You’d probably find it a tall order to think about Michael Jackson, the artist, without thinking about Michael Jackson, the eccentric. But for the sake of this blogpost, I’m going to focus on the former rather than the latter. (The news reports are all going overtime about the latter, so it’s not like I’ll be missing anything.)

You can divide Jackson’s career into two phases. Part One was as an underage prodigy, performing with his brothers in the Jackson 5ive, during the late ’60s and early ’70s. You could consider them the Jonas Brothers of their day, not exactly one-hit wonders (ABC being their one major hit, but I’ll Be There and Ben didn’t exactly fall off the charts either) but you wouldn’t really expect them to be significant hit machines next to, say, the Commodores or the Pointer Sisters.

But that prodigy phase was important because it gave Jackson credibility for his second phase, and that’s the one that really established him as a bona fide major superstar. Because the heyday of Jackson’s solo career happened to coincide with the establishment of MTV as one of the major players in American music.

Think of Michael Jackson’s ’80s hits, and you cannot help but think about his visual persona, the one that MTV became so good at presenting: the tangled hair, the red jacket, the bejangled single glove. And the moves.

Almost all of his songs during this period were songs he danced to, in his videos, with lots of energy and controlled choreography. Beat It. Bad. Thriller. Even The Way You Make Me Feel had a beat that made you move whenever you heard it on the dance floor. Movements looked good on the concert stage, but it was also captured in the scripted music format that MTV became famous for, establishing that cable network as a bona fide artistic medium.

Something else about those songs: if you compare them with today’s corporate, bottom-line, market-driven tunes that emerged out of the ’90s and still get churned out by Miley Cyrus and her generation, you’ll realize that Jackson’s work holds up incredibly well, becoming what musicians would call “standards” alongside the best of Sinatra or Billy Joel or even Elvis. The best of Jackson’s stuff doesn’t rely too overtly on the synthesizer (the exception being Thriller, and that can be forgiven because a brass section can be pretty expensive), but it’s Jackson’s voice work that carries the lyrics through and holds the tune, making it memorable in the listener’s mind.

Was Jackson the greatest superstar of the MTV era? I’d have to say no; in terms of artistic output, I think he got outstripped by Madonna, and in terms of experimentation, I think Prince has the edge. But his music has resonance which, I think, will last longer than the private reputation. Michael Jackson’s music, preserved on CD, VHS and DVD, pretty much guarantees that Michael Jackson will live on.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 09:49 and is filed under R.I.P.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.