Michael Jackson, "In the Closet"

There's just one more point I want to make regarding Michael Jackson before we resume other musical matters. To put it mildly, much has been made over his longstanding interest in children's company and his lack of apparent adult sexual relations. I may be very much in the minority on this, but I am willing to give MJ the benefit of the doubt that his interest in kids was companionary and nonsexual. It does me no good to speculate on predatory possibilities, and I have no stake in the rumors either way. But I do wish to bring up a hypothesis that no one talks about at all.

It may well be that Michael Jackson was, at the end of the day, asexual. Asexuality is a rare topic to hear about; on some levels, it elicits even more of a "what's wrong with you?" reaction than homosexuality or bisexuality. It can be a difficult and embarrassing thing to try to explain; little wonder that few try. Kinsey and others have estimated that about 1% of the population is essentially asexual - not to be confused with being celibate, which is a choice. Asexuality is an orientation, one which few openly claim for themselves. (I learned in the process of making this post that Edward Gorey was asexual. I hope he acknowledged this with no sense of shame.)

There's a reason, you know, that so many celebrities came to Michael's defense over the years and so few disavowed him outright. Maybe money's involved. Or maybe Michael really was that rare creature whose closet was not that he had kinky predilections or a minority orientation but that he had no orientation at all. Our society remains so afraid of sexuality that we can’t even talk about the absence thereof as a concept. American society would truly benefit itself by getting over a few hang-ups and having some honest national (and local) conversations about sex and sexuality.

"In the Closet" wasn't one of Michael's better records. As happened increasingly through the '90s, he got lost in his own mix, burying his quavering words beneath overproduced New Jack beats and effects. It's one of many cases where he forgot the joy that could be found in singing a simple song and sought with his producers to craft a many-handed epic instead. And it's so abstract that it fails to be erotic. But it grooved enough to hit #1 R&B and make the pop Top 10 in 1992 as Dangerous's third single, and it's worth revisiting for a moment this week to see, yet again, how the conflicts and contradictions in Michael Jackson's life unfolded in his songs, sometimes despite himself.

Farewell, Michael. We hardly knew ye.

Jackson 5, "Hallelujah Day"

I've been thinking a lot this weekend about Michael Jackson, about GLBT pride (in light of this weekend's revelry in NYC and the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots), and about some unexpected intersections therein. Still fleshing out my thoughts, so for the time being, here's an underappreciated J5 clip from the spring of 1973, when Michael and his brothers were in a relative cold spell, going no higher than #10 for seven consecutive singles after starting their career with four #1s and two #2s. "Hallelujah Day" was a celebration of the impending return of young American men from Vietnam; it chugs and churns like the Rascals' "People Got to Be Free," to the extent that you can almost see a freedom train coming 'round the bend.

Friday Not-So-Funtime: Michael Jackson, "Scream"

Dear readers: I began this week with the intention of presenting a Friday Funtime of GLBT Pride, songs from artists who have been courageously open about their sexual identities and still musically successful. The past day's events led me to rethink this. Hey - it'll allow me to shine specific spotlights on anthems like Bronski Beat's "Why" and Erasure's "Always" on future dates.

So with that, I turn the page over to my dear friend Dave*. He and I both graduated college right around the time "Scream," the antagonistic song Michael Jackson recorded with his sister Janet, hit the airwaves and video screens. It made it only to #5 in June 1995, but "Scream" represented much more for Michael: an unreturnable breaking point. Its message, both aural and visual, was clear: I'm in my fantasy world now; leave me the fuck alone. D* and I, in a difficult to explain fascination, over a long stretch of time pondered separately and together what might become of a Michael so thoroughly divorced from reality and so ongoingly divorced from his own skin. There never seemed a possible happy ending. It seemed likely things would end badly, but not suddenly and certainly not now.

And yet here we are. And here's D*'s contemplation on a modern tragedy.

_____

I saw a movie about industrial processes once. The operator took a disk of sheet steel, hard, solid, resilient. He put in a steam press and pulled a lever. The press came down and crumpled that shiny steel like it was tissue paper.

Michael Jackson's life always reminded me of that.

The man never had a self; he never had time to make one. From the time he was 10, a media spotlight shone on him, never letting up, getting brighter and brighter until the early '80s, when he was featured in practically every media outlet on Earth. He could do no wrong. Billions of people slavered over him. And then, over the course of the late '80s, they put him in a mirror. All the attention was there, but suddenly he could do no right. There has to be a second half to every Behind the Music; society demands one. And everything we love one day, we grew sick of and hate the next.

The story of Michael Jackson is the story of how our society works, a crucial one to any future historian who wishes to understand our era. And it will probably never be told. It's funny, really: whoever was willing to be honest about the fact of MJ's life (which are almost certainly more bizarre and disturbing that we know) would make a fortune, but no one will spill, out of fear or loyalty or just fatigue. Those who are most willing to talk are those who probably know the least. Sometimes it seems like there are no more secrets, but often it's the most superficial things that are revealed, providing a more impenetrable mask to the truth.

Mask. His face was a mask. What was he trying to make himself into? There's a phrase: "He's trying to be someone he isn't." I think Michael Jackson was trying to be someone he was. He was always trying to live up to his own divine image.

It's hard to have sympathy for celebrities, and rightly so. Yeah, it's hard, but the hardness is cushioned by a thick, spongy layer of money. It's only in the extreme examples, like Jackson, that the true nature of the beast shines forth. We pay these people to be spiritually vivisected, and we all gather around the operating table to ooh and ahh at the fine kidneys and lungs, to criticize a malformed liver or a disappointing pancreas, to dismiss the gonads as the same-old-same-old. The lucky ones get sewn up again, but God help the ones we really find interesting. And outside in the hall there's a line around the block of new victims.

Lord, please show Michael Joseph Jackson more mercy than we did.

Drake, "Best I Ever Had"

I'm not opposed to sampling. I roll my eyes when samples are used in excessively obvious ways (see: Puff Daddy's mid-'90s karaoke), but I admire the creative potential of the form and wish licensing weren't such a damn hassle. (Flo & Eddie, I'm looking at you.) Repurposing existing material is an art in its own right.

But I get really, really disappointed when an old song I love is sampled in a novel way - and wasted on a horrid new song that doesn't deserve such a production assist.

L&Gs, I present Drake's current Top 10 hit "Best I Ever Had," a worst-of-year candidate except for that inspired interlacing of (if my ears aren't failing me) the billowing bass and tinkling piano of the opening notes to Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds' "Fallin' in Love." (Note that I've substituted the "clean" version of Drake's hit - not because I'm a prude, but because it's too depressing a trend in 2009 that someone should go Top 10 with a chorus hook that goes "You tha fuckin' best.") At least the sentiment of the sample is retained, if not the dignity.

Jesse Johnson f/ Sly Stone, "Crazay"

"Cocaine's a hell of a drug," went the now sadly immortal phrase, and damn if Rick didn't prove it in this 1980 Soul Train clip in which he fidgets and boasts and behaves as a total ass. D: "You have a lot of energy." R: "Oh, it's that vitamin E I took." Come on! Trying to clown Don Cornelius?

I was thinking about cocaine-laced funk this week when I was introduced to the nightmarish world of a guy named Ricky Simms who recorded with friends under the moniker Wicked Witch. The I Love Music discussion board has a thread on him, through which I got to hear the WW album Chaos 1978-86. And I hope I never hear it again. Listening to tracks like "Fancy Dancer" and "X Rated" put me in a disjointed haze, their basslines growling as if coming up from hell itself, their ideas going off in jagged directions and abrupt disconnections, hollow and desperately empty. No wonder they call it the Devil's dandruff.

But I won't subject you to that. You needn't have my nightmares. Instead I'll give you some more-benign '80s funk: "Crazay," by a Jesse Johnson whose sobriety I cannot guess at and a Sly Stone who in all likelihood has no memory of ever having performed this song. Johnson had left the Time two years prior with a good sense of period funk formula, but Sly brought little lyrical coherence and the refrain was a washout, so "Crazay" deservedly made it only to #53 on the Hot 100 in 1986.

PS: This is my 200th entry here. I will have a cupcake.

Tony Carey, "The First Day of Summer"

I've been thinking that if I keep posting "summer" songs, maybe Mother Nature'll take the hint and send the sun out to play for a few days. Thus we have Tony Carey, a middling storytelling rocker with a Meatloaf-meets-Milsap look, with his second and final hit, "The First Day of Summer." For a brief time in 1984 his tales of ne'er-do-wells hiding from their lives and responsibilities sat comfortably alongside the characters from Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp who were trying a bit harder. "First Day" is kind of forgettable (nice riff, but a silly video); I prefer its predecessor, "A Fine Fine Day," whose video tells a far more sensible story.

It's a fine, fine day for summer to actually begin. Ain't it?

Jamestown Massacre, "Summer Sun"

It's officially summer now, though you wouldn't know it to look at a New York City that's resembling London more and more each week. Last year I posted a "Summer" theme set (though I wasn't yet in the practice of including YouTube links all over the place); there hardly seems reason to repeat the idea. Especially since, as he always does, Barry Scott gave a far superior treatment to the "summer" theme on this weekend's episode of "The Lost 45s."

Scott, a longtime fixture on Boston radio, deals primarly in chart-pop obscurities, the sorts of songs that made the Top 40 in their day but never came back into circulation in any of the oldies/classic rock/Jack radio formats. He can always be counted on to play something I've never heard before, and this weekend he came through again. Played "Summer Sun," a tune I'd never heard of from a band I'd never heard of (Jamestown Massacre, and the name is a reference to events of 1622, not a foreshadowing of events of 1978) that made it to #90 in 1972. A bit of research tells me they're from Chicago, and I shouldn't be surprised: there's a unified sound that links "Summer Sun" both to the Buckinghams, Chicagoans who'd had a burst of success five years prior, and to roughly contemporary local efforts "L.A. Goodbye" by the Ides of March and "Lake Shore Drive" by Aliotta, Haynes & Jeremiah. I've been thinking that if there really was such a thing as a "Chicago sound" circa 1972, I'd like to hear more of it.

Friday Funtime: I Think I'll Color This Man Father

Sorry for the lateness in posting - I can hardly call this Friday now - but articles don't copyedit themselves and beer doesn't drink itself. Always there are priorities.

So happy Father's Day this weekend to all the dads out there, and the dad-lovers too. Alas, there's not much in the Great American Songbook or the pop annals to celebrate what fathers are and do. I'm inclined to think it's partly because so many biological fathers have proven themselves unfit for the task ... and partly because so many of the great pop songwriters were/are gay men, and gay men tend not to have the sunniest of relationships with their fathers.

But that's a subject for another day. Lacking a true 10-song set of tunes appropriate to the day - and really, what does Fleetwood Mac's "Oh Daddy" (or Adrian Belew's "Oh Daddy" or the Turtles' Oh Daddy," for that matter) have to do with fathers as such? - I'll spotlight one song that I've always found especially touching. "Color Him Father" was a 1969 Top 10 hit for a one-hit-wonder R&B outfit called the Winstons that I know next to nothing about*. All I know is that they wrote a beautiful ode to a stepfather's love (which they present as unconditional: no easy feat for any male, much less a nonbiological dad) and that their name has additional resonance in my life (Winston was also the middle name of John Lennon, the first man I ever admired, as well as the cigarette brand of choice for my own biological father, one of few character traits I remember about him). Enjoy the day.

PS: I'd like to think that the sister Nell mentioned in "Color Him Father" is the same sister Nell who was bitten by a rat in Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon."

* I'm told the Winstons play a role in the "Amen break," but I don't know that story and it'll have to wait for another day anyway.

ETA: PS: I'd be remiss if I didn't take the occasion of Father's Day to mention Elton John's "Last Song," a beautifully honest appreciation with a perfectly emotionally manipulative video to match. Also check out Elton's comments on the song.

Mary J. Blige, "No More Drama"

No backstory to tell about this one - it's just that "No More Drama" at the 2002 Grammys is the most electrifying live performance I have ever seen in my life. I remember watching it live on TV and physically shaking by the end. Damn, she earned that standing ovation. When she glances at the camera and growls "And I choooose to wi-i-iiiiin" at the 1:50 mark, you can sense something coming over her, as if she's having an out-of-body experience and performing a self-exorcism in the process. She yells more than sings, but it works, and by the end, you're gasping for air along with her.

Would that more R&B starlets take a cue from Blige, now that I'm thinking about it. Not just in the singing, but in the taking control of one's life. For all too many, fame spirals people out of their minds. Blige, in achieving the fame she'd (as she reminded us at the coda) worked so hard for, found hers.

Ellen Greene, "Somewhere That's Green"

I watched the latest episode of Obsessed on A&E with great sadness. Sadness for Russ, a compulsive hoarder who was clearly in unspoken and unrequited love with his one friend, Rich, a fellow onetime auditioner for the Gay Men’s Chorus of L.A. There was an utter absence of intimacy in Russ’s life - in every sense. He’d surely never been fucked, perhaps never even kissed; and more sadly, probably never been told “I love you” by anyone except his mother. As part of his way of making peace with his lack of physically and/or emotionally intimate relations with others, he took to developing unnaturally close attachment to things: the faux memories antiques evoked for him provided a facsimile of emotion, of something to be sentimental about. He took to reliving imagined life and love rather than actually living and loving. And all he really wanted beyond that fantasy world of tchotchkes was for his beloved friend to have a chair and share the air with him.

His plight made me think of a song I’d heard at a bar’s karaoke night the previous evening: “Somewhere That’s Green,” from Little Shop of Horrors. Audrey's desire for domesticity in its quaintest form was all the poor hoarding guy really desired from life. (In all honesty, though, his reality is probably far closer to Herbert’s faithful rendition on Family Guy.)

I’ve never actually watched Little Shop of Horrors, so I don’t know if Audrey got her domestic bliss with Seymour. Russ, sadly, did not get his with Rich. I hope you get yours. Everyone should have a bit of it.

The Samples, "Did You Ever Look So Nice?"

A good friend of mine celebrates his birthday today, and though I don't believe he's a regular reader of this blog, I thought I'd offer some greetings in musical form. Mike and I were both fans of the Samples in younger days, and it's still nice to be reminded of the good feelings they could evoke at their best. Here's one of their very best: "Did You Ever Look So Nice," probably the closest thing they ever had to a hit. Give a listen and pretend you're back in college for Senior Week for a few minutes.

Enjoy your day, Mwox.

C.W. McCall, "Convoy"

Welcome back to "Baby I've Been Thinking." I needed some time away from writing to clear my head; now, I'm sufficiently empty-headed to blog again.

In my weeks away, I missed a few musical anniversaries. The third of June is memorialized in song as the day Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge (as well as the day Neil Diamond lost his virginity to "Desiree," mistakenly thinking that June 3 falls in summer). And June 6 - D-Day, and one may well wonder if that detail was chosen for the gruff patriotism the date connotes - was the day C.W. McCall, a character created by an ad exec, led a group of rebellious truckers (and 11 long-haired Friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus, and what a great detail that was to include) on what was then called a "Convoy." Truckers banding together, too fast to stop, too big to fail. A successful example of sticking it to the man - except, for some reason, as they celebrate their victory in the final refrain, they sound a hell of a lot more like Muppets than truckers. I almost expect the trucks to start flinging furry and feathery livestock skyward.

"Convoy," which debuted in December 1975 and hit the top of the charts in early '76, then a year or two later was made into a movie, is one of the very first songs I heard as a child - we had the 45 and were keyed into CB culture, which Will Ferrell was absolutely correct to liken Twitter to. So when does someone write the first Twitter anthem?

PS: If you're new here, or just haven't visited much, this blog is now exactly 1 year old, and I hope you'll take a look through the archives and let me know what you've been thinking.