Jackson Is "Off the Wall"
Michael Jackson’s explosive 1983 music videos are a prime example of successful image creation in the MTV era. Their arresting visuals, explosive choreography, and catchy hooks harness the full power of visual spectacle to maximize Jackson’s image, highlighting his acting and singing ability and dancing prowess. Will Straw, in his essay “Popular Music and Post-Modernism in the 1980s”, argues that the shift in discourse in the early 80s towards concepts like image and celebrity was due largely to the emergence of what he calls the “new pop mainstream” (4). The music video offered a new distribution mechanism for the record industry’s product and coincided with another development in the early 80s, “the rebirth of Top 40, singles-based radio, and with it significant shifts in the relative influence of different music audience groups [and] an increase in the rate of turnover of successful records and artist career spans” (Straw 4). Jackson had already proven his ability to thrive in this market environment with his 1979 LP Off the Wall, which Kobena Mercer argues in his essay “Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson’s Thriller” established his identity as a solo star and demonstrated “the lithe, sensual texture of his voice and its mastery over a diverse range of musical styles and idioms, from romantic ballad to rock” (300). The album was an intricately designed hit machine, spawning five singles. Jackson’s 1982 follow-up, Thriller, was even more perfectly engineered and resulted in seven singles and the three above-mentioned music videos. It was also a carefully constructed crossover effort. By the end of the 70s, the divide between suburban rock listeners and urban disco dancers seemed impossible to bridge. With Thriller, Jackson placed himself in the middle of this unbreachable gap, presenting himself and his music as the solution to the nation’s racial issues. Standing in for the racial pathologies of an entire nation would eventually take its toll on the artist but his mission seemed quite successful in 1983. On Thriller’s role in unifying music audiences, Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman argue, “Jackson confronted the racial divide headon [sic] by collaborating with two very popular, and very different, white artists: ex-Beatle Paul McCartney joined Jackson for a lyrical vocal duet on ‘The Girl Is Mine,’ while Eddie Van Halen of the heavy metal group Van Halen contributed the stinging guitar solo on the intense ‘Beat It’” (466). Jackson’s videos further illustrate this conciliatory effort.
