Jackson provides the thrills

Press, 26 July 1984, Page 14

Jackson provides the thrills

By

Robert Palmer,

of the “New York Times”

New York Michael Jackson’s life must sometimes seem to him, as it has seemed to so many others, more a fable, a work of the imagination, than a passage from childhood to adulthood. But there is nothing unsubstantial about Jackson’s album sales, with “Thriller” now at 35 million, and still climbing. And in spite of some dire predictions, millions of his fans seem to willingly be shelling out SUS3O (about SNZ6O) each — the highest price for a tour ticket in pop-music history — to see Jackson and four of his five performing brothers in concert. The Jacksons’ victory tour, as it is officially titled, will arrive at Madison Square Garden on August 2 for four nights. Yet until two weeks ago, there were reports of disorganisation and infighting within the Jackson family as advisers, managers, “presenters” and other interested parties struggled for dominance. With each decision representing a victory for one camp, only a few details had been firmly established. And the long-delayed Jacksons’ album, “Victory” (Epic-CBS), was not yet ready for release. The entire project was beginning to resemble a speculator’s mad tea party. When the “Victory” album finally went on sale, five days before the tour’s first concert, there were initial orders of two million copies, the largest in the history of CBS Records. But for an album that has aroused almost millennial expectations, “Victory” got off to a slow start. Listeners discovered that the album was uneven and included only one song entirely written, arranged and sung by Michael Jackson.

Jermaine Jackson, the only other Jackson brother who has achieved pop music success on his own, contributed only background vocals and one duet with Michael to “Victory.” He had been busy recording a solo album of his own for a rival label, Arista. By the time the tour got underway, the Michael Jackson fable was beginning to look more like an oldfashioned melodrama of the cliffhanger variety. Yet as soon as the crowd began streaming into Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium for the tour’s first show on July 6, it was evident that Michael Jackson’s talent is no fable, and his success is no fluke. Whom does he appeal to? Just about everybody. The Kansas City audience included mothers and fathers with their children, young and not-so-young professional types, gaggles of children squired by one or two adults who may have been teachers rather than relations, prosperous-look-ing teenagers with dates. And neither the kids nor the adults seemed to have come out of sheer (though expensive) .curiosity. They already knew Michael Jackson — his fluid singing, his dramatic stage presence, his squeaky-clean yet androgynous sex appeal, his exceptional dancing — fiercely controlled yet selfconfidently urbane. Where have they seen these things? On television. Television became popmusic’s king-maker in the mid-1950s when Elvis Presley shook and shimmied and sang and sneered his way into millions of American living rooms. Within a few weeks an ex-truck driver and self-

styled “hillbilly cat” was the biggest pop-music phenomenon since the rise of the great crooners more than a decade earlier. Less than a decade later, the Beatles and Rolling Stones sang and sulked and shook their tresses on Ed Sullivan’s weekly show, and Presley’s overnight success (which, like that of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, had been preceded by some years of hard work) was repeated. But not every viewer reacted the same way. Teenagers loved Elvis Presley — their parents, discomforted by his explicit sexuality, termed him vulgar. The Beatles were cute enough to pass muster, but the Stones, with their surly explicitness and genuine sneers, were too much even for some of the kids. Television created pop sensations overnight — it also sparked a. long and often bitter war between generations. Michael Jackson is the latest pop-music superstar made by television. But unlike earlier idols, this canny 25-year-old is a member of the TV generation — a star by the age of five with the very popular Jackson Five, he grew up with the medium, participating as well as watching. He understands it well, as he shows in his elaborately choreographed video performances, which make most other music videos look like the record company commercials they are. Jackson is a natural performer and an intensely physical, lithe, graceful dancer. In the days before rock and roll, kids dreamed of growing up to become multi-talented song-and-

dance artists like Fred Astaire, working on stage and radio and in films. Michael Jackson is a legitimate heir to this longstanding entertainment tradition, and he attracts listeners whose tastes in entertainment were shaped in those years. But Jackson’s music is still at the core of his success, even if some of the videos made of songs from “Thriller” are more fully fleshed-out works bf imagination than the songs by themselves. And if one word describes Jackson’s recent music, it would have to be “range.” “Thriller” could almost be an album recorded according to demographic studies of its potential audience. “Beat It” is a rocking plea for peace and against street-corner rumbles, but its dramatic high point is an incendiary hard-rock guitar solo by the heavy metal star, Eddie Van Halen, giving the song equal appeal to adolescent whites and blacks. There are danceable pop trifles about “Human Nature” and the charms of a “PYT” (pretty young thing). But there is also “Billie Jean,” in which a woman, seen first as “beauty queen from a movie scene,” soon becomes a problem, spreading stories that Jackson tries to deny by insisting, over and over, that “Billie Jean is not my lover” and “the kid is not my son.” By now Jackson’s range is so broad it encompasses much of the present popmusic field, from gritty urban dance anthems to rock and roll pitched to play on adolescent emotions, to the sort of sophisticated black pop that is the legacy of the Jackson’s early years at Motown, where the impresario Berry Gordy and stars like Diana Ross inculcated in the young Jacksons

the ultimate black pop ambition: to attain the heights of conventional American show business success while continuing to appeal to the kids on the corner. Unfortunately, the Jackson’s tour is priced beyond the reach of a very substantial group of fans who helped put Michael Jackson where he is — the black and other inner-city youth who responded when he urged them, several albums ago, to “shake your body down to the ground” and have been dancing and romancing to his music — and buying large numbers of his records —for years. One suspects that Michael Jackson’s inner-city fans will buy the Jacksons’ “Victory” album, while the tour plays to more upscale, mostly white audiences. Musically, the album seems to be aimed squarely at the inner-city fans who will choose it over the concerts (by default). There are more strongly danceable and grooveoriented songs, with harder, more gospelish singing, than one finds on the most recent Michael Jackson album, “Thriller.” Michael Jackson’s featured number on the new Jacksons’ album, “Victory,” is a wistful ballad, a kind of prayer for human survival: ! ‘How can we claim to spend for peace/When the race is on in strife/Destroying life?” But just because Jackson hasn’t been emphasising the hard-soul side of his music doesn’t mean it isn’t there, ready to be tapped. At the first Jacksons’ concert in Kansas City, Michael Jackson took a riveting, unaccompanied vocal turn that was raw, purely gospel testifying. His performance that night left no doubt, if any still lingered, that he has become the most significant pop performer of the 1980 s.