“‘Can You Feel It’: Michael Jackson, Afrofuturism, and Building the Jacksonverse
Introduction
Afrofuturism is an artistic movement that explores a myriad of possible realities--joining past, present, and future--through the lens of black people with agency, voice, and power. In Walter Mosley’s piece, “Black to the Future,” Mosley ruminates on the importance of black science fiction--and black speculative fiction--as igniting the black imagination that will eventually become black reality. “In science fiction we have a literary genre made to rail against the status quo. All we need now are the black science fiction writers to realize these ends. But where are they?” (406). In the conversation of black speculative fiction and the black imagination, several black artists come to mind. Octavia Butler, Parliament-Funkadelic, Janelle Monae, and Andre 3000 have all been discussed because of their contribution to afrofuturism. Disappointingly, Michael Jackson is an often overlooked but crucial contributor to this movement and challenges Mosley in that the production of black speculative fiction can exist in many mediums--not just literary texts. Michael Jackson’s way of envisioning a global future is nothing short of genius. It is not in his ballads, dance songs, or even his signature moves that reflect his visionary status. It is in his music videos. From “Can You Feel It,” a video he personally wrote for The Jacksons Triumph album, to “Scream,” his duet with his sister Janet Jackson, Michael has much to say about a bright black future.
Michael Jackson sets the foundation for the black speculative artists that are now at the forefront. With the advent of festivals and conferences focused on the influence of black speculative fiction and film--such as the BBC’s series on Afrofuturism and the annual NYE parties, Afrotopia: from Africa to the Future--discussing the impact of the originators on the resurgence of black speculative fiction is not only timely, but crucial. By analyzing his music videos and their lessons on social justice, the creation of mythology, and the promise of the future, Michael Jackson videos not only showcase the ideas espoused in Dark Matter: A Century of Black Speculative Fiction, but reveals something that also may have been taken for granted about the greatest pop star of all time--Michael Jackson understood afrofuturism long before we did.
By looking at four Jackson videos chronologically, the audience can experience how Michael Jackson touches on every element of speculative art--horror, fantasy, and several different science fiction tropes--with a distinctly black retelling. While to most casual Michael Jackson fans, seeing his any of his work as early afrofuturistic may seem incongruous with the media portrayal of an artist seeking to become “white,” a deeper study of the elements employed in his videos showcase his intentional commitment to people of color, and black people specifically. One need look no further than Michael Jackson’s 1993 television interview with Oprah Winfrey when she asked him about having a white child play a younger version of himself in a Pepsi commercial.
Oprah: There was a story about you, um, wanting to have a little white boy play you in a Pepsi commercial. MJ: (sighs exasperated) That’s stupid. That’s the most ridiculous, horrifying story I’ve ever heard. It’s crazy. I mean why? Number one, it’s my face as a child in the commercial. Me! When I was little. Why would I want a white child to play me? I’m a black American. I’m proud to be a black American. I am proud of my race. I am proud of who I am. (0:15)
Many people, my younger teenage self included, read his response as a convenient answer--after all, had he not also had plastic surgery on his nose, eyes, and lips? In retrospect, our limited notions of blackness would not allow us to accept his own experience and his own personal love and connection to his black identity. However, if anything can be said about the many transformations of Michael Jackson is that he is not limited, he is larger than what many of us could imagine in his time.
Michael Jackson is outside of time--he is one of the unsung contributors to afrofuturism. In Erik Steinskog’s article, “Michael Jackson and Afrofuturism,” Michael Jackson is analyzed through his music and videos compiled on the HIStory album. Steinskog suggests that Jackson never deviated from his purpose of presenting and representing blackness. “Almost as if he were a work of Afrofuturist fiction himself, Michael Jackson constructed popular works and a public image that combined past, present, and future in ways that adapted and interrogated racial politics and African American identity” (Steinskog 139). Jackson’s distinct cosmology inscribes blackness as a promise for the salvation of all.
The Beginning and the End of the Jacksonverse
Salvation to a beleaguered Earth, ravaged by war, famine, and poverty, arrives in the 1980 music video, “Can You Feel It?” performed by The Jacksons. While this was not a solo song, Michael Jackson wrote and conceived the music video for the reunited group’s album, Triumph. The video begins with a godlike voice telling the origins of the world in language that is almost biblical. In The King James Version of the Bible, the first line is “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.” The unknown narrator of the video begins with a similar invocation. “In the beginning, the land was pure” (Jackson, Can You). The narrator goes on to explain the creation of the earth and the multitude of humans that would soon inhabit it.
While invoking a spiritual history, Michael Jackson rewrites it to exclude an all-knowing god and instead a divine earth. By ascribing divinity to the land, Jackson invokes one of the first elements of afrofuturism--reenvisioning the past in order to create a new future. “Afrofuturism casts its gaze forward into the post-human/post-black future and back into the black humanist past simultaneously (David 698). Looking backwards and forwards, the omniscient narrator in Michael Jackson’s video gives the history of the world and, more importantly, how humans lost their ability to cherish their world.
A streak of light appears. A comet? A meteor? Suddenly, the video presents the four elements of life--earth, air, water, fire. The Jacksons materialize, not yet fully formed, high above the earth like celestial beings. Michael reaches down into the cosmic water and he and his brothers become fully formed as he transforms the water into fire and then into a giant beam of shooting light. They are the stuff of legend, of myth. In Keith Oakley and Raymond Mar’s article, “Evolutionary Pre-Adaptation and the Idea of Character in Fiction,” they suggest that myth-making began shortly after the birth of language in order to assign meaning to our world. “Creation myths, the bases of religion [ . . . ] were created to produce meaning and order in an unpredictable environment” (Oatley 186). Since “Can You Feel It?” is both a creation myth and a future promise, the Jacksons are the original celestial beings of their own universe. We can imagine that the Jacksons are both celestial beings and aliens--their clothing is shiny and futuristic, while the humans all are wearing the styles of the eighties. In other words, they are both the beginning and the end. The brothers scatter glowing particles on all of the humans and watch them with joy as they accept the love brought from the divine universe.
The Jacksons have arrived full of good and love to influence a lost mankind. “They would never lose sight of the dream of a better world that they could unite and build, in triumph” (Jackson, Can You). They represent both our origin stories--our myths--and our futures. In their universe, perhaps a Jacksonverse, they have the power to save humans from themselves. They do so by filling everyone with their celestial love.In the closing of the video, the first human to recognize the blessing bestowed by the Jacksons is an Indigeneous American man. Michael Jackson is actively centering these people as the first people, as the man in the video is the first to truly understand. The fact that the second person to feel their blessing is a young black boy, wide-eyed and innocent, who reaches for the hand of the first man and receives the love flowing from the Jacksons to the man and then to him, reflects Michael Jackson’s intent--that is, to start at the beginning. Soon everyone is filled with the same energy and is saved from destruction. They were birthed by the Jacksons and subsequently saved by the Jacksons. It is a circle.
However, in Michael Jackson’s future videos, he reveals how and where things go wrong in the world, starting with race and gender norms.
Race-Swapping in the Jacksonverse
In the realm of horror films, historically most black characters are secondary--sidekicks, first to get killed, or comedic relief--usually as a weak or paltry attempt at diversity. Rarely written as the protagonist (or the monster), black characters in horror have become something of a punchline. Everyone knows the black guy dies first. With the exception of a few--Candyman, for example--black characters are not foregrounded. This is mainly because of the tropes associated with horror. Horror films are usually set in quiet, small neighborhoods, lakeside communities, rural towns, or out in the wild. These areas are generally extremely insular and experience little interference from the outside world. In more contemporary horror films, they have the added isolation by not having consistent mobile phone service. Few horror films take place in urban sprawls because they are packed with people, police, weapons, or opportunities for help.
When Michael Jackson released “Thriller,” the third single from the same titled album, many of the expected narrative devices appeared. However, it is what Michael does with these devices that are distinctly rewritten for a black audience. The opening scenes of the video have no music and are set in a 1950s suburb. Michael Jackson and his girl are stranded on the side of the road one evening and are forced to walk alone into town. According to Kobena Mercer, in “Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’,” Michael’s video is simply a self-conscious parody of gender roles. “Their clothes--a pastiche fifties retro style--connote youthful innocence, the couple as archetypical teen lovers” (40). However, they are not the archetype. They are a young black couple in the fifties, the sort of luxury of the convertible car, the classic middle class garb, even their language reads as the All-American teen couple: in blackface. While Mercer reads “Thriller” through the lens of gender, it is just as important to read it through race.
According to Elena Oliette in “Michael, Are You OK? You’ve Been Hit By A Smooth Criminal: Racism, Controversy, and Parody in the Videos “Smooth Criminal” and “Rock My World,” Michael Jackson uses his videos to challenge binaries.“He foregrounds the artificiality of filmic representations, demonstrating that they are nothing but cultural constructions that continue to establish the dichotomy of white/norm and black/deviation” (63). While Oliette does not reference “Thriller” directly, her claims map beautifully on many of Jackson’s videos, especially “Thriller” as he latches firmly to the iconic image of teenage lovers in classic horror films.
Moments after they begin their walk, Michael asks his date to be his girl and she is elated. “This innocent representation is unsettled by Michael’s statement: “I’m not like other guys.” The statement implies a question posed on the terrain of gender, and masculinity in particular: why is he different from “other guys”? (Mercer 41). Unsettling music creeps in, and sweet Michael Jackson is transformed into a violent werewolf. Michael isn’t the sweet boy-next-door, he is the monster under the bed. How can you not read this as the impossibility of attributing innocence to young black boys? The choice of a werewolf seems simple enough--a classic fifties horror monster--but there is more at play in relation to blackness. “Werewolf mythology --lycanthropy-- concerns the representation of male sexuality as “naturally” predatory, bestial, aggressive, violent--in a word, “monstrous” (Mercer 46). In a racial context, these terms and ideas have long been attached to, and still not fully detached from, the “natural” state of black men. One need only look to Hillary Clinton’s infamous dog whistle sound bite when she termed young black men as “superpredators” which must be brought to “heel.”
While scholars like Mercer dissect “Thriller” as though it is merely a campy parody of classic horror, I assert that it is not a whimsical parody, but instead consciously subversive. “The almost camp quality of refined exaggeration in [Vincent] Price’s voice and his “British” accent is at striking odds with the discourse of black American soul music” (Mercer 40) There is a mild undercurrent of derision from Mercer here, in which he seems to belittle the heart of black soul by calling Price’s voice “refined” somehow suggesting that Jackson’s music is not. Mercer also suggests that it was impossible to make “Thriller” without parody because at the heart of cinematic horror is the inherent desire to mimic its predecessors. “Cinematic horror seems impelled towards parody of its own codes and conventions as a constitutive aspect of its own generic identity” (40). Even if “Thriller” is read as a quirky retelling of male sexuality, one cannot ignore the theme of the black sexual predator through a horror lens that usually excludes black characters altogether.
Many articles have been written about monsters used to represent marginalized people--vampires, werewolves, the undead--and often come to the same conclusion. Societal fears of these oppressed groups, the fear they may rise up--like the zombies in “Thriller”--paint black bodies with fur and fangs. Only in Jackson’s video do we see him first as a man, like any normal (read: white) man, but we see the change into the great fear. Beneath him lurks the savage of story tales. If the ending of the short film is any indicator, Michael Jackson suggests that he is both beast and man. “Jackson not only questions dominant stereotypes of black masculinity, but also gracefully steps outside of the existing range of “types” of black men” (Mercer 50). By turning around to reveal his glowing eyes, Michael becomes both the monster we expect and more. He has rewritten the horror trope in which the monster is not defeated, but instead more savvy than past horror tropes lead us to believe.
If Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” reaches back in time to the fifties to rewrite a black horror story, then his next time leap is even more impressive. In “Michael Jackson and Afrofuturism: HIStory’s Adaptation of Past, Present, and Future,” Erik Steinskog deconstructs the songs and videos from Jackson’s HIStory album. By using afrofuturism as a lens, Steinskog suggests that nearly every element of black speculative fiction can be found in Jackson’s album and his influence as a pop culture icon allows him to discuss race and claiming agency over one’s identity. “Jackson adapts iconic moments from history, taking control of the past to reconstruct the present” (Steinskog 130). While “Thriller” only time travels thirty years into the past, “Remember the Time” rewinds history nearly 700 years.
Repairing the Past in the Jacksonverse
“Remember the Time” is the foundational power of the Jacksons in “Can You Feel It.” Much like Octavia Butler wrote all the books of her Patternist series without following a clear timeline--not at all in chronological order--so does Michael. Butler’s Wild Seed details the origin story of the beings evolved from two African gods but was written four years after her first novel, Patternmaster, which represents the fallout of the culmination of the powers acquired by the generations of beings spawned by Anyanwu and Doro. Two decades after “Can You Feel It,” Michael Jackson’s Egyptian-inspired video explained the magic and abilities of black people that will eventually evolve into the celestial beings (we have already met) centuries in the future. Both Jackson and Butler begin their foray into afrofuturism--obviously, in the future--but inevitably must go back and correct the narrative of the past to create a cohesive alternate universe. “Imaging a different future, counter-history of the future, therefore depends crucially on how the past is employed” (Steinskog 128). In “Remember the Time,” Michael Jackson chooses to retell the most prevailing and mistold history of Africa: Ancient Egypt.
Our first introduction to the difference in this story is Michael’s choice of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II and Queen Nefertiti--played by Eddie Murphy and Iman, respectively. Given that nearly every Hollywood rendering of Ancient Egypt is whitewashed--even Michael’s best friend, Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra in 1963--it is both thrilling and jarring to see two dark-skinned, well-known figures playing the noble roles. In cinematic history, the rare presence of black actors in Ancient Egypt is generally relegated to slaves or peasants. Even in 2016, the Hollywood flop Gods of Egypt, cast all white actors to portray the ancient gods. The audience is already in the middle of an important historical correction.
Michael Jackson’s video is entirely bereft of white actors. Every single person, down to the extras, are black and brown people. Even the minor characters are notable in the black community--Magic Johnson, Leslie “Big Lez” Segar, and Tommy “Tiny” Lister Jr.--all who perfect Jackson’s vision of a new Ancient Egypt. While in “Thriller” white bodies were rewritten as black, “Remember the Time” doesn’t rewrite, it returns, white bodies to the black bodies they historically were. Classic art representing Egypt, Greece, even Rome seem to suggest that these civilizations were predominantly lily white, despite our understanding of the diverse mix of nations, ethnicities, and religions that existed simultaneously in these spaces.
Much of the misguided whitewashing of Egypt can be blamed directly on the preservation of these artifacts. Many of the marble and ceramic sculptures of these eras have been cleaned and restored in ways that removed the intentional color of the pieces. In Sarah Bond’s Forbes’s article, she not only explains that many of the iconic pieces initially were in color and represented the diversity of these nations but that the combination of early cleaning and restoration techniques and a dearth of non-white historians and classicists create a white narrative of ancient civilizations. Yellow, red and black were often applied as an underpainting before painted details were added. Art historian and polychromy expert Mark Abbe has emphasized that painters could then apply paints over this base coat to accentuate hair, eyes, eyebrows, jewelry and clothing with a vibrance white marble could not provide alone. Indeed, ancient sources such as Vitruvius or Pliny, note the presence of color used by ancient sculptors. (Bond)She goes on to add that early preservation techniques blanched most of the color, reducing them to monochromatic pieces that we--with our implicit biases--read as white.
Destroying implicit biases, Michael Jackson’s video operates both in the present and the past--contemporary black celebrities projected back in time to Ancient Egypt--and gives us his distinct vision of a black Egypt. It is worthy to note that even with his creative vision, Jackson employs Boyz in the Hood and Higher Learning director John Singleton to bring his video to life. According to Steinskog, the purposeful nature of many of Jackson’s music videos reveals “a Michael Jackson [ . . . ] that is deeply embedded in discourses of ‘blackness,’ the politics of race, and dimensions of black nationalism” (135). Even beyond the casting of the video, the elements of the video from the dances to the hairstyles are distinctly black.
Ramses and Nefertiti are lounging in the great room, visibly bored, when Nefertiti asks to be entertained. Two performers attempt to charm her with their skills, only to be subsequently executed. The third entertainer, silent and shrouded in a black cloak, casts some magic sand on the great room floor and melts into it. The room gasps and falls silent. Moments later, the pool of sand and cloak morph into a liquid gold--much like the liquid metal form Terminator 2: Judgment Day released one year prior--and reemerges as Michael Jackson clad in gold and a teal sarong. Michael Jackson has now incorporated a futuristic element in an ancient world, the seed necessary for the black futuristic world he has already created.
By leaning on the blockbuster that changed sci-fi special effects for a generation and projecting it back into the past, a black past, the video rewrites innovation and places it directly in black authorship. Not only does it suggest that the power of metamorphosis existed in Ancient Egypt, but the powerful and pliable metal is not crude metal, but gold. Gold. The most sought after resource of African civilizations of the time. In 1992, the New York Times, harshly critiqued “Remember the Time” for everything from being derivative to campy to being a poor knockoff of the special effects used in T2. John Pareles calls the liquid gold scene simply a “computerized metamorphosis (so startling in "Terminator 2" but already banal).” Already banal only a year later? It seems that his take on the video is steeped in derision of not only Michael Jackson, but of the real truth of black contributions to Nile civilization. “Perhaps as a nod to Afrocentric contentions that Egyptian culture was created by blacks, the video clip takes place in ancient Egypt, which looks a lot like a Sheba cat-food commercial” (Pareles). By reducing the video to an expensive hollow commercial, Pareles willfully rejects the intertextuality of the video and the conscious play at afrofuturism that anchors his music videos of the past that reinvent the future.
The video is both a nod to Ancient Egypt and to Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America which not only was a hit at the time, but remains a classic in black cinema. Coming to America is also a part of afrofuturism in its own right. It is a fictitious wealthy African country which seems to have avoided the decimation and destruction brought by European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. In essence the movie is a comedic version of Black Panther, with Zamunda standing in as Wakanda. Insofar as Coming to America plays out in the music video, Michael Jackson’s dance sequence is both new and old. In Murphy’s 1988 Coming to America, there is a lengthy, heavily choreographed dance scene at Prince Akeem’s engagement party. The dance scene featured in “Remember the Time” follows a similar script: the dancers blend traditional dances with what contemporary viewers would read as “urban booty-shaking.” The difference is that Jackson’s video is serious in tone and incorporates the hairstyles of the nineties--which happen to be a resurgence of historically African braid styles like “goddess braids”--and the famous dancers of the moment, like Big Lez.
Michael Jackson is simply seizing on that moment, black culture looking back to their ancestors, to define the origin story of his past videos. His video attempts to fix the whitewashing of Egypt in the one way he can: through his power as an international icon just as Sarah Bond charges all creators of popular culture. “We have known for a long time that we have a diversity problem, and one way to address this might be to emphasize what an integral part people of color played within ancient [ . . . ] history. But the onus is also on the media and fashioners of popular culture” (Bond). “Remember the Time” takes the power of afrofuturism to write important narratives that centralize blackness in the chronology of our world and worlds to come.
Exile and the Epic Journey in the Jacksonverse
If “Remember the Time” sets us up for the long Jackson timeline leading us to “Can You Feel It,” then his video “Scream” is the penultimate of the series. “Scream” includes Janet Jackson, and it is important to note that for the anniversary of his death, Janet released a short clip recreating the opening scene from “Remember the Time.” Just like her brother, she pulls on the contemporary moment and places her queendom in a more West African aesthetic, an aesthetic that has informed popular culture of the moment thanks to the Marvel film Black Panther and the surge of afrofuturism festivals that honor the many distinct ancient African civilizations. “What connects these cultural productions are futuristic counternarratives that speak to the intersections of history and progress, tradition and innovation, technology and memory, the authentic and engineered, analog and digital within spaces of African diasporic culture” (David 698). Janet reaches back in time while staying in the present, just like her brother.
For many, the time jumps between Michael’s videos may seem disconnected, even disparate, but just as Butler found a way to connect all of her stories, so does he. “Michael Jackson’s adaptation of a wide range of racialized identities and temporalities makes some of his work highly relevant to discussions of Afrofuturism” (Steinskog 126). The black and white aesthetic of the video, which is actually more of a chrome than a bleak black/white contrast, immediately pushes the audience far past our present. In this video, Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson are the lone occupants on a spaceship jettisoning away from Earth.
“Scream” exposes all of the injustices and corruption of the current world and suggests that the duo have decided to take their chance on escaping to avoid being poisoned by the world we now inhabit. In this video, as a closure to the first video “Can You Feel It,” the message of the song matches the video. However, in “Scream” the injustices are made more clear: there is no “soon men and women of every color and shape would be here too, and it was too easy sometimes to not to see the colors, and ignore the beauty in each other”, instead the video opens with Michael and Janet attacking a whitewashed narrative:
(Michael) Tired of tellin' the story your way /You're causin' confusion /You think it's okay
(Janet) You keep changin' the rules / While you keep plain' the game / I can't take it much longer /I think I might go insane (Jackson, Scream)
In Adichie’s TEDTalk, “Danger of a Single Story,” she outlines how being inundated with a white narrative affects how people see themselves in the past, present, and future.
What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books, by their very nature, had to have foreigners in them [...] But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.” (Adichie 2:31)
Her call echoes the importance of afrofuturism--the necessity of writing black bodies into the timeline as active and vital elements. A large swath of black speculative fiction starts with a new beginning from a corrupt world that disenfranchised black people, and Michael Jackson owns this theme by putting the physical Earth in the background in several scenes in the short film.
In his meditation room, Michael poses like Buddha, but the more he ruminates on injustice his scream shatters the skylight above and his calm is destroyed by action through his dance scene with Janet. “Racism and white supremacy continue to over-determine the hopes of black futurity, thereby necessitating nothing less than empowered individuality” (David 697). They must make change. They cannot exist in their bubble--the spaceship--they must push towards something greater. “These videos--executed from storyboards by Jackson himself [ . . . ] breach the boundaries of race on which the music industry is based” (Mercer 36). Michael Jackson has truly broken the boundaries Mercer asserts and, even moreso, creates a whole universe in which these boundaries do not exist, and he and Janet are taking us there.
So many elements of the video are rushed through, but with closer inspection, they are all leading to one conclusion: Janet and Michael are leaving Earth to reconnect with their brothers. The ship is marked with a giant “J” on the helm as it flies away from Earth (which is always shown in portholes behind Janet and Michael) with an unknown destination. They seem to be just burning time until their undetermined destination. “There is also an internal Jackson history at stake, a history that has largely been dominated by the celestial and otherworldly” (Steinkog 136). If this is the bookend to Michael Jackson’s interest in afrofuturism, then he and Janet can travel through the timeline to be with their brothers and be the change the world sorely needs. Michael Jackson’s alternative universe is one that shatters revisionist history and makes a prophecy for the future.
Jackson’s alternative reality does not only play itself out in these videos; his other videos--mini films--also focus on equalizing humanity through his own image. In Joseph Vogel’s article “I Ain’t Afraid of No Sheets: Re-Screening Black Masculinity in Michael Jackson’s ‘Black and White’,” Vogel critiques the poor critical reception of the video, claiming that critics were more than reductive, they were blind. “Jackson's body of work is filled with examples of signifiyin(g), both by drawing from the rich well of African‐American musical, cultural, and vernacular traditions, as well as borrowing from traditional white Euro‐American aesthetic traditions and injecting it with his own accent, intention, and purpose” (94). Jackson’s purpose runs clear through all of his videos, even the ones that critics found to be incomprehensible.
In the Jacksonverse, “one can at least visualize Jackson's alternative: a utopian world without borders or hierarchies” (Vogel 102). However, in the Jacksonverse, not only is the world redefined, but the entire universe in a way that equalizes blackness. A connection can be made to Sun Ra’s 1974 short film, Space is the Place, as the Jacksons are taking their audience to a new universe that will save the black race. Sarah Bond concludes her essay on the whitewashing of ancient culture by leaving her readers with one thought “perhaps, in this truer representation, we can come to better understand ourselves.” (Bond). For Jackson, what we understand as afrofuturism is a Jacksonverse.
Published in The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms