by Greil Marcus
The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services took custody of the children in 1985, charging the mother with lack of supervision. The children live in New York with the mother’s relatives.
Department officials refused to comment on the case, but sources said Billie Jean Jackson, who legally changed her name from Lavon Powlis, has made previous claims that other famous personalities fathered her children. None had resulted in a paternity suit, however.
—San Francisco Chronicle, 20 August 1987
Now the news was hard, and the newsbreaks never stopped: Jackson’s father and brothers, left behind so long before, forcing him to go before a public he had preferred not to meet; various would-be promoters fighting for the right to meet the Jacksons’ demand for a $40 million guarantee; the suspense over which cities would be visited and which passed over; and, finally, the stipulation that whoever wished to attend a Jacksons concert would be required to purchase, by mail order, no less than four tickets, for $120, with no assurance that the order would result in entry, since ten orders were expected for every available ticket, meaning that, while those who lost would eventually have their money refunded (minus a service charge), it would in the meantime be held and invested in three-month notes, with all accumulated interest reverting to the Jacksons. This was real life: dollars and cents. It was also a version of what Ulrike Meinhof called Konsumterror—the terrorism of consumption, the fear of not being able to get what is on the market, the agony of being last in line, or of lacking the money to join the line: to be a part of social life. All over the country, people became happily afraid of tickets they could not afford to buy, of tickets they might not be able to buy even if they could afford them, of tickets that would seal them as everything or nothing, of tickets that, as the humiliating, exciting process began, were not even on sale.
By 6 July 1984, when the Jacksons played the first show of their “Victory” tour, in Kansas City, Missouri—thirty years and a day after Elvis Presley made his first record in Memphis, Tennessee—Jacksonism had produced a system of commodification so complete that whatever and whoever was admitted to it instantly became a new commodity. People were no longer consuming commodities as such things are conventionally understood (records, videos, posters, books, magazines, key rings, earrings necklaces pins buttons wigs voice-alteration devices Pepsis t-shirts underwear hats scarves gloves jackets—and why were there no jeans called Billie Jeans?); they were consuming their own gestures of consumption. That is, they were consuming not a Tayloristic Michael Jackson, or any licensed facsimile, but themselves. Riding a Möbius strip of pure capitalism, that was the transubstantiation.
Jacksonism produced the image of a pop explosion, an event in which pop music crosses political, economic, geographic, and racial barriers; in which a new world is suggested, where new performances can momentarily supersede the hegemonic divisions of social life. Part and parcel of such an event is an avalanche of organized publicity, but also an epidemic of grassroots rumor mongering, a sense of everyday novelty so strong that the past seems irrelevant and the future already present. In all these ways, Jacksonism counted. Michael Jackson occupied the center of American cultural life: no other black artist had ever come close.
But a pop explosion not only links those otherwise separated by class, place, color, and money; it also divides. Confronted with performers as appealing and disturbing as Elvis Presley, the Beatles, or the Sex Pistols, with people who raise the possibility of living in a new way, some respond and some don’t—and this, if only for a moment, becomes a primary social fact. It became clear that Michael Jackson’s explosion was of a new kind.
It was the first pop explosion not to be judged by the subjective quality of the response it provoked, but to be measured by the number of objective commercial exchanges it elicited. Thus Michael Jackson was absolutely correct when he announced, at the height of his year, that his greatest achievement was a Guinness Book of World Records award certifying that Thriller had generated more top-ten singles (seven) than any other lp—and not, as might have been expected, “to have given people a new way of walking and a new way of talking,” or “to have proven that music is a universal language,” or even “to have demonstrated that with God’s help your dreams can come true.” To say such things would have suggested that in a pop explosion what is at stake is value: that such an event offers as its most powerful aesthetic and social gift the inescapable feeling that the fate of the world rests on how a given performance might turn out. And this was not what was happening. The pop explosions of Elvis, the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols had assaulted or subverted social barriers; Thriller crossed over them, like kudzu. Since Thriller never broke those barriers, but only made them briefly invisible, in Kansas City they once again became undeniable.
Michael Jackson’s most committed fans were black boys and girls under fifteen; in the past, he and his brothers played to audiences that were almost all black. Kansas City is 30 percent black, and as a city it looks integrated: in any given public place, both clientele and service personnel are black and white. In Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium, secured for a performance by the best-known black family in the world, the waiting crowd was almost all white. Following the logic of the commodity, which goes where the money is, which will take you there whether you want to go or not, the imperatives of Jacksonism—its insistence on exchange as a mechanism for the production of value, its $30 ticket price, in $120 blocks of four—did not divide the audience of the Jacksonist pop explosion from those who chose not to be part of it; those imperatives divided those who did choose to be part of it from each other. The poor, who could come up with the money to buy a copy of Thriller, were out. Some of the poor went without food, clothes, or medical care to raise the $120—for many, more than a month’s rent—but, given the mail-order system, which allowed those arranging the concerts to select fans by zip code, they were off the map. The Jacksonist pop explosion was official, which meant not simply that it was validated by the president of the United States. It was brought forth as a version of the official social reality, generated from Washington as ideology, and from Madison Avenue as language—an ideological language, in 1984, of political division and social exclusion, a glamorization of the new American fact that if you weren’t on top, you didn’t exist. “Winning,” read a Nestlé ad featuring an Olympic-style medal cast in chocolate, “is everything.” “We have one and only one ambition,” said Lee Iacocca for Chrysler. “To be the best. What else is there?” Thus the Victory tour—which originally boasted a more apocalyptic title: “Final Victory.”
IT DIDN’T WORK
It didn’t work. Days before the first show, LaDonna Jones, an eleven-year-old black girl from Lewisville, Texas, wrote an open letter to Michael Jackson in care of her local newspaper, and the letter was reprinted across the country. It wasn’t fair, she said. That was all it took. It was all over. The tour managers sent LaDonna Jones free tickets, but it was too late. Hidden in a uniform that likely weighed as much as he did (dark glasses, military jacket, pants above the ankles, laceless shoes, the uniform that in the Jacksonist explosion produced not the imitators who followed Elvis, the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols, imitators who found themselves forming groups to find out what it was they had to say, but only impersonators, young men emerging from hired limousines or rushing stages to be greeted by those who knew they were fakes with screams appropriate to the real thing), Jackson fought against the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, denouncing his own ticket scheme, promising to give money away, but no one ever beats a fable.
Given what it was supposed to be, the tour was dead. The show itself was dead from the first night: a stiff, impersonal, over-rehearsed supper club act blown up with lasers and sonic booms, which drew polite applause from people who had whooped as they passed through the turnstiles. In Kansas City the commodity stood on its head once again: Michael Jackson, who began his year as a dancer, turned into a piece of wood.
As the tour went on, so
me shows failed even to sell out; some were canceled for lack of interest. When all bills were in, the promoter had lost $18 million. On the terms established by the glare leading up to that first show, the tour went on in darkness—not in secret, but in oblivion; on the terms of the heaven of the spectacle, in hell. It ended months later, in the rain, in Los Angeles, unnoticed save for those who were there, who themselves went unnoticed by Michael Jackson and his brothers, who repeated their gestures and their patter lick for lick and line for line from Kansas City, as if nothing had happened, as if they had never been anywhere, as if everywhere was nowhere.
There were echoes; the long year was not quite over. If no longer a god, Michael Jackson remained a celebrity. In an act of celebrity noblesse oblige, along with Lionel Richie he wrote “We Are the World,” an anthem meant to raise money for African famine relief, and the song was, in its way, a masterpiece; recorded by a massed choir of pop superstars, it bypassed its putative objects, the starving Africans, and returned to those who made it. They were the world. They held out their hands: the record completed a circuit that erased all differences between performers and spectators, objectifying both in the face of objective good. With Thriller you could join social life simply by acknowledging it; here, through the simple act of buying the record, you could become part of the world. As the record played, the Africans ceased to starve. “As God has shown us,” Jackson and Richie wrote, not likely thinking of John of Leyden, “by turning stones to bread.”
Long after the Victory tour faded, “You’re a Whole New Generation,” the radio version of Jackson’s “Billie Jean” Pepsi commercial, remained on the air. A song about anxiety and guilt, dazzlingly produced, voices flying through discrete layers of sound, “Billie Jean” was the most seductive record Michael Jackson had ever made; at first, his willingness to immediately transform it into an advertising jingle seemed like a slap in the face to everyone who loved it. But months later, when the constant airplay bought for the commercial allowed it not just to replace but almost to erase the original, one could hear “You’re a Whole New Generation” as a new piece of music. It was tougher: the rhythm was harsh, the production not elliptical but direct, Jackson’s voice not pleading or confused but fierce. When he sang the line, “That choice is up to you,” dramatizing the consumer’s option of Pepsi versus Coke, he made it sound like a moral choice. Altogether he communicated wholeness where “Billie Jean” had broken into fragments, anger instead of restraint, certainty in place of doubt. That only made the buried, surely slip-of-the-tongue message all the more unsettling. “You’re a whole new generation,” Jackson sang as the fade began, “you’re lovin’ what they do . . .” Wait, wait—who was this “they”?
ONE NEGATION
One negation of spectacle is panic, people thrown back on themselves: the “kind of nervousness you’ve had to experience in order to comprehend it. Somebody only has to yell one loud word on the street and the crowds scatter through the doors of houses. It’s a run for your life. At that very moment, machine-gun fire can erupt from some hidden crack, or a hand grenade is dropped from a roof and its fragments tear open your guts. The street is jammed with merchants—it’s a street fair, the kind you usually see only in the country or at folk festivals. The fellows selling sausages, who have to carry hot tin boxes, can only get through the doorways awkwardly, pushing hard. They laugh, but they’re driven by the fear of death. The machine-gun fire can rattle down the street at any moment and bring all excitement to an end. The atmosphere of a great event hovers over the city . . .”
The city is Berlin, January 1919, in the midst of the Spartacist rising, though it could be San Francisco, January 1978, in Winterland, as Johnny Rotten sings “Bodies”—that’s the feeling. The description is by Richard Huelsenbeck, from his 1920 pamphlet Deutschland muss untergehen! (Germany Must Fall), subtitled “Memoirs of an old dadaist revolutionary,” though Huelsenbeck was not yet thirty. His friend George Grosz provided the illustrations: cartoons of the three pillars of the German ruling class—priest, businessman, militarist—rendered as monstrous cretins. “In those days, we were all ‘Dadaists,’ ” Grosz wrote in 1946 in A Little Yes and a Big No, his autobiography—even before dada he Americanized his given name out of hatred for Germany, but now, as an emigré, a new American trying to accept a society that seemed to have no language for the loathing that drove his work, he wanted to put it all behind him, to put quotes around the word, which, if it “meant anything at all, meant seething discontent, dissatisfaction and cynicism. Defeat and political ferment always give rise to that sort of movement. In a different age we might easily have been flagellants.”
On stage, railing obscenities on a woman who’s thrown her aborted fetus into a gutter (“She don’t want a baby that looks like that!”), then on himself, the father (“I don’t want a baby that looks like that!”), then becoming the fetus, crying back from the slime (“MUMMY!”), finally dissolving his tale into curses so driven they can refer back only to themselves (“Fuck this and fuck that fuck it all and fuck the brat”—it is appalling, a tidal wave of filth rises out of the gutter with the sound, you can’t get out of the way), Johnny Rotten is a flagellant—all of the flagellants’ hatred of the body is in his throat. “I drew and painted from a spirit of contradiction,” Grosz wrote, “and I tried by means of my work to show the world that it is hideous, sick and dishonest,” but Johnny Rotten is not trying: this is actually happening. And for all of his cool distance, Huelsenbeck too has a corpse in his mouth.
In late October 1918 the world war collapsed on Germany; sailors mutinied. Days later, the November revolution broke out across the country, and the war government of Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated. Spontaneously organized, self-legitimating councils of workers, soldiers, intellectuals, and professional revolutionaries filled the suddenly empty public space. People who before had only muttered secret curses now asked questions, said their names out loud, left the crowd for the front of the room, said strange things. To some, it looked as if the councils were ready to begin everything from the beginning—it looked that way especially in hindsight, after the councils were pushed aside by the legal-fiction government of social-democrat Friedrich Ebert, which set out to administer all possibility backward. Thus on 5 January 1919 Spartacist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, communists to the libertarian left of Lenin, called for a new revolt to save the November revolution from history; it lasted six days.
The rising was to Huelsenbeck precisely what, in rented halls in the spring and summer of 1918, he and his cronies in the Berlin Dada Club—Grosz, Walter Mehring, Johannes Baader, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann—had prophesied in microcosm. “WONDER OF WONDERS!” read one of their broadsides: “The Dadaist world can be realized in a single moment!” They signed it “Rhythms International.” Garbling already incomprehensible poetry with crazy gestures, singing ridiculous songs three at a time over pure noise, hurling abuse at the paying crowds, dissolving the ideologies of left and right into glossolalia, they tried to make the crowds strike back, to make the stopped clock strike twelve, to prove that time was up. Prancing on their stage, Huelsenbeck and Hausmann with monocles clamped into their left eye sockets, Grosz’s face covered with white pancake makeup, they tried to live out an old, orphaned metaphor as if it were not a metaphor at all. “The criticism” that deals with conditions in Germany, twenty-five-year-old Karl Marx wrote in 1843–44, in “Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,”
is involved in a hand-to-hand fight, and in such fights it does not matter what the opponent’s rank is, or whether he is noble or interesting: what matters is to hit him. The important thing is not to permit the German a single moment of self-deception or resignation. The actual burden must be made even more burdensome by creating an awareness of it. The humiliation must be increased by making it public . . . these petrified conditions must be made to dance by having their own tune sung to them! The people must be put in terror of themselves in order to give th
em courage.
That was the manifesto of Berlin dada. In 1920, looking back to the Spartacist revolt, Huelsenbeck saw those nights on stage in rented halls, where the Dance of Petrified Conditions was first orchestrated to the hit lieder “Their Own Tune”: “For the first time in history,” he wrote in another 1920 pamphlet, En avant dada, “the conclusion has been drawn from the question: ‘What is German culture?’ (Answer: Shit.) And this culture is attacked with all the instruments of satire, bluff, irony, and finally violence. And in a great common action.” It was a connection no one else could see: out of dada, revolution. Huelsenbeck set down his memories as if the outcome were still in doubt:
The atmosphere of a great event hovers over the city. You can see it: some only become human if death is breathing down their necks. They know how to primitively express their most primitive needs only when death brushes their sleeves. Then it is a joy to be alive. The bourgeois pig, who through the whole four years of murder cared only for his belly, can no longer escape the situation. He stands on his sturdy legs in the middle of hell. And hell is frenzied: it is a desire for life. Life is torture, life is fear, hatred, and vulgarity. Never has it been more so. Thus let life be praised. Through their nervousness, these people almost always turn into precious beasts. Their eyes, which always lodged in their sockets like pebbles, become attentive and active. They sense, darkly, that something is happening—something is happening outside their narrow, so-called God-given private family circle. On the corners, in the streets, everywhere a free space appears, they hack away at each other with poisonous speeches. A crowd quickly gathers around each dialogue. Here, dear reader, dramas are enacted. We find ourselves in Homeric times.
