Thriller by Michael Jackson


Listening to this in 2006 creates a lot of cognitive dissonance. First of all, it's nice to hear some actual funk on this record, which moved Jackson one step further into pop from his best album, the almost all funk Off the Wall. There's a freshness and bounce to these songs, a sense of fun, that's all but lacking in modern pop, obsessed as it is with laughably over-serious porno style sexuality. (For another post: but why must all modern sexuality in the media be a variation on the porgnographic or the stripper; are all our modern celebrities masters of the lap dance, the strip tease, and the come-hither flared nostrils look?)

But here, as I said, it's light for the most part. Bille Jean is the dark exception. But it's a great song, with complex cast of characters and an interesting story to tell. Furthermore, it's a sonic masterpiece. The brooding bass, stabbing synthesizer, and Jackson's heavily mannered vocals create a pretty unique mood, somewhere between paranoia and dread.

But there's inevitably a sense of loss which accompanies all Jackson's good early work. Perhaps only someone as miserably disturbed and fully isolated as Jackson could come alive with joy, at at least the put-on of joy, in a performance, play acting at being happy, just as happy people play at being sad and serious. Jackson's real charade is that he was ever allowed to feel the emotions he claims to feel in these joyous songs.

Looking at his already slightly altered face on the cover of Thriller stings like a rebuke. To myself, my childhood, my culture, and this whole modern world. The assault he made on himself feels like a judgement to me, on judgement on us. Feel for one moment the sense of spiritual vacuity and emotional stuntedness that surrounds us, the fake gestures of sexuality that take on the aspects of pornography (ie, sex that only wants to sell you something), and the fear and anxiety that seems to rule over all our lives, and it's not hard to look at Michael Jackson's mutilated face and think you're looking in a mirror for Western culture. My face there, in his, and so is yours.