Dancing to Michael Jackson with my kids

I have a longstanding musical relationship with Michael Jackson. There’s nothing remarkable about that; many people do. Like the rest of my age cohort, Michael entered my consciousness with Thriller in the early 1980s. Aside from a period in my teens and young adulthood, he has rarely been out of my ears since. The relationship took on a new significance when my kids got interested in him, though “interested” is not the right word to describe their obsession. Milo, at age five, will listen to “Beat It” or “Billie Jean” on endless repeat for literally hours at a time. Bernadetta, age two, asks for “Beat It” by name—it’s one of two song titles she knows, along with “Yellow Submarine.” At her second birthday party, she insisted on dancing to “Beat It” rather than opening her presents.

Like me, my kids are not unusual. All babies and little kids love Michael Jackson. They love any kind of upbeat rhythmic music, but there’s something specific to Michael, with or without the Jackson 5, that grabs them especially strongly. As much fun as it is to see my kids dancing or singing to him or learning to moonwalk, though, I dread the day when they get old enough to start asking deeper questions. As the expression goes, Michael is a problematic fave. He was repeatedly and plausibly accused of child abuse, and while he was never convicted, his behavior with kids was questionable at the very least. There’s also the matter of Michael’s own abusive childhood, with the uncomfortable spectacle of a prepubescent boy doing the work of a man. Even if I shield my children from all of that, they will see pictures online, and I will need to answer difficult questions about the gruesome results of his many plastic surgeries.

So, Michael is problematic, but he remains my favorite. I have seen his music bring groups of old, self-conscious white people to their feet to dance who would never dance otherwise. This is not a small accomplishment. Social dance is an essential emotional vitamin, one which white Americans are starved of. Its absence shows itself in our collective unhappiness as surely as vitamin deficiencies show in stunted bone growth. Michael couldn’t use his music to make himself happy, but he has made uncountably many other people happy, including me and my family.

As a child myself, I remember particularly loving “Beat It.” I could only understand a few of the lyrics aside from the title phrase. But I understood the guitar riff and the beat, the urgency and anger in Michael’s voice, and the authority and power of the musicianship. I couldn’t have told you then why I thought that the song sounded so good, but I knew that it did. As an adult with an advanced and broad music education, I can tell you about the song’s musical structure, the layering of the instruments, and the innovative mixing and equalization. But that’s just putting technical detail to the emotional reactions I was already having clearly when I was seven.

I lost touch with Michael as I entered adolescence and became too “cool” for pop music. This coincided with a steep falloff in the quality of Michael’s music, and his hold on popular culture generally. I more or less forgot about him until my freshman year of college. It was the end of the spring semester, a warm and sunny day in May. People were mostly done with their work and were sitting around on the grass. Two musicians I knew, Harris and Stefan, brought out instruments and started jamming. Stefan had his upright bass—he was and is an excellent jazz bassist. Harris had his mandolin, one of many instruments he played astonishingly well. He started picking out “Beat It”, and Stephan jumped in immediately. I still have a photo of them playing it. Harris was one of my first and best music teachers. He killed himself ten years after the picture was taken. I saw him a few months before it happened. He was in graduate school for composition, making experimental music, and he seemed extremely unhappy about it. I wonder whether Harris would have done better if he had played more dance music, or whether, like Michael, joyful music wouldn’t have been enough to save him.

In the mid-2000s, I met a singer and DJ named Barbara. Although she went to music school, her main strength as a musician is having a close intuition for where pop music is headed. In 2008, she suggested that I listen to some Michael Jackson, and not just to Thriller, but to his later albums too. I did, for the first time in several years, and was dazzled by what I heard. I sampled the opening drum groove from “Billie Jean,” and we used it under many of our own tracks. This got me interested in other people’s sample-based music. I did a series of art projects I called sample maps, “family trees” of hip-hop breakbeats, and posted them on the web. They included one I made for Michael, who has always been a go-to sample source for rap producers. In 2009, when Michael died, the world rediscovered his music, and Barbara looked like a visionary. My sample map got picked up by blogs, social media, and then mainstream news outlets. It put me on the map as a pop music scholar, a professional identity I’ve been building ever since.

I teach music technology at NYU and Montclair State University. No one exactly knows what “music technology” is, so I choose to teach “vernacular music made with computers.” The longer I do this work, the less time I spend on the technology, and the more time I spend on music itself—recorded and studio-centric music like pop, rock, techno, and hip-hop. Michael’s recordings are a backbone of my syllabus. I found some multitrack stems from Off The Wall and Thriller, which are invaluable teaching resources. I devote the most class time to ”Beat It.” This is not because it’s musically the most interesting Michael song—quite the opposite, in fact. The harmony is simple, the structure is predictable, the melody is just a few riffs, and the beat is a straightforward rock groove. On paper, the song looks like it should be boring. And yet, it isn’t at all. The production must therefore be doing a lot of the musical heavy lifting.

Listening to the stems shows how rich and densely layered the soundscape of “Beat It” really is. There are three separate drum stems—a programmed pattern on the Linndrum, Jeff Porcaro playing live drum kit, and another stem of extra snare. In addition, there’s also some miscellaneous percussion, including Michael thumping on an empty instrument case. These tracks all blend together seamlessly because Bruce Swedian, the mix engineer, filtered all of the high end out of the drum machine, and the low end out of the kit. In isolation, they sound absurdly bottom- and top-heavy, respectively, but they fit together in the full mix like yin and yang. The iconic guitar part is similarly layered, blending several distinct tones together, including some subtle background parts beyond the big main riff: jazz octaves, staccato plucks, pick slides.

The greatest revelation in the multitracks is the keyboard stem. There are at least seven different keyboard sounds: a digital-sounding emulation of electric piano with a pitch wobble at the end, an analog “wow” sound doubling the guitar riff, string and choir pads, a helicopter-like arpeggiated drone, and most famously, the Synclavier bell sound that starts the song off. Aside from the bell, all these keyboards are mixed subtly. You can listen to the song many times and never even register their presence. But if you take them away, the rest of the music feels flat and lifeless. This is due in large part to the rhythmic interplay between the keyboards and the guitars. The keyboard parts are all on strong beats, while the guitar and bass riffs emphasize the weak beats. The track is full of such nuances, revealing “Beat It” to be more complex than its musical surface would suggest.

“Beat It” stands out from the rest of Thriller because it’s the only rock song. That makes it a conspicuous exception to Michael’s more typically “black” blend of funk, disco and R&B. Quincy Jones apparently pushed the song in a rock direction with the specific intention of appealing to white listeners, and I am living proof that this strategy was successful. It’s possible that Michael and Quincy Jones were also making a comment on rock itself. While it was a solidly white genre in 1982, rock had been the near-exclusive province of black musicians only a few decades earlier. It became popular because of Elvis Presley, but it was invented by artists like Chuck Berry, T-Bone Walker, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bo Diddley, and Carl Hogan, the guitarist in Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five. You can trace a line from Hogan through Berry and Ike Turner, and from there to Jimi Hendrix. Nelson George (2010) points out that Hendrix learned his flamboyant showmanship from his time playing R&B on the “chitlin circuit.” George compares this deep-rooted uninhibited performance tradition to P-Funk, to Prince, and above all, to Michael Jackson:

As a performer, Hendrix, like Jackson years later, placed the lessons of flamboyance he had learned in black show business in front of white audiences. That both were eccentric geniuses made these crossover moves seem less like calculations and more like projections of their rich fantasy lives. Hendrix dreamed of castles made of sand; Jackson imagined Hollywood noirs in which he was the blessed redeemer (116-117).

While “Beat It” reclaims black rock, beneath the guitars it also functions as electronic dance music. The first twenty seconds of the song contain nothing but synthesizers and a drum machine. Before Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo, there’s a sixteen bar section that’s just groove, all rhythm and abstract textures with no melody or harmony. These two sections are the parts that sound the freshest and most contemporary to my adult ears.

I can’t explain exactly what my kids hear in “Beat It,” but it has inspired them to start doing regular dance parties. While the song plays on infinite repeat, they turn off the lights, shine flashlights on some miniature disco balls my wife hung up, and jump around like monkeys. My son is also fascinated with the music video, which shows some not-very-tough-looking “tough guys” doing a choreographed street fight inspired by West Side Story. Milo sees Michael as the hero of this story, trying to stop everyone from fighting. I wish he could think of Michael that way forever, and not have to confront the complicated and sometimes ugly truth.

References

George, N. (2011). Thriller: The Musical Life of Michael Jackson. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

Hein, E. (2009). The Michael Jackson sample map goes viral. Retrieved February 5, 2018, from https://ethanhein.com/wp/2009/the-michael-jackson-sample-map-goes-viral/