The Greatest Dancer

Originally published in Hot Press Volume 8, Issue 4, 1984

Michael Jackson’s theme song is not amongst his own work. Chic wrote and Sister Sledge sang it: Michael Jackson is “The Greatest Dancer”.
He is also the seminarian of soul. Hardly ten, Michael went to Motown; showbiz was almost inculcated as his religion. Any Catholic who ever went to boarding school should understand how Michael Jackson was trained for the priesthood and then the hierarchy of stardom.
He learnt his devotions early. It is possible that Michael Jackson was practising back-spins before he knew how to toddle. It is certain that before he was six, Michael Jackson sat back-stage watching James Brown in his prime. If Michael Jackson hadn’t existed, he would have been invented… and perhaps he was!
As yet, this monk hasn’t married but Olga Korbut would have been his ideal bride. Between Jackson’s career and those of teen athletes, the parallels are numerous. As with swimmers, gymnasts and toy tennis players like Tracy Austin, he has been trained from his earliest days to the exclusion of other interests, defined totally by his skills. Again like many adolescent athletes, he’s been part motivated and guided by an ambitious parent, his father Joe who still co-manages Michael and his brothers Jackson.
Athleticism marks him like no other music star. His arrival has coincided with the fitness cult and its insistence on dance as exercise, healthful, virtuous and only incidentally sexual. Michael Jackson works rather than makes out.
In sixties soul, sweat has always adjacent to sock-it-to-me sex. Michael Jackson strives to transcend those connotations and subsume sixties relationships between body, dance and sex. He gets physical, then glides off on his wings of romance. What a MALE flirt! What a MALE tease!
So it goes. He’s still Superboy and if Sister Sledge sang his theme, another girl group filed through the Motown archives for his flip side. Michael Jackson is also Bananarama’s quintessential “Shy Boy” .. a MALE sex object…and…a Jehovah’s Witness!
It is impossible to decide how much his increasingly odd-ball image is a mismatch between publicists’ manipulation and media speculation. The least reverent accounts play up his reputation as an eccentric hermit with a crush on llamas who holds deep and meaningful conversations with his specially-built gallery of electronically-animated Disney cartoon mannequins.
Yet this self-proclaimed Peter Pan always knows where the pulleys are. A daft and daffy Jackson could not have gained the respect of the redoubtable Katherine Hepburn. Or of Steven Spielberg.
He may have made the most pertinent comments on a Rolling Stone feature, arguing that “he’s in full control. Sometimes he appears to other people to be sort of wavering on the fringes of twilight but there is great conscious forethought behind everything he does. He’s very smart about his career and the choices he makes. I think he definitely is a man of two personalities.”
And a second personality that allows him steal away. There can be no doubt that some of Jackson’s most pertinent traits are defence mechanisms. But while the media consensus contends these habits are unpremeditated, I’m not convinced of Jackson’s complete guilelessness. His gentle eccentricity gives him extra space for social manoeuvre.
Besides an old adage of Oscar Wilde’s has often been translated for American use: trust the art not the artist. We also know Michael Jackson cracked it when he won full control. CBS loved him “Off The Wall”!

Jackson and family are now ensconced in California but they were reared in Gary, Indiana, apparently a grim industrial outpost. The family fraternal music tradition goes back at least one generation; with his brothers, father Joe worked in the Falcons, a local R&B band he disbanded due to the pressure of his growing family.
Joe then got work as a crane operator so though the family wasn’t on the breadline, chances are that Mrs Jackson bought marge more often than butter. Meanwhile as Michael was in the cradle, his elder brothers were already learning their harmonies.
Born August ’58, by age five Michael Jackson had played his first paying gig as lead singer in the family group. But he couldn’t be the typical spoilt brat of a child star: Gary was hardly Hollywood. Besides he wasn’t emulating Shirley Temple. Instead he was already observing and mimicking Brown, Jackie Wilson, and Smokey Robinson.
Gradually Joe Jackson was steering his sons to a more professional grade. Still a shadowy figure, he can be added to the small but quality group of father/managers that also includes John Weller and the Beach Boys’ Murray Wilson. Musically aware but frustrated in his own career, Joe Jackson seems to have realized early his sons’ potential. Allegedly, rehearsals were more work than play: Joe Jackson realized he had sired the family business.
Slowly the Jackson 5 gained a reputation in Gary and the neighbouring cities. Performing regularly for one local black pride organization, they made one useful connection. It had been led by a Gary politician, Richard Hatcher. By '68, Hatcher had become the city's first black mayor.
With Hatcher's approval, they performed at a civic "Soul Weekend". Headlining the event were Diana Ross and the Supremes and according to an enduring legend, Ross was instrumental to signing them to Motown. Recently though, Ross has amended the record. She says that Motown chief, Berry Gordy was already aware of the group.
Whatever the exact facts, Ross has always been a close friend and supporter of Michael Jackson, a relationship artistically consummated when he produced her "Muscles" single. It isn't hard to hear her breathy influence on his singing.
As the Jackson 5 signed to Motown in 1969, the company was changing. Its assembly-line method of hit-making was becoming outmoded as producers like the Holland-Dozier-Holland trio cut loose in search of both increased financial reward and artistic freedom elsewhere.
Furthermore the album revolution had both downgraded the single and increased the status of musicians and singer-songwriters. Compelled by the new styles in vogue, Motown retooled. Early to respond were senior Motown acts like The Temptations, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder.
Under the guidance of producer Norman Whitfield, the Temptations' vocals were re-modelled in a new "psychedelic soul" sound that was the laleb's response to Sly Stone's innovations. Meanwhile both Wonder and Gaye became black singer-songwriters catering for the album market and parading their independence from Motown's old paternalist policies as they negotiated advances and guarantees of artistic control unprecedented for black acts.
Through these three, Motown nailed down the older black audience and retained their influence among white album-buyers. The role of the Jackson 5 was to open a new front for the label.
While psychedelia still monopolized the scandalized headlines, a teeny counter-revolution was happening. Single-handedly the Buddah label had developed "bubblegum", almost the Big Mac of pop, sugary and addictive - though hardly nutritious for the 11 year old brothers and sisters of the hippie generation.
Berry Gordy neither followed the sound nor the simple-minded rhythms of "bubblegum" but he was alerted by its principles. He reasoned that if such a white audience existed, there must also be their young black counterparts. The Jackson 5 would satisfy their need for their own generation of heroes.
The Jackson 5 were given the support of all Motown's creative resources. Motown's opportunities would also be theirs. It later would become their problems too.

From father Hoe through to Michael, the Jackson family had sweated through the sixties. On the final Christmas of the decade, they celebrated their reward. Released in late '69, "I Want You Back" shot to the top of the American charts by the second week of December.
Produced and written by "The Corporation", Berry Gordy's specially chosen brains-trust of Motown producers, "I Want You Back" deserved its eminence. In the stuttering tension of its dynamics, even the strings were syncopated. Further, it was a real vocal group record as his brothers punctuated Michael's novel exuberance.
Adults who heard it on the radio and didn't know Michael's age could be as impressed as the target teenybop audience. For them, Michael Jackson might just have been another quirky falsetto.
The hits kept coming in the same style as both "ABC" and "The Love You Save" gave the Jackson 5 a streak of three consecutive American number ones. Later in '70, their first ballad "I'll Be There" also topped the US charts.
Commercial success and artistic quality had been successfully married. Motown had both honoured the group and respected its own company traditions by not exploiting them to shovel out kiddie-pop. "I Want You Back" definitely matches the label's greatest records.
But a blot on Motown's honour-roll remains. In their remaining years with the label, the Jackson 5 never matched and rarely came near those first singles of dynamite.
The Jackson 5 would have been an unusually delicate proposition for any label since Michael could hardly graduate to more adult material. But the loss of quality in their output also reveals Motown's own decline in creative confidence. Through the success of the Temptations, Gaye, Wonder and the Jacksons themselves, Motown probably was more financially profitable in the expanding markets of the seventies than the previous decade but the prospering balance-sheet masked a change in the nature of the company. The old assembly-line had run down.
Through those years, Motown lost many artists like the Four Tops, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Gladys Knight and the Pips. More crucially, the label also lost indispensable producers and song-writers like the Ashford and Simpson and the Holland-Dozier-Holland team. Their replacements were obviously inferior.
With the exception of the Whitfield-backed Temptations and Diana Ross, always Berry Gordy's class favourite, Motown's most effective acts were those like Gaye, Wonder and Smokey Robinson who generated their own material. Even the Commodores, Motown's first funkateers, wrote their own tracks. The rule of the house producers was over.
Whitfield's work with the Tempts' and The Corporations' hits with the Jackson 5 were the swan-songs of that tradition. Unable to write their own material Joe Jackson's boy wonders were in an exposed position.
They still racked up hits. In their remaining years on Motown, they had 12US and 7 UK Top 20 entries either as a group or through Michael's solo work. But all these records could be stamped "product". There were two obvious defects. The Jackson 5's first fame was identified with the dance-floor but Motown didn't let them return to it 'til their last album "Dancing Machine" in '74. Secondly, they rarely used the black vocal group tradition from which they sprang. Call-and-response patterns were neglected as the brothers laid down straight, undemanding harmonies behind Michael's singing.
Most records were salvaged only by Jackon's instincts as an interpreter. Somehow he was able to communicate sincerity in the most saccharine ballad. But the nador came in '72 with "Ben", Michael Jackson's first American solo number one. "Ben" was that sort of transparent camp that Americans often unblushingly excuse with dollar signs. Anyone believe a love song to a rat?
And a most rabid rodent at that. "Ben" was the theme tune to an exploitation flick so grossly forgettable that even Michael Dwyer only half-remembers its plot. Sort of Man meets Rat, "Ben" was the inspirational tale of an emotionally crippled lad who trained his pet rat to lead an army to wreak vengeance on his enemies. And for his Animal Lib version of "Carrie", Michael sang the theme with plaintive conviction. Obviously he was a trouper.
Motown were prodding their proteges into too many markets. They were fearful that the Jackson 5 might be outsold by white teeny-bop competition like the Osmonds so they tried to make the group even cuter as all-round entertainers.
They dabbled in rock with a hit version of Jackson Browne's "Doctor My Eyes" or a later track "I Am Love" disfigured by the most atrocious pomp-rock guitar and keyboards. Somehow Michael Jackson retained much of his bounce and verve but he was always dangerously close to being swaddled in the material.
Even in their heyday, Motown had directed their acts to record albums for the lucrative Las Vegas circuit so these policies weren't novel. The real change was the label's incapacity to create any striking, compensatory records. "I Want You Back" seemed a far distant echo.
For their final album, "Dancing Machine", the label belatedly realized the danger as the group locked into the pre-disco styles coming out of Philadelphia that reached their peak with the Trammps. It was the first hint of a new mature style but Motown wasn't to benefit. Their contract over, the group crossed to Epic.
Yet even if their career had been artistically erratic, the adolescent Jackson surely gained by his grooming in the hit factory. Motown gave him an ideal professional education, even sending a choreographer, Suzanne de Pazze on the road with them.
Joe Jackson gave him his basic training, Motown was his finishing school. It was the company's misfortune that Michael Jackson's graduation took him off their campus.

The label-change to Epic also brought a name-change to the Jacksons. Brother Jermaine had married Berry Gordy's daughter and stuck with his father-in-law's firm recording as an intermittently successful solo act. The Jacksons kept it in the family. the youngest brother Randy replaced him.
The revised group's first port of call was Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia. While the Jacksons' artistic fortunes had been fluctuating at Motown, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff had created Motown's first real rival since Stax, Philadelphia International, with the invaluable aid of the distribution muscle of CBS. To all concerned, it must have seemed the natural alliance to direct the Jacksons on a new path.
But there was one regrettable hitch. By '76 Gamble and Huff's own inspiration was also flagging and many of their most talented associates had quit to set up their own operations. Built on the same assembly-line principles as Motown, the Philly scene was also suffering the same disintegration of success as had afflicted the original model.
The Jacksons linked with Gamble and Huff two years too late to produce a masterpiece. "The Jacksons", their eponymous Epic debut, was pretty much your standard black album of hits and filler. As if nobody wished the Jacksons to be over-identified with the classic Philly sound, Gamble and Huff's production downplayed standard elements o their formula. "The Jacksons" is unmarked by the warm pervasive electric keyboards, vaguely jazzy guitar and vibes associated with Philly. Unfortunately, Gamble and Huff's fading commitment shows in their replacement: an overlay of characterless strings.
Yet the album served one basic purpose. Spotlighting both the group's and particularly Michael's new maturity, they were no longer assigned those cutesy Sesame Street ballads. At least, they were now hit-making on more acceptable terms.
In June '77 "Show Me The Way To Go" entered the British charts in the exact same week as the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen". Unlike the Pistols' provocation, it officially reached number one.
With the Pistols' controversy at its most noisome, "Show Me The Way To Go" hardly registered outside pop quarters. Yet even if it didn't attain the same standards as Michael's later dance monsters, the single did presage the future in his racing, scatting improvisation over the fade.
For the rest, they enjoyed a few less notable hits and "Keep On Dancing" finds Michael doing his vocal exercises over a disco beat. He was also now writing his own material; "Blues Away" and "Style of Life" the latter in partnership with brother Tito but both were less than astounding blueprints..
Still "The Jacksons" stabilized their career. Also though only his closest confidants could have known it, Michael must have been awakening to a new belief in his ability. All he lacked was context. That came with the next album, "Destiny", the real watershed in the story.

Too many cooks were spoiling the brothers. Like so many black singers, they seemed fated to be producers; property traded around the fashionable names without ever finding their own identity. For "Destiny", Epic took a bold and ultimately lucrative gamble. They let the Jacksons produce themselves.
With few writing credits and no independent production experience, their prior track record hardly warranted the risk. Yet the decision both rejuvenated the group and unlocked Michael's chains. "Destiny" may be patchy but its hits pointed the road forward.
Of course, "Shake Your Body (Down to The Ground)" was the landmark, the first of Michael's monster riffs, introduced by a galloping dance phrase and powered by a bassline that found the highest common denominator between funk and disco. It also revealed his new command as a singer. Michael Jackson's vocal dancing had begun as he lifted off with all those spontaneous cries and chirps/
Otherwise they were still playing safe and having trouble with the ballads, though both "Push Me Away" and the title track betrayed some soul-searching on his part. The only really notable track was the other major single "Blame It On The Boogie". As also its video with its dazzling dance routine. A crucial breakthrough, it signalled to a wider public that Michael Jackson just might be marked out as somebody special. His image as the crown prince of the disco was focussing.
Both the album's successes and failures must have cleared his head. On neither of his solo albums has he over extended his songwriting. Now he prefers to let other invent the melodic ballads while he concentrates on perfecting his killer-thriller riffs. After "destiny". only one element remained to complete the equation: the selection of Quincy Jones as a producer.
Strangely, Epic were initially reluctant to let their budding boy-wonder work with Jones. Though the veteran producer had a reputable commercial track record with A&M's Johnson Brothers, he hadn't followed the disco pack. But Jackson fought his corner and the company acquiesced in his choice.
Quincy Jones can only be described as versatile. Spending his career flitting between jazz and the mainstream, he started as a big band trumpeter who could easily work with Dizzy Gillespie and produce early R'n'B groups like the Treniers. Later he write Hollywood soundtracks and formed his own studio big-band. As the sixties shaded in to the seventies, Hones began flirting with electricity and funk, a road that let him to the Johnsons. His whole career testifies to the flexibility of the black popular tradition.
One aspect of the partnership may be significant. It's a trait of Jackson's to seek out older masters of their trade. Certainly his choice of Jones chimes with a man whose friends include Spielberg, Diana Ross, Jane Fonda and Katherine Hepburn.
The tracks on both "Off The Wall" and "Thriller" have been both released on so many singles and played so regularly that they've become public property. Unlike his formative period at Motown, Jackson managed to satisfy all sections of his audience without offending any.
Even the ballads can sooth those who prefer a more sugar-free diet. "The Girl Is Mine", his duet with Macca, escapes through its jaunty charm while "She's Out Of My Life" was blessed with an unusually vulnerable, even tear-stained performance.
But those concessions to staider tastes merit only a footnote in any history. Jackson's command of the dance-floor is his unique contribution. Nobody has consistently brought such drama to the disco.
In the most recent albums, two changes are immediately apparent. For openers, Jackson's become his own backing vocal group. Secondly he allows himself to be consistently challenged by the musicians around him. Previously any instrumental personality seemed to be discouraged and/or mixed down. Now Jackson glorified in countering and outstripping the rhythms and licks his players threw at him. Listening to "Off the Wall" and "Thriller" it's impossible to decide whether Jackson was a late developer or somebody who had been held back by bad advice. Like a newborn babe in the swimming pool, his natural element is the dance.
Black music has always been physical and its performers have always prided themselves on their choreography, but Jackson brings that tradition to his own peak of perfection. Even his singing almost demands a physical response.
So attuned and alert to the body, Jackson's music is hardly sexless but it has a joy in the physical perfection that is unprecedented. Jackson's delighted and uncanny sense of timing could only come from a dancer in peak condition. Jackson's music exults in itself. It has acted and will act as a preliminary for sex but it doesn't have to. For Michael Jackson, getting down is an end in itself.
Comment on the dance may seem superfluous but so many musicians, even the more famous, are scared to dance. Every Sunday, Michael Jackson has his own private three-hour session of dance therapy. Those Sunday rituals make him different .
Lyrically he had hardly ventured beyond love and dance platitudes but "Thriller" brought determined if unsteady advance. Written by Rod Termperton, the title track played up his puckish humour while his own lyrics became more specific, if a touch paranoid. "Billie Jean" received her marching orders and she also featured as a gossip in "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'".
That song also had the oddest sequence. "Still they hate you", he sings "you're a vegetable/You're just a buffet, you're a vegetable/They eat off/you're a vegetable." Michael Jackson shares nothing in carnivorous common with Ted Nugent. He is a vegetarian.
Well boys will have their jokes. As Rob Termperton wrote for him on "Off The Wall", "Gotta hide your inhibitions/Gotta let that fool loose deep inside your soul". Perhaps that same sense of conviction saves his ballads from schlock.
Still my favourite joke comes from "Off The Wall". On "Get On The Floor", the track breaks into a remorseless disco passage as his own vocals become more harshly commanding. Then suddenly he returns to the verse and you catch his laugh. With mischievous glee, the Pied Piper has owned up to his tricks.

Michael Jackson isn't the first child star reared in the Motown stable. (Little) Stevie Wonder preceded him and as are such maverick characters because their closest encounters with everyday reality are on stage and in bed.
Certainly Jackson has confessed that the stage is the home he prefers - though he is no indulgent rock excessive. A Jehovah's Witness, he guards his talents from temptation with a single-minded devotion. The concern that underpins his fear is touching but des he lose contact with his own? Dies he even remember the ghetto in Gary?
Certainly, as Wonder matured, he showed a consistent social concern in songs like "Living For The City" and in his support of Jackson, he seems a rare jewel, refined in the furnace of the music business, He was bred to cross over.
A man who's surprised once can surprise again: Michael Jackson's record proves he should never be under-estimated. But his own combination of showbiz ambitions, however honourable, and an essentially protective fantasy cocoon may limit his cultural range and power.
Still there are innumerable European idealists who under-rate Michael Jackson. Fiddling him with synthesizer, dealing in monotone rhythms, they hardly note that the title track of "Thriller", save for guitar and horn seasoning, is totally synthesized.
This has been a selective rather than a blow-by-blow account. Between the group and his solo work, there were innumerable Motown albums, about to be smelted down to a new compilation. Also after "Destiny", the Jacksons produced the "Triumph" album and a sometimes invigorating double-live set.
But the real story, the real rama-llama is Michael Jackson and the dance, a man often thwarted but finally triumphant in his ambitions. On "Thriller", Rod Temperton defined Jackson's opponents: "Whosoevershall be found without the soul for getting down".
Hear it on "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" as it closes with a furious African chant. Michael Jackson's music attests to both the primacy and continuity in the black tradition."