Discovering the showbiz roots of vox-pop commentary
Some conservative pundits online have realized how the popular revolt of Michael Jackson fans against moralizing by the mainstream media has created a truly democratic event.
Consider the discovery of a scene from the little-known 1974 film The Little Prince in which choreographer Bob Fosse (celebrated for directing the political movie-musical Cabaret) performs a wriggly, serpentine dance that bears an uncanny similarity to the Moonwalk slide-and-shuffle that Jackson would make world-famous a decade later. It is rare when opinion-based political commentators also serve as cultural archivists. Emboldened by the existence of social media discourse, Jackson’s admirers post clips that oppose media narrative with their own accounts of Jackson’s history, renewing the efflorescence of his artistry. This moment in grassroots vox-pop discourse might crucially affect the future of genuine independent political speech.
The $450-plus million that the biopic Michael has grossed so far has ignited a vengeful liberal-media backlash comparable only to Trump Derangement Syndrome, yet it has also galvanized fans across the cultural and political spectrum to strongly resist the media’s prohibitions.
Art stands against the media’s efforts to demoralize the public. Drawing connections between Jackson and such pop culture antecedents as the Bob Fosse song-and-dance solo in The Little Prince provides irrefutable defense. This deep dive into Jackson lore links the Antoine de Saint Exupéry novella (a centerpiece of existentialism as well as children’s literature) to the rarely discussed concerns of Jackson’s art. The sojourn of Saint Exupéry’s lonely child into global (extraterrestrial) adventures parallels a pop music phenomenon witnessed by millions yet understood by few.
As Saint Exupéry’s Snake (one of the book’s philosophical temptations), Fosse is the child’s projection of moral choice and mortality. Jackson’s response to Fosse signifies his adolescent physical expression of ethical ideas roused by pubescent stirrings. Note Fosse’s sparkly spats and cooch-dance arm-and-leg movements. His wily star turn includes an alliterative spiel to the Little Prince and future King of Pop:
You seem like a smart sensible sort.
Why did you swing down to this sorry, sleazy swamp?
Well sir, this speck in space is a scholastic sewer.
All you can learn here is sorrow, sorrow.
If I were you, I’d scram.
Fosse’s “Snake in the Grass” showcase extended his renown after the success of Cabaret (so massive that it affected every facet of ’70s pop culture, including protopunk artists such as Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure). 1974 was also the year of the Jackson Five’s Dancing Machine album, and Fosse’s Snake suggested a personal departure by which Jackson could claim the showbiz roots of subversive pop for himself, eventually going solo like the Little Prince exploring outer space.
It was Jackson’s cultural ascension — exceeding Motown and Elvis hegemony, raising alarm at both his racial and sexual identity, subverting the ruling order of pop culture — that prompted mainstream media’s punitive, anti-pop reaction. The legacy media are false guardians of decency, and their bias against the biopic Michael, like their negativity toward the documentary Melania, reveals that a political agenda has always hidden behind postures of morality or taste.
So many defenses of Jackson’s innocence — recalling his June 13, 2005, acquittal and memories of his performances — have gone viral that the pretense of R&B and pop haters has been rendered nil. (Numerous online watchdogs have tracked Rolling Stone’s running tally of articles defaming the movie Michael and exposing the publication’s treachery.)
The contention that Jackson copied his moves from the Bob Fosse “Snake sequence” is disproved by viral posts of Cab Calloway in a clip from the opening credits of Minnie the Moocher (1932). The hunches, slides, and wriggles of Jazz singer and bandleader Calloway foreshadow what both Fosse and Jackson would do. His physical syncopation is closely related to how Jackson’s Moonwalk would meld ’70s robotic “locking” dance with smooth elegance.
Defending Jackson’s legacy requires recognizing shared cultural values — the testaments to romance in his early career with the Jackson Five (the romantic pitch of those expertly tooled Jackson Five tracks went too deep to ever be erased) and the social observations that distinguished his later, fraught politicized output (“Black or White,” “Man in the Mirror,” “They Don’t Care About Us,” “Scream,” “You Are Not Alone,” “Earth Song,” “Stranger in Moscow,” “HIStory”). The film’s dramatic and musical reenactments are echoes of the joy that folk already know.
The Fosse–Jackson factor gives conservative commentators an advantage to maintain their political positions — “commonsense” arguments based on consensus pleasure. Online political pundits understand how the genuine popularity of Michael reverses received opinion. Tracing Jackson’s creativity to its historic antecedents is as essential to Michael Jackson’s folk-hero status as it is to democracy. This is a unified moment in a culture war we can’t afford to lose.