Much older than MTV, music videos have been around since the sixties, when they were introduced as a promotional tool within the music industry—a way to sell record executives on the viability of the music they were spending precious lucre producing. More often than not, these videos were boring and superfluous to the music, featuring bands pantomiming at singing and playing their instruments as the studio recording played.
In the early days, MTV relied on these clips almost exclusively. The fledgling network was unable to convince wary record executives that they could deliver an audience substantial enough to warrant spending additional money on promotion. That all changed with the video for “Billie Jean”, with its cinematic flourishes and hints of a larger story behind the music. “Billie Jean” brought new attention to MTV and the music video format itself, proving that videos could not only be great for increasing an artist’s visibility, but also might just be a viable art form in their own right.
So when it came time to produce a video for Thriller’s second single, “Beat It,” Epic’s execs gave Jackson a wide berth and a good deal more cash to work with. The resulting video is positively cinematic, its drama and elaborate staging only eclipsed by future Jackson videos.
The video for “Beat It” goes way beyond promoting the song, it provides context for the lyric, with a narrative much more elaborate than Jackson’s straightforward verses can even hint at. Regardless of what fans thought “Beat It” was about before seeing the music video, afterwards one could only conclude that it was about gang violence.
Heavily inspired by West Side Story, the video’s tale of rival gangs has all the moody atmosphere of classic film noir, updated for the early 80s and achieving a level of tension absent even from most Hollywood films of the era. Unlike other videos of the time, “Beat It” relies heavily on story, developing the distinct characteristics of both gangs, using the song’s lyric as a skeletal narration, thrusting them toward their inevitable face-off.
If the video for, and Motown performance of, “Billie Jean” focused solely on Jackson’s magnetic charisma, letting the details of a larger story linger on the periphery, “Beat It” inverts this relationship, succeeding despite Jackson spending little time onscreen—and even less time dancing.
Quite comfortable with the camera, Jackson makes the most of his limited appearances, narrating the story while delivering a charismatic performance. He sulks on his bed, concerned and frustrated. He lurks in the pool halls and greasy spoons, looking for the rival gangs, throwing in the occasional choreographed flourish—suggesting dance where there isn’t any. He sings to the camera, in close-up, with an almost uncomfortable intimacy.
Director Bob Giraldi brings the proceedings a distinctly cinematic flavor, shooting through drastic lighting that immerses the actors in an unflattering, almost brutal light or hides them in enveloping shadows. All except for Michael, of course, who’s soft lit as if he was a studio-era Hollywood starlet.
Coming just after the one-two punch of the Motown performance and accompanying video for “Billie Jean”, “Beat It” proves that Jackson was a different breed of artist, one just as comfortable working in a visual medium as a musical one. And, as much as his music paints him as a son of soul, Jackson’s videos would seem to suggest he considered himself just as much an heir of Broadway and the golden era of the Hollywood musical.
Giraldi’s direction continuously emphasizes these connections, wrapping with a final shot that alludes to both. As Jackson leads the gangs through the final choreographed steps, the camera pulls back through one of the parking garage’s doors, framing their movements in a way that invokes both a theater’s stage and movie screen.
The single and video for “Beat It” also introduced a theme that would become central to Jackson’s work in the coming years: his obsession with flaunting a kind of hyper-masculinity. Whereas Off the Wall was a work of boyish enthusiasm and found Jackson playing with the casual, ambiguous sexuality and upbeat, lighthearted rhythms of disco culture; Thriller’s biggest hits embraced the darker, more aggressive impulses of funk and rock. Producer Quincy Jones deftly sets Jackson’s rich, irresistible hooks against foreboding, synthesized soundscapes, creating a sonic blueprint for much of Jackson’s work through Dangerous.
The video for “Beat It” echoes Jackson’s rough, new sound through the tough guise of its rival gangs, who spend much of the video grimacing and lurking in the shadows. When the gangs join Jackson in the video’s climatic dance, it seems a shock even to them, as their bodies transition from the stiff, hardened posture of street toughs to the lithe, fluid movements of dancers.
That Jackson’s textual preoccupation with aggressive masculinity came after his first attempts to feminize his appearance through plastic surgery seems hardly coincidental, instead exposing the first of many fissures that would eventually fragment and shatter his public image and persona.
The chasm between the sexless, race-less, benevolent Michael Jackson of “Man in the Mirror”, “We are the World” and the macho, “Bad” Michael Jackson would widen throughout his career, becoming irreconcilable by Dangerous, which featured dark, foreboding tracks like “Jam”, “Why You Wanna Trip on Me?” mingling with “Heal the World” and “Keep the Faith”.
7.27.2009
The Lonesome King: “Billie Jean” performance at Motown 25: Yesterday, Today & Forever
Coming five months after Thriller’s release, and a month after the music video for "Billie Jean" broke MTV’s color barrier, fifty million Americans tuned in to watch Jackson perform the song during Motown’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration.
The first thing that jumps out about this astonishing performance is that Jackson is clearly lip-synching to the studio recording. Later artists—from Madonna to Britney Spears and Ashley Simpson—would be chastised for not singing in live or televised performances, yet Jackson remained untouched by such charges. Watching the video, it becomes obvious why no one questioned Jackson’s singing (or lack thereof)—his appearance is so clearly not about the song, but the performance of it.
Jackson appears alone on the stage, without the distraction of a backing band or the troupe of back-up dancers he would embrace post-Thriller. He strikes a sideways pose just before the music begins—the crowd already on its feet, screaming—then begins thrusting his pelvis in time as the drum beat drops.
More like a Broadway actor than a soul singer, Jackson’s approach is largely performative, acting out the song’s lyrical story of dark seduction through his dancing. He stalks the stage, mimicking meeting the titular character on the dance floor, before moving to the side of the stage for the song’s bridge. “People always told me/be careful what you do/don’t go around breaking young girls hearts”, and he raises his eyes and hand to the sky, in a knowing plead, as if begging God to take back the mistakes he has made with Billie.
But more than this, Jackson’s movements embody the music’s rhythms and tension, with whiplash kicks and head-snaps providing a visual illustration of the song’s mid-verse sound effects. His moves go from an almost liquid fluidity to a mechanic stiffness and back again in just a few beats, as he plays to both the smooth flourishes of the guitar and synthesizers and the insistent, metronomic throb of the drum and bass. As the song builds to its chorus, he stomps his feet theatrically, as the lyric builds to its cathartic confession of truth.
He spends much of the song, though, with one gloved hand in his pocket, giving the impression that the performance is almost casual, leaving the audience wanting more—imagine how great he must be when giving it all?
Even the hallmark of the performance—the debut of the Moonwalk—is presented as if an afterthought. Coming in the middle of a distinctly wooden series of poses and moves—for a dancer of Jackson’s grace, anyways—he performs the move for only four beats. He returns to the move during the song’s long fadeout, but again for only four beats. It’s a brilliant stroke of restraint, creating a disorienting effect, as the audience struggles to understand what they’ve just seen, and to question whether they saw anything at all.
It’s worth noting that the song itself is the first of Jackson’s long-line of songs tying sexuality and neurosis. Jackson’s sexiest songs—“Don’t Stop Til’ You Get Enough”, “Wanna Be Starting Something”, “Rock With You”—are all about dancing, while his songs about women and sex are soaked in anxiety and doom. A sexually powerful woman is “Dangerous” (and, later, “Invincible”) and, like “Billie Jean” and “Dirty Diana”, they use sex to control or manipulate the singer. This trend reaches an epic peak in the claustrophobic “In The Closet”, where Jackson only agrees to sleep with his seductress if she promises to never tell anyone.
The first thing that jumps out about this astonishing performance is that Jackson is clearly lip-synching to the studio recording. Later artists—from Madonna to Britney Spears and Ashley Simpson—would be chastised for not singing in live or televised performances, yet Jackson remained untouched by such charges. Watching the video, it becomes obvious why no one questioned Jackson’s singing (or lack thereof)—his appearance is so clearly not about the song, but the performance of it.
Jackson appears alone on the stage, without the distraction of a backing band or the troupe of back-up dancers he would embrace post-Thriller. He strikes a sideways pose just before the music begins—the crowd already on its feet, screaming—then begins thrusting his pelvis in time as the drum beat drops.
More like a Broadway actor than a soul singer, Jackson’s approach is largely performative, acting out the song’s lyrical story of dark seduction through his dancing. He stalks the stage, mimicking meeting the titular character on the dance floor, before moving to the side of the stage for the song’s bridge. “People always told me/be careful what you do/don’t go around breaking young girls hearts”, and he raises his eyes and hand to the sky, in a knowing plead, as if begging God to take back the mistakes he has made with Billie.
But more than this, Jackson’s movements embody the music’s rhythms and tension, with whiplash kicks and head-snaps providing a visual illustration of the song’s mid-verse sound effects. His moves go from an almost liquid fluidity to a mechanic stiffness and back again in just a few beats, as he plays to both the smooth flourishes of the guitar and synthesizers and the insistent, metronomic throb of the drum and bass. As the song builds to its chorus, he stomps his feet theatrically, as the lyric builds to its cathartic confession of truth.
He spends much of the song, though, with one gloved hand in his pocket, giving the impression that the performance is almost casual, leaving the audience wanting more—imagine how great he must be when giving it all?
Even the hallmark of the performance—the debut of the Moonwalk—is presented as if an afterthought. Coming in the middle of a distinctly wooden series of poses and moves—for a dancer of Jackson’s grace, anyways—he performs the move for only four beats. He returns to the move during the song’s long fadeout, but again for only four beats. It’s a brilliant stroke of restraint, creating a disorienting effect, as the audience struggles to understand what they’ve just seen, and to question whether they saw anything at all.
It’s worth noting that the song itself is the first of Jackson’s long-line of songs tying sexuality and neurosis. Jackson’s sexiest songs—“Don’t Stop Til’ You Get Enough”, “Wanna Be Starting Something”, “Rock With You”—are all about dancing, while his songs about women and sex are soaked in anxiety and doom. A sexually powerful woman is “Dangerous” (and, later, “Invincible”) and, like “Billie Jean” and “Dirty Diana”, they use sex to control or manipulate the singer. This trend reaches an epic peak in the claustrophobic “In The Closet”, where Jackson only agrees to sleep with his seductress if she promises to never tell anyone.
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