Expectations must have been a thorn in the side of Michael Jackson.
Consider this: His 1987 album, Bad, sold roughly 35 million copies worldwide. That’s impressive by anyone’s standards, except Jackson’s: His previous album, 1982’s Thriller, sold twice that number.
MJ the Musical takes place on the eve of Jackson’s tour supporting the album Dangerous, his 1991 follow-up to Bad. The show offers a glimpse of Jackson’s creative process in which each new idea had to be measured against his audience’s expectations.
(See MJ the Musical Feb. 25-March 2 in Morsani Hall at Straz.)
The video for “Black or White,” the first single released from Dangerous, didn’t exactly exceed expectations. In fact, Jackson seemed to be trying to escape or destroy those expectations.
The video’s first airing was genuine appointment viewing, hyped to the hilt before its Nov. 14 premiere on BET, Fox and MTV.
The video gets off to an odd start with what’s pretty much a wholesale steal of Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” video, with Macaulay Culkin and George Wendt as the battling father and son.
After that intro, we watch a travelogue in which Jackson dances and interacts with different cultures before Culkin pretends to rap. It concludes with faces of different races morphing into each other to drive home the song’s message of unity.
That’s the conclusion you see now. The original video included a four-minute, music-free coda in which a panther skulks onto a city street before morphing into Jackson, who proceeds to break windows, throw things and perform all manner of presumably non-Michael Jackson actions.
Huh? What? Why? It probably happened like this:
DIRECTOR: Hey, Mike! The label wants an 11-minute video and this one’s only seven!
MJ: Not a problem. Roll cameras. I’ll improvise.
No, it probably didn’t happen like that. However it happened, it became a pop culture big deal.
Jackson said later that the performance expressed his “frustration about injustice and prejudice and racism and bigotry.” Few seemed to recognize it as such.
Complaints about sex and violence in music videos were old hat even in 1991. But Jackson’s fan base skewed younger than most MTV regulars. Jackson excised the last four minutes of the video and issued an apology saying he never meant to offend.
Was this a painful miscalculation on Jackson’s part? Or was it a miscalculation at all?
Jackson was understandably upset when the tabloid press ran stories based on the most outrageous rumors they could dig up. But Jackson grew up in the public eye and he understood the value of publicity. Even a silly or hurtful item in the press put his name forward.
Sure, much of the discussion of the “Black or White” video was negative. But there was a lot of it and most likely a lot more talk than would have been generated by the video’s first seven minutes alone. Plus, every commentator or pundit who decried the clip’s coda was also bound to mention that the video was for the first single from Jackson’s then soon-to-be-released Dangerous album.
Eleven days after the video’s premiere, Dangerous, was released, immediately going to No. 1 in the U.S. and 13 other countries and selling 5 million copies worldwide in its first week on the shelves.
The tour supporting the album, the tour we watch Jackson prepare for in MJ the Musical, played to 3.5 million people and grossed $100 million.
Career misstep or cool calculation? Maybe both, maybe neither. But Michael Jackson’s millions of fans weren’t going to be put off by a tossed trash or broken windows.