Petesophizing...

My dance vocabulary is not sufficient, but even I can identify in Michael Jackson's breakthrough performance in 1983 the following:

Charlie Chaplin

Fred Astaire
Elvis, of course
Chuck Berry
Karate kicks
Vaudville poses (how many bows does he take in the middle of the number, not just after it?)

There are probably a half dozen references (samples) I recognize but can't pinpoint. (Who in the pantheon used to reach out and shake hands with an imaginary companion?) Like Shakespeare's play Hamlet, there's something for everybody in this dance.

I was going to write that, like the play Hamlet, Jackson's breakthrough moment, the one that survives the passage of time, is nearly incoherent. Fragmented. Not an artistic whole. At the very least Jackson's a long way from heeding the character Hamlet's own advice to the players: Suit the action to the word, the word to the action. Does anybody believe his naive, misdirected hip thrusts could have anything to do with a paternity scenario?

But this morning I realized there is an organizing idea, or maybe a frame tale, to this stylishly patchwork five minutes. His dance, at age 25, is really the dance of a teenager. (So are his limbs.) It's supremely well executed, with flashes of individuality, yes. But those flashes leap from between pop culture references. His overarching persona is a talented kid who's watched too much TV having a Risky Business moment. And like Tom Cruise acting out Bob Seger's Old Time Rock And Roll, incredibly, Michael Jackson is lip-syncing. Pretending. The overall effect, like the moment for Cruise's character in the movie, is to invoke a state of sexual inexperience, which is maybe a state of anticipation, but one certainly dominated by the imaginary.

If you think of him as a teenager at a fantasy distance from the song's decidedly sexual groove and its lyrics of post-coidal anguish, the performance suddenly takes shape as an artistic whole. The nonsensically nonsexual juxtapositions (like invoking Fred Astaire) make sense in a bedroom adolescent world. And the performance becomes, it is, in front of millions, so intimate.

I wonder, though, if at least two aspects of this performance might have reverberated negatively in Jackson's head over the years. First, that the launch sequence for earning gazillions with worldwide fame was so full of unabashed borrowing. The old cliche is that a mature artist doesn't borrow, but steals. Later he would not steal, or borrow, but buy Paul McCartney's catalog--the exploited kid becoming the exploiter receiving checks every time Sir Paul wanted to tour his own music. How that must have felt, especially when his stake in the songs of the Beatles became his principal (perhaps only) income asset. How much better it would have been for him (now rotting in a funeral home) to retain McCartney's friendship and creative kinship. Jackson did have his own well to draw from.

And, as mentioned--and I didn't remember this thinking back to first seeing this performance--the launch of Michael Jackson, the gloved one, was lip-synced. Thanks to YouTube, his solo legacy may be reformatted with thumbnails of lip-syncing at key junctures, a blow to the performance chops he surely had. How did he get away with it when others have been so lambasted? The Superbowl looks pathetic to me. All hat and no cattle. To be sure his voice, complicated by real physical problems, was nowhere close to the vocal strengths of his Mount Rushmore companions, Elvis and Sinatra, both of whom could achieve lift-off with little or no accompaniment. Elvis liked stagecraft and pyrotechnics, but he didn't need them. Jackson's "I'm a fake" panics, like those experienced by all performers, must have run even deeper than his talent.

I hadn't seen this performance in years. It brought out in me real sadness, where before I think my only emotion was a small sense of relief--at not having to watch this guy twist in the wind any longer.