Michael Jackson #61 - Forever Michael

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Op vrijdag 7 augustus 2009 00:07 schreef Rnnz het volgende:

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Ik hoop wel dat je weet dat Jam geplaybackt is.

Sorry

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Op vrijdag 7 augustus 2009 00:08 schreef Shitney het volgende:

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Nee, ik had het over die alternatieve versie van Keep the Faith die jij net gepost hebt. Jam vind ik niet zo'n leuk nummer, heb er niet zoveel mee. Ik hou van de dramatische Michael.

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Op vrijdag 7 augustus 2009 00:07 schreef Rnnz het volgende:

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Ik hoop wel dat je weet dat Jam geplaybackt is.

Sorry

Nummer is veel te snel om samen met zo'n choreografie live te kunnen zingen.

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Op vrijdag 7 augustus 2009 00:10 schreef Robijn1961 het volgende:

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Ik hou van allebei de kanten...de heel gevoelige en de stoere. Juist die mix vind ik zo mooi.

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It's a seducer's diary, sung by someone who has himself been ravished, who has given up everything for dance.

"Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" practically leads you by the hand to the dancefloor, the milky-way swirl of the strings sweeping you up, the deliquescing delight ("I'm melting") of Michael's enraptured falsetto gently undoing any resistant character armour. It's a love song to dance itself, just like "Rock With You", which similarly sees the whole universe in a disco mirrorball. "Rock With You" manages the amazing feat of simultaneously bring a tear to the eye and a shuffle to your feet. Jackson comes on as benevolent disco-svengali so he can seduce the listener-girl that the song turns us all into: "Girl, close your eyes/ Let That rhythm get into you/ don't try to fight it" - and who would want to fight it? Listen to the way that the synths and strings suggest starlight seen by starstruck lover's eyes. Is there any record which better captures the cosmic vertigo of falling in love than "Rock With You"? That headlong synaesthetic rush in which music, dancing and love feed each other in a reflexive virtuous circle which, even though it seems miraculous, unbelievable, ("girl, when you dance/ there's a magic that must be love"), at the same time seems like it couldn't possibly end ("And when the groove is dead and gone/ you know that love survives/ and we can rock forever"- ? This was Soul to sell your soul for. No wonder that Green Gartside sacrificed the whole of his avant-garde self in order to sound like this. And if you asked me to choose between Off The Wall and the entire back catalogue of the Sex Pistols and the Beatles, there would be no contest. I respectThe Beatles and the Pistols, but they had already calcified into newsreel-heritage before I even took heed of them; whereas Off The Wall is still vivid, irresistible, sumptuous, teeming with technicolour detail.

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Sometimes, the weariness brought on by hearing it so many times will make you twitch the dial when "Billie Jean" comes on the radio. But let it play, and you're soon bewitched by its drama, seduced into its sonic fictional space, the mean streets and chilly single-parent single-room appartments that now suround the still-glittering dancefloor like conspiring fate. Listening is like stepping onto a conveyor belt. And that's what it sounds like, as the implacable, undulating sinous cakewalk of the synthetic bass takes over the massive space opened up by the crunching snares Jones and Jackson insouciantly hijacked from hiphop. Check, if you can manage to keep focused as the track crawls up your spine and down to your feet, embodying the very compulsion the lyric warns against... check the way that the first sounds you hear from Jackson are not words but inhuman asignifying hiccups and yelps, as if he is gasping for air, or learning to speak English again after some aphasic episode.

Ten years after psychedelic Soul, this is cyborg Soul, with Jackson as cut-up as Grace Jones ever was - partly by the (James) Brownian motion of his own language-disassembling vocal tics (the mirthless, and indeed emotionally unitelligible, joker-hysterical hee-hees, the ooohs shotgun-divorced from doo-wop's street corner community to circulate like disembodied wraithes in the survivalist badlands of an inner city ravaged by Reaganomics), partly by the astonishing arrangement. Check the way that the first string-stabs shadow the track like stalker's footsteps, disappearing into the cold wind like mist and rumour. Feel the tension building in your teeth as the bridge hurtles towards the chorus, begging for a release ("the smell of sweet perfume/ this happened much too soon) that you know will only end in regret, recrimination and humiliation, but which you can't help but want any way, desire so intense it threatens to fragment the psyche, or expose the way that the psyche is always-already split into antagonistic agencies: "just remember to always think twice". Does he then sing "do think twice" or, in an id-exclamation that echoes like a metallic shout in an alley of the mind, "don't think twice"? Everything dissolves into audio-hallucination, the chronology gets confused, the noir string-slivers shiver. Jackson is angry at his accuser (and also at the fans who will trap him into the Image: Billie Jean is pop's Misery) but also weirdly mournful, hunted, pleading (to the big Other, in kettle logic: I didn't do it, I couldn't help it), the part-objects of his voice circling a psyche without a centre. Notice that it's a song about the very things Marcus talks about in Lipstick Traces: seduction by Spectacle, about the way in which everyday life is taunted and haunted by the screen ("she was more like a beauty queen/ from a movie scene"). Billie Jean - which was effortlessly modern, a new Soul that was devoid of any hint of pastiche - could still dramatise all this; perhaps what you can hear is the very process of subsumption itself, Jackson becoming the brand. After this, there would be few glimmers of any outside.

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Op vrijdag 7 augustus 2009 00:14 schreef sig000 het volgende:

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Teveel standaardkreetjes , op zich issie zeker wel invloedrijk geweest.

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Op vrijdag 7 augustus 2009 00:27 schreef sig000 het volgende:

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Maar ik mag toch vinden dattie er te vaak gebruik van maakte.

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Op vrijdag 7 augustus 2009 00:39 schreef Rnnz het volgende:
Ach, later werd hij natuurlijk ook een beetje een karikatuur van zichzelf. Alles willen perfectioneren, veel kreetjes, veel dezelfde moves etc.

Ik vergeef het hem.

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Op vrijdag 7 augustus 2009 00:39 schreef Shitney het volgende:

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Natuurlijk mag dat. Want dan heb ik eindelijk eens een excuus om dit antwoord te posten:

[ afbeelding ]

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Op vrijdag 7 augustus 2009 00:50 schreef Rnnz het volgende:
Lievelingsnummer van de J5:

Ik denk Never Can Say Goodbye.

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"Je moet de mensen raken, of dat door de muziek gebeurd of door de tekst maak niet uit, als je ze maar raakt"

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Op vrijdag 7 augustus 2009 00:44 schreef veuvje het volgende:
Wat zijn jullie lievelingsnummers van J5?

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Op vrijdag 7 augustus 2009 00:53 schreef DrDentz het volgende:
Het ging bij hem altijd meer om het melodietje heb ik het idee. Ook in de demo's brabbelt hij maar wat, de tekst komt later wel.