Michael Jackson was so Bollywood. Gaudy costumes. Exuberant dancing. Melody and rhythm. Bold lyrics. Add a little narrative of epic emotions. Stir in a dash of irony. This is the recipe of Jackson’s most celebrated music videos. And of the best Bollywood song-and-dance sequences. Check out the music video of The way you make me feel on YouTube to see what I mean.
Jackson was amongst the first American performers to break out in the age of MTV. In the Eighties, more than just about any other artiste, Jackson understood and pioneered the music video as an art form. This is why Jackson’s art — and it was art — resonates in India. Bollywood values the visual and the musical — the spectacle — in very similar ways.
Bollywood is full of Jackson. You can see him in the dancing of Prabhu Deva, who has in fact been called ‘South India’s Michael Jackson’. Or in the pose Shah Rukh Khan likes to strike — you know, the one where he leans back and flings his arms wide, palms open. You can hear Jackson in the music of A R Rahman, who in a statement responding to Jackson’s death noted how inspired he was by Jackson in composing the music for the film Roja.
Not all of this is influence. That is, not all of it is the viral spreading of the cultural idiom of an iconic American performer through the transnational media circuits made possible by globalisation. Some of it is simply a shared aesthetic sensibility. Jackson’s immense popularity in India has more than a little to do with the fact that his art seems, well, so Indian.
Isn’t that why the King of Pop’s death has been so mourned in India?
Of course, Michael Jackson was in many other respects little understood in India. In ways perhaps hard for Indian followers to recognise, Jackson was very much an African American artiste. Jackson evolved in different directions over the years, but always the roots in African American music and performance remained.
As an African American icon, Jackson was certainly tragic. It wasn’t just the scandals — the accusations of child molestation and his own account of the abuse he had faced as a child from his father. It was even more what Jackson seemed to be doing to himself physically. Over the years, the nose and hair became straighter and his skin lighter. What was going on? Was it injury and disease? Or was Jackson, as most thought more likely, bleaching his skin and undergoing plastic surgery to appear white?
It is easy to mock the startling physical transformation Jackson seemed to inflict on himself and find in it self-loathing. It is also possible to see in it a lesson about the terrible price America demands of African Americans, especially those who are artistes and want to achieve a broad appeal. Aspire to whiteness or else be content with a small following — this is what America seems to say to them.
There is another way to look at it. African American culture is full of examples of great writers, musicians and artistes who struggled against racism and the peculiar burden of being black and great. Jackson, even with all his flaws, was one of them. He took and made art out of his burden. Certainly, there was compromise and a bowing down to mainstream culture in some of what he did — a kind of self-hatred. But if it were only self-hatred, Jackson would not have been the great musician and performer he undoubtedly was. There was also in his art a clever, deliberate and often interesting playing with racial identity, and other identities too — as if he were asking questions about what it meant to categorise someone as black or white, man or woman, adult or child.
In many ways, Jackson’s story is a very African American one. It would be wrong to come to easy conclusions about what this story means. The story is complicated, as complicated as the very history of racial relations in America. That is why when Jackson died there was no hesitation on the part of African American leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in owning and celebrating him.
But, finally, when all is said and done Jackson was about style, understood in the best sense as an aspect of art. He was curled fingers and gloved hands. He was flaring jackets and poses held against blue backlighting. He was the well-placed grunt at the right moment in the melody. Jackson understood that for style to be art it had to be about timing — doing the right thing at the right instant for the right length of time. Any artiste, even a writer, could do worse than learn this lesson from him.
Michael Jackson understood style. Perhaps that is all we too need to understand, for it may be the key to his appeal, not only in America and India but everywhere.
(The author’s latest book is the novel No end to the journey, the Spanish translation of which appeared earlier this year)