activity often acquired a heroic dimension, as viewed in the careers of figures such as Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Althea Gibson, Wilma Rudolph, Muhammad Ali, and Arthur Ashe. Black sports heroes transcended the narrow boundaries of specific sports activities and garnered importance as icons of cultural excellence, symbolic figures who embodied social possibilities of success denied to other people of color. But they also captured and catalyzed the black cultural fetishization of sport as a means of expressing black cultural style, as a means of valorizing craft as a marker of racial and self-expression, and as a means of pursuing social and economic mobility.
It is this culture of black athletics, created against the background of social and historical forces that shaped American athletic activity, that helped produce Jordan and help explain the craft that he practices. Craft is the honing of skill by the application of discipline, time, talent, and energy toward the realization of a particular cultural or personal goal. American folk cultures are pervaded by craft, from the production of cultural artifacts that express particular ethnic histories and traditions to the development of styles of life and work that reflect and symbolize a community’s values, virtues, and goals. Michael Jordan’s skills within basketball are clearly phenomenal, but his game can only be sufficiently explained by understanding its link to the fusion of African-American cultural norms and practices, and the idealization of skill and performance that characterize important aspects of American sport. I will identify three defining characteristics of Jordan’s game that reflect the influence of African-American culture on his style of play.
First, Jordan’s style of basketball reflects the will to spontaneity. I mean here the way in which historical accidence is transformed into cultural advantage, and the way acts of apparently random occurrence are spontaneously and imaginatively employed by Africans and African-Americans in a variety of forms of cultural expression. When examining Jordan’s game, this feature of African-American culture clearly functions in his unpredictable eruptions of basketball creativity. It was apparent, for instance, during game two of the National Basketball Association 1991 championship series between Jordan’s Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers, in a shot that even Jordan ranked in his all-time top ten (McCallum 1991, 32). Jordan made a drive toward the lane, gesturing with his hands and body that he was about to complete a patent Jordan dunk shot with his right hand. But when he spied defender Sam Perkins slipping over to oppose his shot, he switched the ball in midair to his left hand to make an underhanded scoop shot instead, which immediately became known as the “levitation” shot. Such improvisation, a staple of the will to spontaneity, allows Jordan to expand his vocabulary of athletic spectacle, which is the stimulation of a desire to bear witness to the revelation of truth and beauty compressed into acts of athletic creativity.
Second, Jordan’s game reflects the stylization of the performed self. This is the creation and projection of a sport persona that is an identifying mark of diverse African-American creative enterprises, from the complexly layered jazz experimentation of John Coltrane, the trickstering and signifying comedic routines of Richard Pryor, and the rhetorical ripostes and oral significations of rapper Kool Moe Dee. Jordan’s whole game persona is a graphic depiction of the performed self as flying acrobat, resulting in his famous moniker “Air Jordan.” Jordan’s performed self is rife with the language of physical expressiveness: head moving, arms extending, hands waving, tongue wagging, and legs spreading.
He has also developed a resourceful repertoire of dazzling dunk shots that further express his performed self and that have garnered him a special niche within the folklore of the game: the cradle jam, rock-a-baby, kiss the rim, lean in, and the tomahawk. In Jordan’s game, the stylization of a performed self has allowed him to create a distinct sports persona that has athletic as well as economic consequences, while mastering sophisticated levels of physical expression and redefining the possibilities of athletic achievement within basketball.
Finally, there is the subversion of perceived limits through the use of edifying deception, which in Jordan’s case centers around the space/time continuum. This moment in African-American cultural practice is the ability to flout widely understood boundaries through mesmerization and alchemy, a subversion of common percep
tions of the culturally or physically possible through the creative and deceptive manipulation of appearance. Jordan is perhaps most famous for his alleged “hang time,” the uncanny ability to remain suspended in midair longer than other basketball players while executing his stunning array of improvised moves. But Jordan’s “hang time” is technically a misnomer and can be more accurately attributed to Jordan’s skillful athletic deception, his acrobatic leaping ability, and his intellectual toughness in projecting an aura of uniqueness around his craft than to his defiance of gravity and the laws of physics.
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 73
