Night Beat (38 page)

The most affecting stories on
Joad,
though, are the ones that Springsteen tells about a handful of undocumented immigrants, and their passage into Southern California’s promised land. Some of these tales are drawn from real-life instances, as reported in the
Los Angeles Times.
In “The Line”—an achingly beautiful song, with a melody reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”—a border patrol cop falls in love with an immigrant woman, Louisa, and he helps her and her child and younger brother sneak into the States. But in a confrontation with another officer, he loses track of her, and never again finds her. In “Sinaloa Cowboys,” two young brothers, Miguel and Louis, come from north Mexico to the San Joaquin Valley orchards to make money for their hungry families, and get involved in dangerous and illegal drug manufacturing. One night there is an explosion in the shack where they work; one brother is killed, and the other is left to bury him and tell their family. And in “Balboa Park,” an undocumented teenage immigrant called Spider gets caught up working in San Diego as a sex hustler and drug smuggler, until one night, during a border patrol, he becomes victim of a hit-and-run. These people come to their fates quickly—much like that doomed planeload in Woody Guthrie’s “Deportees”—one of the first songs that awakened Springsteen’s political awareness. In one moment, these characters’ “undocumented” lives are over, and the world takes no note of their passing or shot hopes.

People like Spider, Louisa, Miguel, and Louis are not people we hear much about in the popular music and literature of our time. In fact, they are the people that politicians like California governor Pete Wilson and Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan tell us are part of our national problem: folks who do not speak our language or share our birthrights. It is a testament to Bruce Springsteen’s continuing vitality as one of our greatest writers that he has found the stories of these people—and the stories of the other characters caught in
Tom Joad
’s lower depths—worthy of being comprehended and told. By climbing into these people’s hearts and minds, Springsteen has given voice to people who rarely have one in this culture—and that has always been one of rock & roll’s most important virtues: giving voice to people who are typically denied expression in our other arts and media. In the midst of confusing and complex times, Bruce Springsteen has written more honestly, more intelligently, and more compassionately about America than any other writer of the last generation. As we move into the rough times and badlands that lie ahead, such acts might count for more than ever before.

the problem of michael jackson

I
n the 1980s, when I was pop music critic for the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
I wrote about Michael Jackson more than almost any other single pop figure of the time. I almost wish I hadn’t. In the pages that follow, I’ll try to trace and explain some of what it was that caught me about Jackson, and what it was that eventually left me feeling disillusioned and saddened about him.

THIS FIRST PIECE ran in the
Herald
on April 11, 1983. It appears here with only slight editing:

Everywhere this last season I’ve heard this animating sound. It begins with taut, maddened, funk-infused guitar lines that scramble against the upsweeping curve of a string section in a heady depiction of emotional panic. Then a high-end, sensually imploring voice enters the fray and imposes elegance and resolution upon the panic: What does it mean, the singer seems to ask in a breathtaking voice, that he is the one who is appointed to dance alone, for our pleasure, and attention? The song is Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” and it has suddenly, surely, become one of the most ubiquitous—and exciting—breakthrough singles in recent pop history.
Whenever a song becomes as madly popular as “Billie Jean,” it can be fun to examine the reasons why: Is it simply the appeal of the music’s exacting but impelling sound? The fine phrasing and tremulous emotion at play against one another in the singer’s voice? The allure of the artist’s personality or celebrity?
In the case of “Billie Jean,” it is a bit of all of these things. Clearly, since a string of brilliant childhood triumphs with the Jackson 5 (the last great 1960s-style Motown group), the now-twenty-two-year-old Michael Jackson has long been one of soul
and
rock’s most stirring singers. But it wasn’t until 1979’s
Off the Wall
that he stood out as a mature, stylish vocal force in his own right. For that reason, as much as for the memorable songwriting of Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, and Rod Temperton, or the ravishing production of Quincy Jones, the record proved one of the most consistently exuberant (and popular) black pop works of the last ten years.
It came as a surprise, then, that at first few listenings, Jackson’s long-awaited follow-up,
Thriller,
seemed somewhat disappointing. Quincy Jones—whose elegant but edgy arrangements on
Off the Wall
exalted Jackson’s evocative vocalizing in much the same manner Nelson Riddle’s graceful, rousing work once enlivened Frank Sinatra—had taken to displaying both dominating and overprudent instincts in his recent work. As a result, he seemed to restrict Jackson on much of
Thriller
to a catchy but somewhat tame brand of dance-floor romanticism.
Indeed, the boldest sounding tracks on the album were the ones Jackson himself had the strongest hand in writing, producing, and arranging: “Wanna be Startin’ Somethin’,” “Beat It,” and “Billie Jean.” After hearing these songs find their natural life on radio, it became evident that they were something more than exceptional highlights. They were in fact the heart of the matter: a well-conceived body of passion, rhythm, and structure that defined the sensibility—if not the inner life—of the artist behind them.
These were instantly compelling songs about emotional and sexual claustrophobia, about hard-earned adulthood, and about a newfound brand of resolution that seeks to work as an arbiter between the artist’s fears and the inescapable fact of his celebrity. “Wanna be Startin’ Somethin’ ” had the sense of a vitalizing nightmare in its best lines. (Especially in the lines in which he describes himself as a sort of vegetable, being devoured for his fame and oddness.) “Billie Jean,” meantime, exposed the ways in which the interaction between the artist’s fame and the outside world might invoke soul-killing dishonor (“People always told me . . . be careful of what you do ’cause the lie becomes the truth,” Jackson sings, possibly thinking of a debilitating paternity charge from a while back). And “Beat It,” in many ways the album’s toughest song, was pure anger: In its relentless depiction of violence as an enforced social style, it conveyed terror and invincibility almost as effectively as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message.”
But the ultimate excitement here is that “Billie Jean” is merely a first step. When Michael Jackson performed the show a couple of weeks ago at Motown’s twenty-fifth anniversary bash (in what was one of his first public acts as a star outside and beyond the Jacksons), it was startlingly clear that he is not only one of the most thrilling live performers in pop music, but that he is perhaps more capable of inspiring an audience’s physical and emotional imagination than any single pop artist since Elvis Presley—and I don’t know anyone who came away from that occasion with a differing view.
There are simply times when you know you are hearing or seeing something extraordinarily fine and exciting, something that simply captures all the private hopes and dreams that you have ever wanted your favorite art form to aspire to, and that might unite and inflame a new audience. That time came for those of us who saw Jackson onstage that night, and now every time I hear “Billie Jean,” I have a vivid image of one of rock & roll’s brightest hopes. “Billie Jean” is the sound of a young man staking out his territory—a young man who is just starting to lay claim to his rightful pop legend.

FROM THERE, things went up—far up—and then far down.
Thriller
went on to place an unprecedented seven singles in
Billboard
’s Top 10, and also became the biggest-selling album in pop history (over 35 million copies, or something like that), and at the 1984 Grammy Awards Show, Michael Jackson captured eight awards, including Best Album and Best Record of the year. Then, a few months later, it was announced that Michael would be setting out on a nationwide tour with his brothers, the Jacksons. By that time, the massiveness of Jackson’s fame was already starting to work against him—and the controversies that started surrounding the Jacksons’ Victory tour (as it was billed) only made matters far worse. For one thing, there were fears that Jackson’s popularity would attract such large crowds that something horrible might result—something like the crowd rush that occurred at a 1979 Who show in Cincinnati, where eleven young people were trampled to death or smothered. Also, there were charges of greed: The Jacksons were charging as much as thirty dollars a ticket, and had also accepted the multimillion-dollar sponsorship of the Pepsi company.

The tour began in Kansas City, Missouri, in July 1984, and days before the group ever hit a stage, things had gone weird and awry. At times—what with the tireless histrionics of promoter Don King (who said that anybody who saw the Jacksons’ show “will be a better person for years to come”) and the manner in which local politicians and sports officials ingratiated themselves with the Jacksons’ organization—it was easy to forget that this was primarily to be a musical event, featuring one of the more popular and captivating performing groups in pop’s recent history.

Unfortunately, that fact seemed lost even on the Jacksons. When the group finally took the stage at Kansas City’s Arrowhead stadium, amid curls of purple smoke and crimson laser beams, some of the reporters were eyeing the crowd for signs of the much-predicted hysteria. We never found them. Instead, what we saw was an overwhelmingly white, affluent-looking audience of forty-five thousand fans—largely parents and children—exhibiting a kind of polite exhilaration at the vision of Jackson going through his trademark, impossibly adept maneuvers. It was good, of course, that there was no mob hysteria (in fact, I doubt if there was so much as a scratch in the audience that night), but it also would have been nice had there been something of real excitement taking place onstage. But on this night, Michael and his brothers—Marlon, Jermaine, Tito, and Randy—didn’t work as effectively as a cooperative unit as they did on their 1981 tour. For that matter, the best collaboration I saw that whole night came from a clique of about five black and white tots standing in the aisle near my seat, dancing in joyful abandon with one another, trading quick, sharp, fancy moves in a fun and funky exchange, mimicking the action they saw onstage (or rather, on the large screen
above
the stage). When I looked closer I realized they were all wearing the souvenir Michael-style sunglasses that were being sold at the arena, and then I realized that for these kids this was truly a transfixing dream that no amount of critical scrutiny might ever obscure or alter.

Well, good for them, because for some of the rest of us, the whole thing really wasn’t that much fun. Much of the press that came to Kansas City wanted
something
to be critical of, and the Jacksons had unwittingly served that interest with the displays of apparent greed and incompetence that preceded the tour. Worse, they delivered a show that didn’t work—a show that proved too susceptible to the allure of spectacle, as if an epic display of technology and stagecraft might also count as substance and excitement. Simply, the group was overwhelmed by its own trappings—forced into a position in which it attempted to connect with the audience through predictable displays of pyrotechnics and flashy mechanics rather than by force of their own performing matter. (The audience, it must be said, seemed to enjoy it all: Musical art and physical mastery be damned, give us the BOMB!) It was frustrating to watch a performer as resourceful as Michael Jackson succumb to such a grandiose and ultimately unimaginative interpretation of his art.

The problem was, Michael Jackson should never have done the 1984 tour in this way. He was unquestionably beyond the Jacksons by this time, and he seemed constrained in his role as a frontman for a group he truly no longer felt a part of. By all rights and reason, Michael should have been working a stage alone. After all, his best performances worked as public declarations of intensely private fears; that’s the quality that gave his art whatever anxious depth it possessed at that time. The 1984 tour was to be Jackson’s way of paying off—and breaking off—family ties, but what it would cost him, in a way, was that moment he had finally captured, after a lifetime of waiting.

A MONTH LATER I was in New York City to attend the New Music Seminar, during the same week in which the Jacksons were playing several dates at the city’s Madison Square Garden. By this time, the skepticism and suspicion that had greeted the tour’s start in Kansas City had turned into outright hostility in some quarters—most of it directed at Michael Jackson himself. On more than one occasion, when Jackson’s name would be cited during panels at the New Music Seminar as somebody who had helped dispel some of the racial barriers in the 1980s pop scene, the notion was met with jeers.

This is what is called “backlash,” and in the case of Michael Jackson it was not a simple or pretty matter. To be honest, some of the anger directed at Jackson had to do with the press’s notion that somehow Michael and his brothers were simply the latest case of pop-cultural hype—a charge that was also frequently leveled at Elvis Presley and the Beatles in the early stages of their mass fame. Clearly, there is a big difference between what Michael Jackson represented to his audience (an instinctual physical and emotional savvy meant to turn personal fear into public celebration) and what Presley and the Beatles represented to theirs (good, old-fashioned youth-cultural disruption). Yet all these artists shared one thing: They bound together millions of otherwise dissimilar people in not just a quirk of shared taste, but also a forceful, heartfelt consensus that spoke to common dreams and era-rooted values. In 1984, it wasn’t yet clear whether Jackson would go on to have the continuing momentum or epic sweep of Presley and the Beatles, but at the time I thought it likely that his mass popularity represented something more significant than the incidental mass appeal of such artists as Peter Frampton or the Bee Gees. Looking back, I think I was both right and wrong—and I’m not sure which likelihood today disturbs me more.