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Sampling Michael: Rhythm, Masculinity & Intellectual Property in the ‘Body’ of Michael Jackson
by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
When Michael Jackson reached the commercial apex of his career in the mid-1980s, he did so not only on the strength of his formidable talent and creative vision, but also as the most visible embodiment of the broad traditions of African-American and Diasporic musicality. Much has been made of Jackson’s early development on the chitlin’ circuit of the mid-west in the 1960s and the influence of popular figures like James Brown and Jackie Wilson on his performance. Less has been made of the influence of vocalists like Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross and notably William Hart of the Delfonics. Throughout his development Michael Jackson functioned as an archival resource of Black movement, voice, and gender performance, which he deftly managed and negotiated in performances that were as flawless as they were fluid. As Michael Jackson was always in conversation with a broad range of Black vernacular expression, it would figure that he would ‘sample’ from Black Culture as often as he was ‘sampled’. As such the free exchange of cultural practices and ideas that flowed through the body of Michael Jackson raises interesting questions about intellectual property and proprietary artistic rights and the ways that Black culture has historically subverted conventional wisdom in these matters.
Michele Wallace—in a critique of Jackson that is not nearly remembered enough—described Jackson at his creative peak in the 1980s as an emblem of “Black Modernisms,” Black artistic expression that was “in consistent pursuit of meaning, history, continuity and the power of subjectivity.”[i] Michael Jackson’s Black Modernisms can be best evidenced in his signature performance on the Motown 25 (1983) broadcast, perhaps one the most chronicled “live” performances of Jackson’s career. It would be useful to read Margo Jefferson here from her book simply titled, On Michael Jackson, where she describes Jackson as functioning throughout the Motown 25 performance as “hoofer,” “Soul Man,” “Song and Dance Man” showing elements of what Jefferson alternately names as “musical theater melodrama,” “chitlin circuit bravado” and “Motown mime.” Jefferson could have just as easily inserted the names of Fred Astaire, James Brown, Gene Kelly, Sammy Davis, Jr., Diana Ross and Stephanie Mills and her point would have been made just the same, but her choice of descriptive terms highlights the extent that Michael Jackson’s performance, though steep in tradition, regularly enacted a form of simultaneous recognition and erasure—the latter act brought about by the nature of Jackson’s virtuosity.
Jackson’s inspirational archive was wide-ranging, but for my purposes I’m most interested in the Chitlin Circuit, which in the spirit of Jackson’s interests in the career of P. T. “The Greatest Show on Earth” Barnum, served as Jackson’s musical and performance circus. The Chitlin Circuit allowed Jackson to enact his signature performance gesture; that of rendering his primary influences as obscure, while making his own performance of those influences ubiquitous. This move by Jackson is as much about his artistic ego—his interest in being the “Greatest Show on Earth”—as it was about his respect for cultural and racial communities that privileged the sharing of artistic expression beyond the scope of what we currently understand as intellectual property. As such Michael Jackson’s artistic sensibilities find resonance in the sampling practices largely associated with contemporary Hip-Hop production; practices that are themselves deeply indebted to communal sharing practices long valued in localized Black communities.
In a discussion on NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan, noted cultural critic and music journalist Nelson George engaged in a spirited debate with fellow music critic Bill Wyman over the debt that Michael Jackson owed to Elvis Presley in terms of creating a pop music audience. As always, underlying virtually every comparison between Presley and Jackson, is the question of the more specific debt Jackson owes to Presley’s music and accordingly, the oft-diminished influence that a earlier generation of Black Blues and Rhythm and Blues artists had on Presley. This is an old debate, one that Jackson sheds light on in his memoir Moonwalk, where he casually dismisses Presley’s influence—a tactical choice no doubt, regardless of whether truthful—choosing to instead to highlight the influence of Chitlin’ Circuit artists such as James Brown, Jackie Wilson and Joe Tex, whom he saw many times, standing in the wings on stage after he and his brothers opened for such acts on the Chitlin’ Circuit. George’s desire to distance Jackson from Presley is fully in line with his broader project of establishing originary contexts for Black Music, one in which the claiming of Jackson within the Chitlin’ Circuit is crucial. But such influences are multi-directional; When Wyman later mocked Jackson’s relationship with hip-hop—citing Justin Timberlake and Usher Raymond as examples of Jackson’s tangential influence on the Hip-Hop era, it was clear that Wyman hadn’t been listening or watching very closely.
Part of Michael Jackson’s singular brilliance was his capacity to archive a virtual history of Black musical performance and movement and to then to reproduce this archival material beyond simple mimetic sensibilities to create something that was truly original. As Richard Schur writes in his book Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law, “African American originality departs significantly from dominant notions of creativity…the creativity of black vernacular speech emphasizes language use over language meaning. It matters not whether a speaker/writer first coined a phrase, idea or expression; what matters is the art by which it is used to convey a new meaning and make a new connection.”[ii] As such Jackson turns simple understandings of intellectual property law on its head. It is in this way that Jackson’s influences are simultaneously obscure, pronounced and as ubiquitous as the Black music traditions that inform him. Even as a close reader of earlier generations of Black musicians, Bill Wyman might not have fully recognized Jackson’s artistic presence in hip-hop, because hip-hop is aligned with the very obscure/ubiquitous dynamic that frames Jackson’s art—even as hip-hip itself has found moments to directly sample or cite—for the more literary and legal types—Jackson himself.
Such a moment can be heard on the track “PSA” from Jay Z’s S. Carter Mixtape, produced by Just Blaze and released in 2004. Besides the spoken word introduction, the first voices that you hear is that of the Jackson 5, with Michael’s high-pitched falsetto searing above those of his brothers. The sample is from the track “Walk On” which was a staple of the Jackson Five’s national tour from 1970 through 1971. This particular sample was likely lifted from the soundtrack to the group’s “live” television special Going’ Back to Indiana which was broadcast in September of 1971. The song itself was a reworking of Isaac Hayes’s brilliant re-arrangement of the Hal David and Burt Bacharach classic “Walk On By,” which was originally recorded by pop singer Dionne Warwick. With a small repertoire of their own original songs during that initial national tour, the performance of “Walk On” did multiple labor, giving the group a foot in the deep orchestral funk that Hayes was crafting for the Stax label, as well as the Psychedelic Soul of groups like Sly and the Family Stone and Norman Whitfield produced Temptations. Hayes later returned the favor by charting with Clifton Davis’s “Never Can Say Goodbye” only months after the Jackson did the same with the song.
Yet in Jay Z and Just Blaze’s version of the song, included on a recording that is partly named in recognition of Jay Z’s proprietary intellectual property and a song that serves a momentary rupture of the seamless iconography that is Jay Z (as opposed to S. Carter), there is a consciousness of Michael Jackson’s presence in the production, if only because of the obscure and ubiquitous nature of that presence. As the hallmark of great sample based hip-hop production is to obscure the origins of the music, Michael Jackson is an early purveyor of such practices, essentially obscuring the Isaac Hayes original, which while continuing to stand on its own, has been sonically muted in the Jackson Five’s performance—something that was as much a tribute to the musicianship of the Jackson Five backing band—Chitlin’ Circuit veterans skilled in making themselves “present” in other people’s music—as it is for Jackson’s singular talents to lovingly erase traces of his own influences. Some would call this virtuosity. Again as Schur might describe theses practices, “Sampling is not simply the reshaping and reuse of recorded text, but a method of textual production…that proceeds by listening for and incorporating discrete parts, rather than completed wholes, and constructing an aesthetically satisfying text out of them.”[iii]
Such mimetic virtuosity was a hallmark of Michael Jackson’s performative gestures from the very beginning of his professional career. As an adult he recalled that as a child he was “like a sponge, watching everyone and trying to learn everything I could.” Jackson’s working archive was the Chitlin Circuit, where he could literally, as he puts it in his memoir Moonwalk, study “James Brown, from the wings,” knowing “every step, every spin and turn.” Of Jackie Wilson, Jackson writes that he “learned more from watching [him] than from anyone or anything else.” Again perhaps this is a tactical choice by Jackson, paying deference to Wilson five years after the singer’s death, though there is archival footage of Jackson’s Motown audition that looks like a “how to dance like James Brown” video. Nevertheless the broader point is made; Jackson may have been the most successful archivist of the Chitlin Circuit, though most of that influence was rendered transparent by Jackson’s mimetic genius. Jackson himself outs part of his theft practices in a lyric from “I’ll Be There” where he swags (or swanks, to shout out Dwele) Just look over your shoulder, honey” which is directly lifted from the late Levi Stubbs’s on the Four Tops’ track “Reach Out, I’ll Be There.”
Despite the post-race rhetoric that became as much a part of Jackson’s presentation in the late 1980s and 1990s as were the denials of sexual misconduct, Jackson was always in conversation with his influences as witnessed by the photos of The Manhattans, Stevie Wonder, Luther Vandross and Quincy Jones on the wall of the character Darryl’s apartment in the film short for the song “Bad.” Little known fact, Vandross was expecting Jones to produce a debut solo album for him in the late 1970s, when the accident of fate, that was The Wiz (in which Vandross’s song “Everybody Rejoice” appears) brought Jackson and Jones together, changing the career trajectories of both Vandross and Jackson, who became the opposite poles of Black music and crossover pop in the 1980s, though Vandross was never as “rhythm and blues” and Jackson, never as “crossover pop” as some claimed. Vandross’s photo in the video for “Bad” is akin to Jay Z saying to Lil’ Wayne a generation later, via a cell phone call, “I see you.” The short film for “Bad” was itself a sample from the tragic death of a Harlem prep school student Edmund Perry.
The oft-mentioned example of Jackson’s cover of Smokey Robinson’s “Who’s Lovin’ You” is just the first of a long tradition within Jackson’s oeuvre of him sampling from the archive. Recorded in the spring of 1969, when Jackson was ten-year-old, “Who’s Lovin’ You” has drawn attention because Jackson conveys a sense a carnal knowledge seemingly well beyond his years. As he would clarify in Moonwalk, in the early days of the group’s struggles on the chitlin circuit, it was not unusual for the group to perform at strip clubs. This sense of sexual knowing that becomes evident in Jackson’s early recordings as a child—it was indeed part of his appeal, as witnessed in the now famous “Shake it baby” break-down from “ABC”—is an example of how cultural retentions from the Chitlin’ circuit, or the Black aesthetic underground, are translated in terms of Jackson’s and other artists’ sense of movement, voice, and sexuality when they hit the pop mainstream. It is also a reminder that Jackson was always/already in drag, well before the release of Thriller in late 1982.
Jackson is less convincing covering Bill Withers’ Ain’t No Sunshine” on his solo debut in 1971—no one will ever claim that Jackson made it his song—but the version that appears on Got to Be There is all Michael Jackson, as if he and Withers made two different songs. Jackson’s version embodies the rhythmic quality of his vocal instrument, another early example of the way that rhythm, movement and voice are seamlessly embodied in Jackson’s performance—recalling Jay Z’s admission to Charlie Rose a few years ago that what initially attracted him to Beyonce was that she “she sang like a rapper.” The jagged melismic mutations that mark Beyonce’s own vocal strategy is perhaps one of the purest tributes to Jackson’s vocal strategies (with gospel singer Kim Burrell also present in the mix.).
Perhaps the best example of Jackson’s early sampling practices can be heard on an earlier cover of The Delfonics “Can You Remember?” as Jackson tries on the grown man begging vocals of William Hart, producing a performance more wistful than demanding. Jackson’s vocal authority—his willful desire to obscure—is not yet fully actualized, a reality that is recognized with the spate of “wanna be” Michael Jackson vocalists that crop up immediately with the success of the Jackson Five. While the Osmond’s “One Bad Apple” produced by Muscle Shoals veteran Rick Hall was more an attempt to capture the “Jackson 5 in a bottle,” in comparison New Birth lead singer Londee Loree was a dead ringer for a young Michael Jackson on tracks like their cover of “Never Can Say Goodbye” or most famously “It’s Impossible.” The New Birth tracks were notably produced by Motown veteran staffer Harvey Fuqua.
We began to see Michael Jackson’s vocal authority emerge with the signature grunts, slurs, gasps and “schumas” that become part of the repertoire of the adult performer, leading artist Faith Ringgold to suggest to her daughter Michele Wallace that Jackson “makes up words.” Jackson’s vocal expressions were likely a broader attempt, one that might have been unconscious, to sync his sense of rhythm with movement and vocal expression. This percussive aspect of Jackson’s vocals are enhanced until the end of his career and can be framed by his performances on “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” “Remember the Time” and later “Butterflies.” The closing segment of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is heavily indebted to the music of Cameroonian musician Manu Dibango and his song “Soul Makoussa.” While Jackson’s debt to African pop were fairly well-known among older Soul and Disco fans—“Soul Makoussa” was a big club hit in the US in the mid-1970s—Jackson refigures those rhythms in his vocal runs on “Remember the Time,” a song and video that brilliantly trades on the affinity among young African-Americans for nostalgia, via the cultural phenomenon known as “Afrocentricity.” Theorist Fred Moten has noted the virtuosity of Jackson’s performance on “Remember the Time” noting the different inflections that Jackson uses with each enunciation of “remember.”
Despite popular perceptions to the contrary, Michael Jackson and hip-hop are artistic kin because both invested in the notion of a cultural system of sharing. According to Schur, “While [the] Hip-Hop aesthetic fails to conform to legal fictions about cultural and property law boundaries, the result is not a pervasive, infringing cultural aesthetic. Rather intellectual property law has failed to untangle abstract legal fictions about creativity from how ordinary people within a shared cultural system convey meaning through the recording of signs, symbols, metaphors and icons.”
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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking For Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press). He is professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University and the host of the Weekly Webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.
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