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When Michael Jackson introduced the moonwalk in 1983, people freaked—and then immediately began imitating him. We haven't stopped. Slate V has collected video footage of our best attempts to top the King of Pop in this great video.
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Mike: What is your reaction to M.J.'s death?
Susan: In 1983, at the peak of Thriller fever, my father said, "He'll never be as big as Elvis."
Mike: Your dad may be right. For me, M.J. is associated with watching MTV. They showed his videos every 20 minutes. I still think gangland battles are fought in the manner of "Beat It."
Susan: I learned "Beat It" by its inverse, "Eat It." It was the introduction to Michael Jackson for nerds.
Mike: If it's getting cold, reheat it. I also remember being acutely aware of which of my friends was the best moonwalker. I could never really do it.
Susan: The boy who could do it best at our school owned a tie with the pattern of an electronic keyboard. It seems like both of our associations with Michael Jackson begin and end with Thriller.
Mike: He kind of lost me with that face-morphing video, though I did think it was kind of cool at the time. Didn't M.C. Hammer enter the scene at this point?
Susan: Really the next thing I know about Michael Jackson is the child hanging from the open window. I often worry that someone across the way from us in Brooklyn will think I'm a Michael Jackson mother when I hold our baby seven stories above the street and he tugs at the window guards.
Mike: At least we did not nickname our kid Blanket.
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As saddened as I am by Michael Jackson's death, I'm equally shocked that it didn't happen sooner. A few years back when I covered M.J.'s trial and sat a few feet from him on a daily basis, I found myself constantly marveling at his frailty. Jackson wore his suits tailored tight, with fitted jackets and stovepipe trousers, yet still the fabric billowed around his bird-boned frame. He was always limping down the courtroom aisle, clutching at his ribs, taking shallow breaths. He showed up late to court one day looking on the verge of a violent retching attack. The consensus within the trial's press corps held that Jackson spent his days in a haze of Jesus juice.
Now that he's gone, obsessive Jackson watchers will wonder what hidden truths might at last emerge. Some theorized that Jackson had been paying off his ex-wife Debbie Rowe and perhaps others in an effort to conceal the actual biological provenance of his children. Will anyone come forward now and clear up the origins of Prince, Paris, and little Blanket?
Jackson's many creditors will no doubt lament the death of his ability to tour and to rack up new revenue. They'll squabble over his valuable song catalogs and his less valuable tacky home furnishings.
And then there are the rest of Michael's fans, the millions who loved the music but were unsure what to think of the man. I've always been agnostic on the question of Michael's guilt or innocence and felt that he was, at heart, an 8-year-old boy with the equivalent excitability and moral sophistication. And so I'm mainly sad that the gloved one won't get a chance to bask in his inevitable cultural reappreciation. M.J. was due, somewhere down the line, for a Johnny Cash-style re-emergence. An Elvis-in-black-leather moment. It would have been tinged, of course, with the lingering memory of M.J.'s alleged transgressions. But never underestimate people's thirst for a comeback. Michael would have lit up like a small child at the opportunity to make one more moonwalk across the world's stage.
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Michael Jackson died of a heart attack today. He was 50. Volumes have been written about Jackson's music, his bizarre personal life, and his legal troubles. Here's a selection of Slate's coverage of the King of Pop over the years:
Seth Stevenson filed two dispatches from Jackson's 2005 sexual-abuse trial. Click here to read Part 1; click here for Part 2. During that same trial, Jacob Weisberg didn't believe Jackson was a pedophile, and Dahlia Lithwick wondered whether the threat of imprisonment would make Jackson stop acting like such a freak. Pulitzer Prize-winner Margo Jefferson and Slate music critic Jody Rosen discussed M.J. as a cultural object and a troubled human being. Seth Stevenson charted the evolution of the star's persona by examining his greatest music videos.
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Directed by John Landis, specially effected by Rick Baker, and choreographed by the step-designer of Broadway's Dreamgirls in collaboration with the moonwalker himself, the "Thriller" video, of course, earns its accolades as the greatest music video of all time. This is not just a matter of its lavish detail or its loving grandiosity. Nor does its distinction owe simply to its self-reflexive wit as a riddle within a video within a film—"the Chinese-box humor," as Robert Christgau once said, worth regarding as "Michael's most effective anti-star move." (Contrary to popular belief, or at least Wikipedia, "Thriller" is not a spoof of zombie flicks but an inside-out horror film connecting R&B lust with the erotics of fear and proposing a superstar as an extrahuman.)
But all that is just the payoff. What mattered was the giddiness of the buildup to the video's MTV debut on Dec. 2, 1983. For the generation that came of age, or thought it was coming of age, in the first half of the 1980s, that afternoon was its "Who Shot J.R.?" moment, a Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan societal spectacle. Maybe its only companion piece was the wedding, two years earlier, of Jackson's pal Diana Spencer. We were gathered around the TV set with everybody after school, practically trying to stick our heads in the cathode-ray tube, and it was the tension of the anticipation that made us jump, as a unit, at that first flick of creepy yellow peppers. Our eyes weren't yet jaundiced, and the hype was the thrill.
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The Big Money Editor James Ledbetter offers this remembrance of Charlie's Angels icon Farrah Fawcett, who died today of cancer at age 62:
It must be next to impossible for anyone under the age of 30 to understand that there was a time when Farrah Fawcett Majors was actually cool. Looking now at that iconic mid-’70s poster, anyone can see the surface attractions that propelled her to fame: perfectly feathered hair, impossibly confident smile, and—particularly if you were a seventh-grade boy like me, staring for too long at that red bathing suit image masking-taped to the wall—the unabashed alert nipples.
Yet there was a whole other layer to her mystique that eludes today’s eye (to say nothing of the fact that her subsequent crises buried the real person along with the persona). Tits-and-ass primetime programming reached a kind of apogee in the mid-'70s, and while our parents rolled their eyes and tried to switch the dial to PBS, my friends and I devoured it with a pre-adolescent mixture of innocence and titillation. No matter what anyone might try and claim today, Charlie’s Angels was an abysmal way to kill an hour. The inevitable scene in which one or more Angels would get wet could barely justify the ludicrous plots, ritual explosions, and truly crappy acting. Even then, I knew it was bad.
The show, though, wasn’t the point. (At least that, I suspect, today’s youth would understand.) Watching Charlie’s Angels, having the FFM poster on your wall, clipping magazine pictures of the Angels in their bikinis and hanging them on the inside of your locker—these were more like badges, a way of participating in pop culture with as much sexual knowing as you could muster. Actually, as best I can recall, it wasn’t just a boy thing. I would not go so far as to say that the Angels were pillars of feminism, but girls watched the show. Charlie’s Angels was our version of a croquet match in an Edith Wharton novel—a way for almost-men and almost-women to play together politely, pretending to talk about one thing when actually you were checking one another out.
You were supposed to have a favorite Angel—some debased version, perhaps, of once having to have a favorite Beatle. (Kate Jackson was the smart one, but I can’t remember what the distinguishing factor between FFM and Jaclyn Smith was supposed to be, nor did it matter.) In truth, there was no competition—it was Farrah, always Farrah. Why? Blonde prejudice, for some, perhaps. But for me and, I suspect, most of my peers, it was for the most innocent reason of all: She was married to Lee Majors, the "Six Million-Dollar Man," the bionic hero whose cred had been established way before hers, or at least two ABC seasons before. And so I think FFM functioned as a kind of transitional crush, from the young boy’s fascination with physical strength and cyborg powers to the preteen’s need to branch out into a social exploration of sexuality.
When she left the show after the first season, I don’t remember any of my friends watching it any more, and by the time she and Majors split in 1979, the girls I wanted to spend time with had more dimensions than that poster. I imagine for her, the poster was something she wanted desperately to transcend, but for millions of American boys, it was itself a kind of transcendence.
—James Ledbetter
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One of the strangest moments in Transformers 2—and there's plenty of competition, this being a movie in which John Turturro recommends that a robot's scrotum be the target of an airstrike—comes when we learn that the president of the United States is none other than Barack Obama. You thought Obama already had a lot on his plate? Turns out when he's not worrying about the GM bankruptcy or the latest from Tehran; he's trying to keep a lid on a supersecret alliance between the U.S. military and the Autobots.
Obama is only referred to in passing, in a news report, and we never see his image. But the movie paints an unflattering portrait nonetheless. Galloway, the Pentagon official sent by the administration to oversee the goodly Autobots, is a short-sighted fussbudget. Wielding a letter of authority from the president, he essentially shuts down the operation, accusing heroic Autobot leader Optimus Prime of being more trouble than he's worth to the taxpayers of the United States. This is a short-sighted move to say the least, a rash decision that endangers the mission to rid Earth of the evil Decepticons. Way to go, Barack.
The hardly subtle suggestion here is that Obama is a lousy commander in chief. This characterization has led some to wonder whether Transformers auteur Michael Bay might have been taking a potshot at the president. When asked about it recently, Bay said he intended the reference as an affectionate shout out. He explained that he'd bumped into then-Sen. Obama at the Las Vegas airport after seeing him at a campaign event, and they'd had this exchange:
I said, "Hey, I saw you the other night, and I liked what you had to say. I really like hearing your stuff." I introduced myself, and he said, "What do you do?" "I'm a director." He said, "What movies?" I said, "Oh, these movies..." He said, "Oh, you're a big-ass director. I've seen a bunch of your movies." So that's why I decided to put him in.
I'm inclined to believe Bay's story. There's nothing in Transformers 2 to suggest the director contemplated the meaning of anything—he probably just assumed Obama would find it awesome to be president of a big-ass summer blockbuster. And it is sort of an honor, if you think about it. Presidents—some feckless, some brave—are stock characters in Hollywood's summer fare. Usually, however, they're thinly veiled caricatures—Donald Moffat's Reaganesque President Bennet in 1994's Clear and Present Danger is a personal favorite—rather than actual sitting presidents. Brow Beat readers, can you think of other summer blockbusters that have featured the real POTUS? Post your examples in the "Fray."
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William Eggleston's one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 is a landmark of photographic history—color photography's first-ever solo show at the country's most influential museum. The medium had been maligned as too commercial and too amateurish, but Eggleston's understated photographs of Southern life were an instant hit. Eggleston's major retrospective arrived Saturday at Washington's Corcoran Gallery after having opened last year at New York's Whitney Museum. Its title, "Democratic Camera," calls attention to his populist streak. Eggleston embraced cheap, widely-available materials. His film "Stranded in Canton," restored last year and available on YouTube and DVD, documents life among hardscrabble musicians in Memphis and New Orleans as they liquor up and play; it was shot on a Sony Portapak, the first mass-market portable video recorder. And he exposed some of his most iconic photograghs on Kodachrome, the first commercially successful color film.
The Portapak is long gone, and Kodachrome will soon be: Kodak announced on Monday it is discontinuing the film, after 74 years on the market. What equipment, then, would a young William Eggleston use today?
The obvious analogy with the Portapak is the inexpensive, feature-stripped line of Flip digital camcorders. In photography, cell phone cameras might have enticed a young Eggleston with their widespread use. But both suffer from low image quality. Eggleston's work bucked prejudices against color photography's lowbrow reputation but his technical skill was still evident—his photographs have great tonal range, color balance, and resolution. The pixilation and poor light handling of the Flip and many cheap digital cameras would seem to make them a long shot for MoMAfication—though digital photographs from more expensive, higher quality cameras have already found wide acceptance in the art world. Has Eggleston's niche—working in a popular medium that still allowed for virtuosic expression-really vanished, a victim of manufacturers' bottom lines and the arms race among luxury consumer cameras? Or is there a true digital successor to Kodachrome or Portapak? Post responses in the Fray.
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"They lived in squares and loved in triangles." About the Bloomsbury group. Heard it on the BBC's "Start the Week" podcast, which is as good an hour of free audio as you can possibly find.