As I grew up, there were three artists I could reliably count on for making great new videos on MTV whenever they had new songs. They were Tom Petty, Madonna and Michael Jackson. As I think back on the chronology of it all, I guess it was Michael Jackson who started it all.
His earliest videos made him iconic. They defined his image. His face may have changed behind the hats he donned throughout his career, but his look always remained unique to him. His dance stylings were second to none. His obsession with touching his crotch ... OK, I guess that was a little weird.
His pop music made deep impressions on me, I admit. He was the king of pop, no doubt, and whenever he came out with a new song like "Smooth Criminal" or "Black or White," I was right there, first on the receiving line. The new video's debut was usually heralded as a world event on MTV or even prime-time network television. I was always tuning in for those.
He made pop culture enthralling. I remember watching the entire "Black or White" video when it premiered. It was not only appointment television, but it was the kind of thing I would count down to. I think I remember watching "The Simpsons" before the "Black or White" premiere and knowing I'd have to go pee during the last commercial break to settle in for the video. His videos weren't three-minute songs, that's for sure. You always knew something great was coming, and that it could take a while.
That's how "Black or White" was. The video may have aired in full only that once in the United States. It started off with Macaulay Culkin at home, his dad (played by George Wendt) telling him to turn down his music before he returned to his armchair, where his relaxing was uninterrupted despite him being blasted off -- his armchair intact -- to a faraway land that had Michael Jackson dancing with some tribe. I mean, I was eating this stuff up!
Only after he landed did the new Michael Jackson song start to play. And there it was, one infectious guitar riff, one blues pattern transformed into a rock-pop genre bender, and full of his trademark vocal workouts. It was that stuff that did it for me, not as much as the dancing. Just knowing what his music was about and how to reproduce it if I ever needed to.
He was a great dancer, I knew, and back in the "Smooth Criminal" days, I remember dancing along and my year-old nephew Ben, barely able to stand up inside his crib without grasping onto the sides, dancing along with me and Michael. But at whatever age I was, I knew dancing wasn't for me. I could appreciate what Michael was doing on the dance floor and knew it was something for other people to do. I could just see myself in his band, one of those off-camera people helping out with the music. Or maybe I could just see myself as a fan, telling him how great it is when the music breaks down and we hear, "I'm not gonna spend my life being a color." Even I knew what he meant. This was great stuff!
At the end of his song, after one person would change before our eyes into another, came the reason this video probably never aired twice. It was when Michael veered into a back alley behind the set where they were filming some blonde dancing for the video. Another great transition like the one that gave way to the song's beginning.
Now with the soundtrack completely silent, Michael got on top of a black car, started dancing on it, busted out some dance moves that in turn busted up the windows, and he turned into, literally, a black panther. Any symbolism there was lost on me. All I knew was he was a kitty, slinking around and acting violent. This was good stuff.
I don't remember whatever else happened, and I'm sure I could turn to YouTube to replenish my memory, but it doesn't matter. My point is this stuff was important enough for me to tune into and keep watching. Michael Jackson held my attention, on and off, for about a decade.
There was some kind of vicious backlash against Michael for this video, I guess for the way he destroyed the car. I didn't understand why. It didn't make me want to get up and dance, much less go break the windows of any car. I considered myself an impressionable kid, but did that mean there must have been other kids so impressionable that they would immediately run to the Honda Civic in their parents' driveway and let loose? That didn't seem possible to me.
But I also noticed that whenever someone on the news reported on the violence in this new Michael Jackson video, they'd cut to the clip of him doing this crap on the car and they'd show it. Suffice it to say it was OK to air it again as long as the voiceover explained how bad the message these images gave to viewers was.
The same thing happened when Madonna, in "Like a Prayer," started making out with a multiracial Jesus in a chapel. Everybody saw it as an abhorrence, so what better to do than replay it 17 times on the local news? "The furor over a blasphemous new music video. Story at 11." There, now it was appointment television. Make sure you go pee at 10:55 because you'll want to be back in time for this!
This kind of hypocrisy existed long before mild-mannered Bill O'Reilly learned how to pout over sex on TV and pepper his segments with file footage of bikini-clad bimbos on spring break as an example of exactly what he argued should never be aired on television. It's the kind of hypocrisy I love, which, too, makes me every bit as hypocritical.
Michael Jackson created videos not just for his fans but for everybody. People who claimed to despise his art still saw the videos anyway. He really had that kind of universal reach. This made him the sole king of pop in a way that nobody to this day has succeeded him and doubtfully ever will.
