#396: Michael Jackson, "They Don't Care About Us" (1996)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNJL6nfu__Q

1. My brain has decided, when I read science articles that mention dark matter, to picture protest banners that blare "Dark Matter Lives". Thanks, cortex, I can tell this will be endlessly cogent and helpful.

2. At an Amanda Palmer concert back in 2012, one of the opening acts was two of her bandmates as a saxophone duo called Ronald Reagan, who played instrumental covers of '80s pop hits. They played "Take on Me" by a-ha; the crowd sung the choruses for them. They played "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey; the crowd sang every single word. Then they announced that would play a true gem of the 1980s, a song from the best-selling album of all time. As they blew into the opening riff, I turned to my friends and said "Weird Al Yankovic was popular but not *that* popular", then shrugged and bellowed along to "Eat It". Great rock song.

3. Off the Wall and Thriller are probably his finest albums, especially the latter's mega-hits, but I don't have the right background to experience them as masterpieces of pop music. Funk and gospel and soul were not what I was raised on, and the "You Can't Hurry Love" in my mom's collection was the Phil Collins version. Melodies and chords that I gather sound instinctively perfect to other people sound -- y'know, interesting and likeable to me, but a little artificial. Jackson's voice is smooth and pretty and capable of toughness, but it also chirps and grunts and goes boing and does weird things I don't understand. This is a countdown of songs I love, so as always "#396 of all time" is a sincere and enthusiastic compliment, but if you'd have put a Jackson song in your top ten, as so many people would, (1) go for it and (2) I'm just letting you know what I'm probably missing.

3a. The love song to a killer rat that he sang when he was 13, on the other hand, we learned to sing in elementary school chorus.

4. Considering his videos as videos, "Beat It" is probably Jackson's most impressive artistic success, but "They Don't Care About Us" his most impressive social one. Amid crowded and colorful Brazilian favelas, where people inside their homes are still visibly doing their washing, many dozens of adults and teenagers and children, with drums and tambourines, beat out the song's rhythm; an even larger number gather to watch and celebrate. The drummers twirl their sticks and show off, excited in the moment. Michael struts and prowls, gesticulates and poses and leans, turning even shrugs and half-steps into dancing.

4a. He uses the police as props, which fascinates me, especially as he sings a Brown Lives Matter song that implicitly links police with "They". They obviously they know they're in a music video, but they're outnumbered by the vast civilian crowd. Even as they're given no need to do anything more than observe from the sidelines -- and even as their skin is as dark as everyone else's (and much darker than Michael's), which makes them seem less an invading force than American police often look -- their discomfort is palpable.

5. I adore drums, and percussion generally; air-drumming is one of my fundamental ways of reacting to music in the moment. For a little while, late in the last decade, I was a pretty decent drummer; somewhat embarrassingly, I did the majority of my learning (especially in the early stages) using Guitar Hero Rock Band, a video game whose drumming mode, unlike its guitar mode, was honestly designed to teach. Then my toddlers got old enough to dismantle my drum set several times faster than I could repair it. Anyway: drums! Tambourines! Dozens!

6. As best as anyone can ever guess at a massive distance, I suspect Michael Jackson was a good person. Granted, I don't think he was a good babysitter -- dangling children outside a window is a no-no in my house. And in my personal life, I stay away from people like him who have no control over their spending habits. But everything I've read about his supposed molesting of children -- including the testimony of his bodyguards, who were happy to dish dirt when their experience supported it -- weighs out to look like a repulsive con game to me. I see parents and psychologists with financial interests coaching children as ruthlessly as anyone in the 1980s Daycare Witch Trials did, taking advantage of a cripplingly jaded society where it's easier to imagine a grownup as a monster than as a sweetly overgrown child. I trust the pied-dancer charisma he shows in this video; I trust the idealistic motivation behind his weird surgical attempts to de-racify and de-gender his appearance. He grew up as a breadwinner in a deeply screwed-up traveling family, with no proper childhood, and finally got his chance to be a playful, sharing, open-hearted kid once he had tens of millions of dollars and a lot of full-grown suck-ups keeping him company.

6a. Which means, in the context of "They Don't Really Care About Us", that when he sings "Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/ Kick me, kike me, don't you black or white me", I assumed even before his official statement that he was referencing Jews as (actual) historical victims, not (imaginary) historical oppressors. I'm nominally Jewish; I had no shortage of indirect ancestors killed by Hitler. Michael Jackson claims, and I believe him, to be trying to imagine himself in their place. It's too clumsy to be a good lyric, but I accept it.

7. The line about "If Martin Luther was living, he wouldn't let it be" makes me want to link you to Xander Dominitz's historically informed rap song "95 Theses" ("and the pope ain't one"). It's cute.

8. On the other hand, neither "I accept it" nor "It's cute" are what this countdown is about. Whereas the point a bit more than three minutes into "They Don't..."  when that skittering, dive-bombing synthesizer line comes in is, for me, the most thrilling moment in Michael Jackson's musical career. I wrote "thrilling", remembered the name of his hit album again, considered other words, then shrugged: it's what I meant. For the crescendo during the last minute of the song, my adjective can be "triumphant". For the lives witnessed throughout: "ordinary", I guess. But so's mine, in its admittedly less crowded and much better temperature-controlled context. I'm definitely supposed to notice how shifting the geography and the color of my skin stretches the word "ordinary" more than we might like to admit. But I'm supposed to listen as well as look, and bringing joy and release to the ordinary is one of the things music is best at.