Starting Something: Synthesizers and Rhythmic Reorientations in Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”

When we think of Michael Jackson and, more specifically, “Billie Jean,” what we tend to culturally remember is the moonwalk, that moment at the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever television special when he spins up onto his toes and seems to momentarily defy gravity as he floats backwards. Even decades after this moment in 1983, we continue to hold onto how Jackson moved seamlessly with the rhythm of the song—and in the process charted new rhythmic possibilities for black people. Most recently, Janelle Mon'ae’s Dirty Computer, an album and accompanying “emotion picture” released in April 2018, fuses androgynous looks, funky and synth-y bass lines, and choreographed dancing to imagine new kinds of collectivity. As an android fighting against a government that wants to erase her memories as punishment for partying and being romantically involved with another female android, Mon'ae uses synthesizer-heavy songs and accompanying choreography to accentuate how, even 35 years after “Billie Jean,” we are still in need of the rhythmic re-attunement first proposed by Jackson.

Although Jackson was hardly the first black artist to use synthesizer-heavy music to imagine new possibilities for race, gender, and sexuality, he was the first to effectively harness the mass appeal of Music Television (MTV), mobilizing sound, visuals, and movement to master the medium of the music video. Given his virtuosity as a singer and dancer, it could be easy to lose track of these synthesizer sounds. In this article, I listen to and feel with the synthesizers on “Billie Jean” as a means of situating Jackson not only as a black pop star in mid-1980s America but also as an artist who was embedded in a larger genealogy of synth-y black pop music that has roots in both the more obvious interlocutors of funk and R&B and a tradition of rhythm that black people have musically carried with them throughout the African diaspora. I want to, in the words of Alexandra Vazquez, listen in detail to these synthesizers, to linger with their sonic materiality.[1] Through this attention to the song’s synthesizers, I posit that these musical instruments helped facilitate not only Jackson’s dance moves but also how he navigated the world around him, beginning with the cartoon-y, deindustrialized city landscape that formed the backdrop for the music video for “Billie Jean.”[2] As a black artist in a white-dominated pop music landscape in the early 1980s, these two realities—of being both a forerunner in contemporary music and an artist steeped in black rhythms from the past—were more often than not intertwined for Jackson.

As political and aesthetic cues from the 1980s reverberate in our contemporary moment, now is the time to revisit how Jackson musically moved in 1983. Through my analysis of the music video and the Motown 25 performances of “Billie Jean,” I explore how the synthesizers in Jackson’s song facilitated a sonic and affective site where he could (re)construct his body amidst the ongoing racism of 1983 America. Weaving together Sara Ahmed’s notion of queer phenomenology with Saidiya Hartman’s conceptualization of the afterlife of slavery, I investigate how Jackson responded to the synthesizer’s sonic charge—and affective excess— with his body. Through emoting black and queer aesthetic cues (without necessarily identifying as queer or fully embracing his blackness), Jackson maneuvered in the sonic and affective excesses (and, limitations) of visual representation. More so, through moving with and against the song’s synthesizers, Jackson reworked the rhythms of anti-black racism into queerly imagining a black futurity. What is the affective resonance of vibrationally sharing a black and queer phenomenology with one’s audience? Although “Billie Jean” was not written as an explicitly political song, I assert that its affective work of re-attunement to black histories and reimagining black futurities was itself a political intervention. As Jackson and his brothers wrote in the liner notes for their 1978 album Destiny, “‘Politics can’t save the world, so the music people should at least try. People are brought together by music.’”[3] With its texture of layered synthesizers, “Billie Jean” was one way that Jackson would “try” to make a difference.

Synthesizers and Black Minoritarian Subjects

While Jackson’s “Billie Jean” was not the first pop song with a synthesizer to become a hit, it was the first music video by a black artist to go into heavy rotation on MTV when it aired in 1983. Even as “Billie Jean” was “the first” in this sense, it was nevertheless part of a musical trajectory of black artists pushing the limits of what constituted popular music via a use of the “new” musical technology of the synthesizer—which had only become a commercially viable instrument beginning in 1965 with the success of the Moog synthesizer.[4] Since the early 1970s, musicians such as Stevie Wonder; George Clinton; Earth, Wind & Fire; and Prince had utilized synthesizers to express themselves and creative fusions of soul, funk, R&B, disco, and rock.[5] Then, in 1977, Donna Summer and her creative team of Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte created “the sound of the future” in the first number one hit song created entirely using a synthesizer.[6] Not everyone, such as cultural critic Greg Tate, was excited for this new future for black music, lamenting that the chilly synths and vocals in “I Feel Love” eroded so-called authentic black music.[7] Nevertheless, the song would shape the future of pop music.

During the period of time that Francesca Royster has dubbed the post-soul era (which encompasses everything from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 onward), the stakes of how music made by black artists would be received by both black communities and the (white) general American population were high. Deeply entwined with the racial integration of school desegregation and the rise of a black middle class, the gains of the post-soul era were political and economic recognitions of black people’s humanity.[8] Releasing “Billie Jean” two years into Ronald Reagan’s first term as president, Jackson’s music video circulated alongside images of black men as criminals (accompanying the rise of the prison industrial complex) and black women as welfare queens (accompanying cuts to social welfare programs), images invoked by Republican politicians in their quests for discursive power.[9] With Summer’s highly sexualized and objectified music only six years in the past, the painful histories of black people as things to be commodified and exploited still haunted pop music.

But this flirtation with thingliness was also a source of potential for artists seeking to express their gender and sexuality in conjunction with their blackness. As Uri McMillan writes of black avant garde art, there is potential in “an amalgamation of self, a fashioning of oneself as both the subject and object of art.”[10] And as Royster investigates in the specific cases of Wonder, Clinton, Prince, and Jackson, these artists’ embrace of eccentricity allowed them to be “creative, elusive, rocking racial, gender, and sexual lines.”[11] Although not necessarily directly related, this black eccentricity in popular music unfolded alongside developments in black political and cultural expression. In 1966, the Black Panther Party, a group known for its blending of radical politics, aesthetic unity, and performances of protest, formed in Oakland, CA; in 1967, Soul!, a performance and variety program associated with the Black Arts Movement and hosted by the openly gay Ellis Haizlip (and that would host Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind & Fire as musical guests), aired its first episode on New York City’s Public Broadcasting Service affiliate station WNET.[12] Armed with guns and berets, the Black Panther Party intentionally sought to circulate a different—and more militant—image of blackness in the media. On the musical end, Soul!—and later Soul Train—offered black people a platform for presenting music and dance as an extension of their humanity. In both cases, the tension between images ripe for circulation and manifestations of the people behind these representations was a potentially generative one—and carried over to developments in black popular music in the 1970s, such as the Jackson 5.

As a child of Motown and the Jackson 5, Jackson was already well aware of the opportunity—and limitations—of being recognized as an image. He was also deeply committed to growing as a musical artist, a journey that, by the late 1970s, no longer seemed possible at Motown, the label that had catapulted him (and his brothers) to success using a calculated sonic and visual formula meant to appeal to both black and white audiences.[13] Not insignificantly, when Jackson left Motown for Epic Records to record his fifth solo LP, Off The Wall, he and his collaborators heavily incorporated synthesizers on the album. In this way, Jackson understood sound—and its vibrations—as a source for pushing on the stereotype of himself as a benign child star with a well-kept afro and polite mannerisms. As Jackson recounts in his autobiography,

[Off The Wall] meant a great deal to me, because its eventual success proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that a former “child star” could mature into a recording artist with contemporary appeal. Off The Wall also went a step beyond the dance grooves we had cooked up. When we started the project, Quincy [Jones] and I talked about how important it was to capture passion and strong feelings in a recorded performance.[14]

In this quotation, Jackson seeks to put distance between himself and his “‘child star’” self. At the same time, Jackson’s use of quotation marks speaks to how adults had imposed this label on him when he was a child. In lieu of a typical childhood, Jackson had grown up in the spotlight—and always attuned to popular music and the power of its vibrations. Using what he had learned about adults as a child star, Jackson sought to make a “mature” album. With its disco feel, Off The Wall gestured both towards the smashing success of Summer’s “I Feel Love” and to the genre’s black and queer (and underground) roots. Not desiring the whitewashed disco of Summer’s late 1970s moment, Jackson and his team instead gravitated towards the emphasis on strings and bass from disco’s earlier days,[15] a music that brought “passion” with it.

Although Jackson would declare his next album, Thriller, his “post-disco” album, the shared decision of him, producer Quincy Jones, keyboard players Rod Temperton and Greg Phillinganes, strings arranger Jerry Hey, and the rest of the album contributors to use analog synthesizers, which sought to “authentically” reproduce the sounds of instruments, in the recording sessions for Thriller in 1982 was notable in the wake of new digital synthesizers such as the Fairlight CMI-I, which British artist Kate Bush had begun to make popular on her 1980 album, Never For Ever.[16] Rather than experiment with digital synthesizers, Jackson and his creative team utilized the Yamaha CS-80 analog synthesizer when recording “Billie Jean” at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles in 1982.[17] In 1976, the Japanese company Yamaha began selling this 200-pound high-end synthesizer, which was so expensive that very few studios or artists could afford to have one. The Yamaha CS-80 was a polyphonic (as opposed to a monolithic) synthesizer, meaning that keyboard players could hold down multiple keys, instead of just a single key, at once—which allowed for the relatively easy (compared to other analog synths) creation of rich, thick sounds.[18] As synthesizer expert Chad Allen expounds, the Yamaha CS-80 was the great analog synthesizer of the 1980s. Its complexity as a machine allowed users to create the most “authentic” sounds that could very closely resemble those of actual brass and string instruments.[19] In the case of “Billie Jean,” Jackson used the Yamaha CS-80 to compose the four-chord synthesizer part that forms the rhythmic backdrop of the song, referencing the string sounds made popular in disco in the 1970s. But rather than using actual string instruments, Jackson recreated their sounds on an analog synthesizer, working with string master Hey to arrange “Billie Jean” into its final version.[20] By invoking such familiar and “authentic” sounds, Jackson and his creative team reached backwards towards black music genres such as funk, soul, and R&B—and blues and jazz before them—grounded in rhythm.[21]

The analog synthesizers in “Billie Jean” therefore worked as both a point of reference to these music genres and a resonance of the rhythms (of labor, of protest, of song) guiding black life since the 1960s—and, as Saidiya Hartman notes, since the time of chattel slavery.[22] The work of the synthesizers in this song were historical and, by extension, spatial. Traveling across different genres, the synthesizers’ vibrations worked as a source of historical connection across space and time. Intimately intermingled with this transmission was the sexualization of black bodies and black people’s attempts to reclaim their sexuality on their own terms. In this way, the synthesizers in “Billie Jean” facilitated what Sara Ahmed calls a queer phenomenology. As she writes, “Queer is, after all, a spatial term, which then gets translated into a sexual term, a term for a twisted sexuality that does not follow a ‘straight line,’ a sexuality that is bent and crooked.”[23] In seeking to separate himself from his child star self, Jackson sought to embrace sexual expressivity on “Billie Jean” and Thriller—even as it was, at times, a childlike wonder for a sexuality that he had learned from adults. In the process, he also connected with prior black artists mobilizing synthesizers for expressivity. Removed from both the “‘straight lines’” of his Motown trajectory and any absorption into normative straightness (as evidenced by his feeling pressured to make a public statement in 1985 that he was “not gay”[24]), Jackson engaged in a queer phenomenology without necessarily identifying as queer. Through an attention to what was behind him, Jackson, through sound (and, later, dance), enacted what Ahmed describes as “how bodies are gendered, sexualized, and raced by how they extend into space.”[25] On “Billie Jean,” Jackson sounded to both lines of identity and lines of history that were anything but set in stone. This quite literally began with how he used his voice. In Royster’s words, Jackson, as an eccentric, was engaging in a “queer relationship between body and sound.”[26] Seeking to redirect the attention away from Jackson’s morphing body, Royster posits that Jackson’s voice worked as a space of becoming gender—one that allowed him to occupy a third space of gender in between “male” and “female” binary endpoints. Additionally, Royster contends that by moving across markers of gender, Jackson simultaneously fluctuated across boundaries of age, connecting back to his beginnings as a child musical star.[27] Singing with and in between the synthesizers on the track, Jackson reached back towards the political and cultural histories informing black popular music in the 1980s. Extending Royster’s analysis, I want to focus my attention on what sits behind and alongside these vocal fluctuations on “Billie Jean” (i.e., the synthesizers). If the synthesizers on “Billie Jean” performed a queer phenomenology, then they provided the groundwork for the transgressions described by Royster. Through his musical queer phenomenology, Jackson touched down in histories of how black bodies are simultaneously hypersexualized and infantilized, their sexual capacities a swinging pendulum between being perceived as a danger and an allure. Although this too was the situation for Wonder, Clinton, and Prince, Jackson’s status as the most visible (and most successful) black artist in 1983 amplified how far this conundrum went beyond the realm of popular music.

The stakes of such a vibrational reorientation were therefore not only the extent to which Jackson could present his pop superstardom on his own terms but also the possibility that this black queer phenomenology could be extended to—and then embodied by—his audiences. Materially transmitted along the vibrational oscillations of “Billie Jean,” blackness worked as a sensation, or an individually experienced affect that could simultaneously, as Amber Jamilla Musser posits, function as a “tool … for making sense of the world.”[28] In conversation with Fred Moten’s work on blackness, Jos'e Esteban Mun~oz theorizes brownness as a sensation. He writes,

Brownness is about something else. As a concept, even as a method, it offers us a sense of the world. … These Brown feelings are not the sole province of people who have been called or call themselves brown. It is, instead, and more importantly, the sharing out of a brown sense of the world, a flowing into the common, that nonetheless maintains the urgencies and intensities we experience as freedom and difference.[29]

Blackness, like brownness, is unquestionably rooted in the lived experiences of people of color. But blackness is also “about something else.” In Mun~oz’s words, such a brown(or black-) informed phenomenology also ultimately transcends the boundaries of racial difference to become a sensation that could be experienced on the bodies of those of a different race. Race then potentially becomes a compass for navigating the word, a map that is collectively accessible in a shared space such as a Michael Jackson concert—or watching his music videos on MTV.

New Pop Music Possibilities in Old Scenes of Precarity

When Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” aired on MTV for the first time on March 10, 1983,[30] the music video was still a novel technology in America. The first American television station originally dedicated to airing music videos, MTV, had launched on August 1, 1981.[31] With the exception of Pat Benatar, the first 30 music videos that the station aired were by white male rock bands or solo artists.[32] As the first music video by a black artist to go into heavy rotation on MTV, Jackson’s song broke the television station’s unofficial color line. This feat was nothing short of monumental, opening the floodgates for other black artists such as Prince and Jackson’s sister Janet to reach new audiences through music television in the 1980s.[33] Situated within this context, the music video for “Billie Jean” is a testament of the tension between Jackson’s exceptionality as a rising black pop superstar in 1983 America and the racialized histories through which he had to navigate. More so, it prophetically addresses the issue of Jackson’s rising fame—and how this plays out on account of his blackness and the speculations surrounding his sexuality and choice of sexual objects.

From the opening moments of the music video, Jackson presents himself as an atypical black man walking on the city street at night. After black and white footage of the paparazzo following the pop star is framed in the style of a wanted poster without words, Jackson appears on screen—and brings color to the scene. Although he feels like an outcast (as signaled by his tight posture), Jackson continues to move. Dark-skinned, rocking Jheri curls, and dressed in a pair of tight black leather pants, pink buttoned-down shirt, and red bowtie, Jackson alludes to black aesthetics (the Jheri curls) and stereotypes about gay men (wearing pink/embracing femininity) with his self-presentation. At a moment in time when Prince was also playing with androgyny by wearing as little clothing as possible, Jackson appears as an offbeat character minding his own business while out on the town. Narratively, Jackson is on the run from a paparazzo trying to capture him in the act with Billie Jean (who is never seen in the video), an allusion to both the paternity accusations that white women made against Jackson and his brothers during their time together in the Jackson 5 and the ongoing criminalization of black men in 1980s America, which the pop star perverts by positioning the paparazzo as the criminal.[34]

As Jackson fails to appear in every photo that the paparazzo believes that he has taken of him, both his voice and the song’s synthesizers dominate the aural landscape. While the wanted posters and Jackson’s denial raise uncomfortable questions about his potential real-life criminality involving children, both offer commentary on the stereotypes of black male pop stars—and, more generally, the presumed criminality of black men—at time of the video’s release. In the first verse, Jackson lyrically marvels over the accusation that he is the father of Billie Jean’s child, which leads him to connect with other outcasts in the city. As the song’s synthesizer bass line keeps repeating, he flips a coin towards a homeless man that he has just passed on the street. After the coin lands in the man’s cup, it lights up and then transforms his shabby brown clothes into a shiny white suit with a red belt. As with the case of the homeless man, Jackson is attempting to tell a different story of himself—and, inadvertently or not, of black men in America in 1983. Jackson interweaves his voice with the song’s synth bass line to open up the space for an alternative narrative where black men are not accused rapists or criminals. He proclaims that he is not the father of Billie Jean’s child, although the reason why not is unclear. Did he never pursue her? Did he use protection? Is he trying to tell us that he’s not that interested in women to begin with? Whatever the reason, Jackson proclaims his innocence, using the sound of the synthesizers to amplify what he says/sings with his voice.

In “Billie Jean,” the synthesizers accentuate how Jackson, as a black man in the city, is embedded in the afterlife of slavery, or what Saidiya Hartman describes as “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.”[35] As the lone black man on the street, he is already suspect of being criminal or in need of welfare. At the same time, the synthesizers also allow Jackson to shape these rhythms towards a new futurity, a la the twisting and repurposing of a queer phenomenology. For example, when Jackson first appears in the music video, he walks exactly in sync with the synthesizers. As the synthesizer belts out a bass line, Jackson places a foot on a square on the sidewalk—which lights up with his touch. These moments of his feet lighting up the ground also accentuate the sonic welding of black musical cultures that his music performs, particularly the stringing together of the bass guitar that drives genres such as rhythm and blues from the 1940s onward and the analog synthesizers prevalent in disco and synth-funk from the 1970s and 1980s. This emphasis on rhythm highlights the extent to which Jackson draws on black musical traditions such as funk, soul, and R&B, which emphasize bass lines in a way that much of the white guitar rock on MTV in the early 1980s did not. Via his exceptionality, Jackson is eventually able to move to his own rhythm at the end of the second verse, as evident when he spins up onto his toes and turns away from moving exactly in sync with the lighted up sidewalk panels. But this movement is only possible through twisting the lines of black music that came before him.

The synthesizers in “Billie Jean” orient Jackson towards the future and the past, allowing him to both move ahead towards the possibility of new musical fusions and economic opportunities and stay connected to histories of black suffering and musical traditions. Jackson’s treacherous navigation of the cityscape portrayed in the video creates a vibrational through line between these black pasts and futures, offering a jumping off point to futurity that also situates 1983 within a bigger context of black life in the continental United States over many decades. On the one hand, the synthesizer did not completely escape the tensions of exceptionality; as a musical technology that would render studio musicians less needed over time, the synthesizer itself also participated in the deskilling brought about by deindustrialization.[36] On the other hand, synthesizers and also drum machines would be ubiquitous in both mainstream and “underground” pop (and later hip hop[37]) music by the end of the 1980s, illuminating what Richard Iton calls the democratic potential of new musical technologies.[38] This tension in the synthesizer’s potential to both perpetuate poverty and inspire creativity inversely mirrored Jackson’s relationship with Motown, a record label that had raised him (and many other black artists) out of poverty at the expense of structurally limiting their potential for artistic growth.

For white viewers watching Jackson’s video, these analog synth sounds would not have been unfamiliar; in MTV’s first aired video ever, the Buggles’ 1979 single “Video Killed The Radio Star,” they were exposed to pop music made with synthesizers— and, more specifically, to the new wave genre that pulled from disco’s emphasis on drums (particularly hi hats) and bass while leaving behind its “ornamental” flourishes of strings and horns.[39] But, at the same time, “Billie Jean” was not the Buggles; strings and synthesizers sound off together throughout the song’s entirety. In this vein, Jackson was more influenced by the music of Stevie Wonder, who combined analog synthesizers and horns on his 1976 smash hit single, “I Wish.” Similarly to Wonder, Jackson utilized synthesizers on Thriller and specifically “Billie Jean” to continue to distinguish himself from his earlier releases on Motown.[40] More blatantly in sonic conversation with black artists creating in the genres of soul, funk, disco, jazz, and R&B before him than the white artists being played on the radio or on MTV at the time, Jackson’s breaking the unofficial color line was also a breaking in of a new formula for pop music—and for music videos. Through intermixing choreography with a sonics that built on the work of Wonder and others before him, Jackson added new layers of visuals and movements to an already rich tradition of sound. The resulting pop felt accessible to white fans while refusing to leave behind the sonic and affective histories of black suffering and creation in the United States.

Jackson wanted to reach people on his own terms on “Billie Jean”—and get them moving during economically precarious times. In this vein, the synthesizers in “Billie Jean” additionally put forth a vibrational pull reminiscent of songs during the late disco era. In a more dance-ready and less robotic way than with Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” Jackson and his creative team brought synthesizers to the mainstream masses. Although he described Thriller as his post-disco album, it nevertheless still heavily incorporated disco’s synthesized sounds and danceable beats. When the synthesizers finally enter the song and join the bass and the drums, Jackson thus connects with the beat and pulse of late 1970s disco, a period of time when people went out dancing to escape the realities of deindustrialization in their daily and personal lives.[41] By infusing the rhythm in funk, soul, and R&B (musical genres associated with black people) with disco (a genre associated with black and queer people), Jackson offered the possibility of some kind of escape to those viewing the video within the comfort of their homes—and, in the words of George Lipsitz, turning to musical consumption in the search of “desires for connections to others, for meaningful work, for a culture not based on lies.”[42]

Fungibility, Undoing, and Cross-Identification

Michael Jackson carried more than a few lessons over from his Motown days in crafting the music video for “Billie Jean.” Already renowned for his singing and dancing, Jackson not only wanted to display the prowess of the recorded version of the song but also aimed to capture the attention of audiences hungry for the new technology of music videos. As stated in the aforementioned quote about Off The Wall, Jackson sought to have “contemporary appeal” once he left Motown and started recording for Epic in the late 1970s. By teaming up with producer Quincy Jones for Off The Wall in 1979, Jackson had taken a huge step towards a global pop superstardom that capitalized on these talents in more complex ways than when he was in the Jackson 5. In contrast to a young Michael Jackson warning a fast girl to take it down a notch on the Jackson 5 hit “The Love You Save,” the lyrics of “Billie Jean” put Jackson on the opposite end of having to proclaim his innocence amidst accusations of fathering Billie Jean’s child.

Part of Jackson’s attempt for “contemporary appeal” was to pen the risqu'e lyrics of “Billie Jean” and to visually reinforce these lyrics with suggestive images, such as him climbing into bed with a lump who can be presumed to be Billie Jean near the end of the video. Alongside his displays of musical and dance virtuosity, Jackson also opens up space for viewers to fetishize him as a sexual object, embodying the tension between reclaiming his sexuality on his own terms and risking the reobjectification of his body in the process. The paparazzo, then, foreshadows the mobs of fans who will flock to Jackson in his rising success. Jackson’s response throughout this chase is to stay connected to the rhythm of his song— and by extension the rhythms of black musical genres and histories before him. After escaping a close call with the paparazzo in the music video, Jackson begins to dance. As his next move, Jackson steps on the sidewalk squares in sync with the bass line. Moving along with the bass instead of the synthesizers, Jackson accentuates the funk rhythms that would not have been possible without the black diaspora in continental America. In the process, he again highlights the duality of a rhythmic afterlife of slavery that reduces black people to objects to be exploited (for both their labor and their fetishized sexuality) and the potential for crafting new rhythms from these painful histories.

These rhythms are not without their tensions. Halfway through the video, Jackson looks miniscule in comparison to a billboard of one white woman and one Latina woman that towers over him.[43] In the Latina woman’s seeming to pass as white, the billboard sounds to an overarching white domination that even Jackson, in his increasing success as a pop star, cannot completely escape; white-owned record labels can still intervene in his creative voice and the white-run MTV can silence his influence by not playing his music videos for their largely white fan bases.[44] As a second synthesizer layers atop the original synth, bass guitar, and drum sounds, Jackson’s voice is rendered less audible than in the previous verse. In this moment of apparent diminishment, he struggles to be heard on the city streets. As Jackson dances closer to the billboard, the women on it continue to stare out into the distance with the desiring eyes of the capitalistic impulse to consume. When Jackson comes into their purview, it appears that they see him as what Hartman describes as a fungible body, or a body deemed a replaceable commodity that works as “an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values.”[45] In being reduced to just another black body, Jackson is deemed expendable and replaceable. Nevertheless, the women’s placement on the billboard as emblems of light-skinned femininity popping out from the darkness of the advertisement’s background also sexualizes them, turning them into objects of the white male gaze.

Although the two women on the billboard never look directly at Jackson with their carnivorous eyes, their ears are turned towards him from the moment he begins to walk towards them. After doing a quick double spin, Jackson breaks free from walking directly in sync with the sidewalk as it lights up below him. He also sonically breaks free in this moment, repeating a vocal line not once but twice with a high-pitched delivery that causes his voice to soar over the rest of the song’s instrumentation. On the first repetition of the vocal line, the women on the billboard turn to him and look on empathetically; on its second repetition, the women look at one another and smile. All of this happens over the course of three seconds—and in between two bom-bom sound couplets from the synthesizer from the first verse. Hardly the sharp eyes and curled lips of eroticization, the women’s eyes exude a warmth that suggests a moment of cross-identification shared between two groups of people who are fetishized by society, white or light-skinned Latina women and black men. Through being affectively drawn to Jackson through the synthesizer’s sounds and vibrations, the women come to see Jackson as more than a commodified object. At the same time, the scene also reinforces Jackson’s— and much of black pop music’s—complicated relationship with whiteness. As much as he lyrically bemoaned Billie Jean’s false accusations, Jackson knew from his Motown days that he could not achieve national or global success without the support of white women—and their white male counterparts.

As much as this is an instant of connection for Jackson, the additional layers of nuance that hindsight adds to our reading of the billboard scene cannot be ignored. Despite his larger than life career at this moment in 1983, Jackson is, as the billboard’s omnipresence renders him, still a person—and not exempt from the norms and laws of society. While he was alive and making music, Jackson was able to defer many inquiries of his behavior into the future. With the release of Leaving Neverland ten years after his death, the decades-long speculation of Jackson’s relationships with younger boys has become a prominent part of the public conversation about his legacy. He is, as he appears under the billboard, subject to public scrutiny. While this does not automatically erode Jackson’s contributions to popular music, it does raise questions about what his superstardom might have allowed him to keep from the public eye while he was alive. In addition to public scrutiny, the billboard in this scene is also a stand-in for the music industry, an omnipresence that both normalizes contact between adult pop stars and child fans—and that, until recently, seemed to turn its back on allegations against its profit-generating artists.[46] What thinking about the billboard scene in “Billie Jean” from the vantage point of a #MeToo present reveals is the necessity of holding together the power of popular music and the complexity of (some of) its artists. Moving onto Jackson’s first televised performance of “Billie Jean,” I continue to both unpack and nuance his legacy, situating the transformative potential of his sounds’ and movements’ vibrations alongside the personal history from which they came.

The Moonwalk and New (Dis)Orientations

A mere thirteen days after the music video aired on MTV for the first time, Michael Jackson performed “Billie Jean” as part of the nationally broadcast Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever that occurred at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium outside of Los Angeles, California.[47] Motown 25 was a huge event, logging 47 million views—or the equivalent of 35% of the American population— when it aired on television.[48] At the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, around 3,000 people participated in their own intimate experience with “Billie Jean.” Meant as a retrospective of the industry-changing Motown sound, the celebration was the first time in eight years that Jackson and his brothers had associated themselves with the record label since leaving it for Epic in 1975. They also gifted the world its first Jackson 5 performance since 1981. But as a prerequisite for his involvement in the event, Jackson insisted that he be allowed to perform “Billie Jean.” It would be the night’s only song not from Motown; in fact, music critic Nelson George surmises that Jackson’s show-stopping performance of “Billie Jean” confirmed that Motown’s glory days were indeed over.[49] So as to focus on perfecting his dance moves for the audience’s enjoyment, Jackson lip-synced this performance.[50] It was his dancing, therefore, that technically stole the show—and it is there that I will begin my analysis and consideration of the changed impact of the synthesizers in this song in a new performance space.

Jackson begins his performance at Motown 25 facing the audience, black fedora in hand. He quickly turns to the left, offering the viewer a good look at his outfit. Dressed in black pants, a black sequined jacket, and a single white rhinestone glove, Jackson’s gender presentation is more androgynous than in the music video for “Billie Jean.” As the anxious bass of the recorded version of the song kicks in, Jackson thrusts his pelvis up and down to the beat of the bass line. His dance moves quickly become more a-rhythmic than these original thrusts, albeit no less precise. With the entry of the main synthesizer chords into the performance, Jackson throws the fedora off to the left side of the stage like a frisbee. He continues to intermix the thrusts and more fluid movements until the end of the second verse, when he abruptly begins to run-dance in place. This movement solicits a squeal of glee from the crowd. The excitement continues to build, especially when Jackson struts to the right side of the stage and points his finger—and then repeats this movement in the other direction. Within seconds, he breaks into his famous moonwalk, jumping up on his toes and spinning around—and the crowd absolutely goes wild. When he finishes the performance, the crowd gives him a standing ovation.

In addition to infusing multiple musical genres, Jackson was a master of pulling from the work of past or contemporary dance greats and putting his own spin on their moves. Jackson especially drew influence from funk legend James Brown. As he notes in his autobiography,

While my brothers and I were paying dues on the so-called “chitlin’ circuit,” opening for other acts, I carefully watched all the stars because I wanted to learn as much as I could. … After studying James Brown, I knew every step, every grunt, every spin and turn. I have to say he would give a performance that would exhaust you, just wear you out emotionally. His whole physical presence, the fire coming out of his pores, would be phenomenal. You’d feel every bead of sweat on his face and you’d know what he was going through.[51]

From Brown, Jackson learned that singing and dancing were full-body endeavors, performances with the potential of sharing feelings between people. Jackson’s phrasing of “what he [Brown] was going through” is vague, noting that the emotional and the physical (and by extension the psychic) were all a part of the affective transmission. His slippage recalls how Ann Cvetkovich describes “feeling” as an “ambiguity between feelings as embodied sensations and feelings as psychic or cognitive experiences.”[52] In the fused space of song and dance, Jackson made music a full-body affair, an experience seen, heard, and felt. In emulating James Brown, Jackson hoped not only to get his audiences dancing but also to emotionally and mentally shake them up. Once again turning to “adult” affectations that he first accessed during childhood, Jackson would attempt to harness music’s feelings not for sexual prowess but rather to get his audience to move and feel together—an intention that, at this point in time, would not yet become so messy.

At Motown 25, Jackson wanted his audience to quite literally be moved by his music and performance on multiple levels. In order to help facilitate this possibility, Jackson presented his moonwalk as spontaneous, the result of his being moved by the music. Reflecting on “Billie Jean” at Motown 25 in his autobiography, Jackson remarks,

I … let the song tell me what to do. I kind of let the dance create itself. I really let it talk to me; I heard the beat come in, and I took this spy’s hat and started to pose and step, letting the “Billie Jean” rhythm create the movements. I felt almost compelled to let it create itself. I couldn’t help it.[53]

Jackson’s commentary is fascinating in that it reinforces his belief that music can “talk” to people in a way that is materially different from lyrics or political commentary. Nevertheless, this was more aptly an anticipation for how Jackson intended his music (and dance moves) to work on his audience rather than a description of himself. As dance scholar Judith Hamera asserts, Jackson was too much of a virtuoso to really have let the dance “create itself” without a great deal of ongoing practice beforehand.[54] As the above quote illuminates, Jackson had a keen understanding of how music and dance pasts can accumulate in a single performance—and how these histories, as the music video for “Billie Jean” exemplifies, carry with them sediments of anti-black racism that informed the lived experiences of artists such as himself. In addition to a stellar performance, Jackson would affectively invite the audience to feel these histories.

At Motown 25, the crowd for Jackson’s performance was racially mixed, as camera shots throughout the video illustrate. Pausing the footage at the 3:19 mark, a front row of a dancing black woman and man and trio of white women jumps off the screen. The visual is a metaphor for the blending of funk, soul, R&B, jazz, and rock that will make Jackson a pop superstar in America and ultimately in the world. The visual also exemplifies just how much rhythm (both in the form of bass guitars and analog synthesizers) in the song could get people literally moving. This scene additionally accentuates the many layers of Jackson’s success. On the one hand, the presence of white women works as an uncomfortable reminder of Motown’s aggressively targeting white fandom by turning black artists into objects to be consumed by them. On the other hand, this moment encapsulates the affective potential of Jackson’s music. More than an artist who gets women’s heads turning, Jackson is someone who can, at least in this moment, push on the boundaries between blackness and whiteness, femaleness and maleness, and, perhaps, queerness and straightness. By sharing in the song’s affects together, they share an experience of the world together—and embody the potential of his performance.

Through Jackson’s performance of “Billie Jean” at Motown 25, blackness and its material—and musical—histories became a vibrational sensation that could be felt on bodies, an affect queerly transmitted by the synthesizers’ pulses. More specifically, these vibrational sensations were an invitation for audience members to viscerally recognize the intertwining of blackness and whiteness. Both black and white people’s bodies would have been open to receiving the affective portal that Jackson was extending in his performance of “Billie Jean” at Motown 25. As Christina Sharpe theorizes, “[A]ll modern subjects are post-slavery subjects fully constituted by the discursive codes of slavery and post-slavery” while also noting that “post-slavery subjectivity is largely borne by and readable on the (New World) black subject.”[55] Sharpe’s words emphasize the relational aspect of slavery, asserting that the violence imposed on black people in America during slavery is also the foundation of postmodern and post-slavery black subjectivity. Long accustomed (and often contributing) to the rhythms of black suffering, there was space for Jackson’s performance to affectively register on the bodies of white people.

Although they could never know how it feels to be black, white (and other kinds of) listeners could begin to feel the sensation of black suffering that has powered so much of black cultural creation (and remained strong in 1983) through Jackson’s performance. This other history of black suffering was always in tension with Jackson’s success story, even as it was also the jumping off point from which new futurities could be imagined. Through giving off the impression that the music was literally moving his body, Jackson offered a visual cue for how his performance may potentially affect his audience. But there was also something unseen to this rhythm, a black queer phenomenology transmitted along with the synthesizers’ vibrations and Jackson’s eroticism. And this phenomenology was necessarily both sensory and sexual, a result of the double queering (sexual and spatial) of “Billie Jean.” Just as the synthesizer literally bends—and distorts—sound waves, Jackson’s overall performance sent an alternative for sensing the world into the audience. This reorientation was an invitation to notice old stories of black suffering reverberating in the present—and then begin to imagine cultural spaces such as Jackson’s music and performances as the jumping off point for a different political future.

Coda: Reconsidering Jackson’s Legacy in the #MeToo Era

At the beginning of 2019, the lingering questions regarding Jackson’s behavior towards children exploded with the release of Leaving Neverland, a documentary by Dan Reed that showcases the stories of Wade Robinson and James Safechuck, two men who experienced sexual abuse from Jackson when they were young boys. After premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2019, the film then made its way to HBO on March 3 and 4 for its television debut. Building on the momentum from the Sundance premiere, fans and loved ones began to line up and take sides, with many besides Jackson’s immediate family and closest friends standing on the side of the accusers.[56] With this film, the cultural conversation around Jackson has shifted—and has prompted a reevaluation of his proclaimed innocence while he was still alive. Although Jackson had settled one child abuse case in 1994 and been acquitted on another case in 2005, the testimony from witnesses Robinson and Safechuck tapped into a cultural imaginative already more attuned to sexual abuse and assault on account of the rise of the #MeToo movement.[57]

In the wake of this documentary, we are now left with questions of what to do with Jackson’s music, never mind how to regard his legacy. While I empathize with calls to remove Jackson’s music and videos from the air, I also do not want us to miss this opportunity to sit with the complexity of his legacy. Jackson changed popular music—and music videos—forever. Additionally, as I have argued in this article, Jackson’s music from the early 1980s works as an important vibrational linkage point back to older genres of black popular music—and the histories that inform them. In Jackson’s case, his music was also informed by cycles of familial and intergenerational suffering. As Tavia Nyong’o writes, “We must recall, as Liz Magic Laser reminds us, that the nostalgic image of the childhood Michael Jackson idealized as an adult was a screen memory that masked his own childhood experiences of exploitative labor conditions and emotional abuse.”[58] Although Nyong’o does not explicitly name Joe Jackson, the pop star’s father and manager, as the source of these “exploitative labor conditions,” we know from other sources of how his grooming Michael to be a child star involved abusive behavior of all kinds.[59] In sharing this perceptive, I do not mean to absolve Jackson for any wrongdoing. Instead, I mean to return to a point that I highlighted midway through the article: that the conditions of popular music as an industry blur the lines of what constitutes “good” behavior. What would it mean to simultaneously nuance Jackson’s legacy and scrutinize the workings of the industry that created him? If #MeToo has taught us anything, it is that structures and the people that benefit from them must be evaluated together when analyzing popular culture’s most prominent figures.

Acknowledgments

I thank the journal editors for including my work, the anonymous readers from the Souls editorial collective for their generous feedback, and everyone who engaged with my article as I continued to grow its ideas, particularly Francesca Royster, Kareem Khubchandani, and Stephen Marshall.