Michael Jackson’s vision surpasses hip-hop politics.
In Black or White, Michael Jackson’s still-awe-inspiring 1991 music video, the pop star promoted an audacious claim: “I’m not going to spend my life being a color.” Decades later, Jackson’s courageous declaration has lost none of its power or challenge, a fact that rap star Kendrick Lamar cannot match in his show-offy new music video, The Heart Part 5, which has the media mesmerized.
Lamar’s aim is lower than Jackson’s; he attempts to confirm the psychosocial distress Jackson rose above but that the corporate media — and many politicians — insist is the definition of black American experience. Jackson went beyond that limitation, expanding his one-world belief in Black or White’s miraculous morphing montage in which at least 17 different faces representing various cultures, nations, phyla and phenotypes, evolve into and out of one another. No matter how many times you watch the morphing sequence, a technological innovation for its time, it remains amazing — for playing out MJ’s thesis so that its reality cannot be denied.
The Heart’s video conceit utilizes the digital update of morphing called “deepfake” as if to deny MJ’s prophetic optimism. The fascination of deepfake technology is based on deception (using a person’s likeness and then misrepresenting it); it contributes to skepticism and distrust that, in this case, insists on racial uniqueness. Returning to the Obama era’s disavowal of biraciality, Lamar emphasizes “blackness,” linking it with the separatism of Biden-era “equity.” MJ’s playful-profound morphing becomes a confounding spectacle in which Lamar deepfakes his own identity with a rogue’s gallery of other black celebrities — O.J. Simpson, Kobe Bryant, Jussie Smollett, Kanye West, Nipsey Hussle.
The visual conceit deceptively foregrounds racial identity, using Lamar himself and his morbid penchant for victimization. First, he’s seen alone — isolated — photographed against a dull backdrop the color of blood so old and dried-out that it’s turned almost purple. Lamar looks perplexed, the agitated youth of his 2012 breakthrough album Good Kid, M.A.A.D City (released when Kendrick Lamar Duckworth was 24) now grown older and handsome with worry. His wild, springy Afro is “perfect,” like Warren Zevon said in “Werewolves of London.” That’s because Lamar has mastered stylized anxiety — black and mauve.
Lamar’s tune forsakes the liveliness of Black or White, which resulted from Jackson’s combination of guitar-rock buzz and R&B melody. Lamar samples Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You,” turning its sensuality sullen. He misuses R&B’s life-affirming tradition as the setting for a chaotic monologue; this is the “spoken-word” genre, hip-hop ready-made for the delectation of ghetto tourists and celebrity hounds.
Because Lamar has his heart set on pleasing sociologists and pundits (the kind who mention his Pulitzer Prize as bona fides rather than a jinx), The Heart trades sincerity for specious authenticity. MJ never made this mistake; Black or White is a transcendent work of art — the best film of 1991 — because he surpassed hip-hop’s petty street impudence. Experience gave MJ a larger view of life, society, and faith — enough to question and defy the mega-stardom that becomes Lamar’s trap.
If the three decades since Black or White have taught us anything about celebrityhood, it’s that the media exploit it but never understand it. Black celebrity becomes alienation — it prevents comprehension and compassion by making exceptions of individuals who achieve success and fame. But fame is not recognition. It stirs envy — the opposite of understanding. This is the dubious basis of Lamar’s deepfake, which traffics in black notoriety. While MJ’s morphing externalized his sense of brotherhood, Lamar’s deepfake internalizes all the infamy that the hate-filled media ascribe. (“Don’t tell me you agree with me / When I saw you kicking dirt in my eye!” MJ warned.)
Lamar’s blinkered vision (his rote politics) will prevent his art from changing the world as MJ did. (“Five” in the title enumerates Lamar’s series of obscure one-off non-album tracks.) Black or White’s significance was perfectly summed up when the website Perfume Nationalist mused: “Crazy to think racism, colonialism and gender identity were solved by one man in one song in 1991 and everything since has been willful, cynical, opportunistic regression.”
The Heart Part 5’s deepfake gimmickry doesn’t explore these mischievous celebrities’ individual troubles or separate misfortune. (The song’s Will Smith verse “hurt people hurt more people” gives no more insight than those clueless pundits recently accusing Will Smith of felonious assault; it exploits all black men as the same.) Instead of fawning over Lamar’s deepfakery, ask, Why didn’t Lamar also morph into Obama, or Clarence Thomas, or Berry Gordy, or Crispus Attucks, the first person killed in the American Revolution? Such an iconographic challenge would go against The Heart Part 5’s simplistic, unclear politics.
The video is a collaboration with Matt Parker and Trey Stone, creators of the animated TV series South Park, but this production isn’t funny or clever. It’s more like the loathsome deepfake clip Sassy Justice that Parker and Stone made in 2020 to inveigh against Trump’s reelection bid. Their failed satire relied on media-safe targets — including Mark Zuckerberg, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner. That Pulitzer Prize seems to have gone to Lamar’s head. He doesn’t realize when he or his brethren are being ridiculed. His identification with O.J., Kanye, and Will Smith is only skin-deep.
