By the time you read this Michael Jackson (or most of him) would have been laid to rest. If media reports are to be believed he leaves behind his brain, his nose, his original colour, and millions of grieving fans and detractors many of whom are wondering if he really had been an alien. Michael Jackson did not help matters when he appeared as an alien in Men in Black 2. With his ghostly white face and his long straight hair parted in the middle, Michael Jackson appears on a video monitor in the headquarters of the MIB. For those who haven’t seen MIB it’s based on the fact that there are 1500 aliens living on earth, half of them in Manhattan. It is a serious film about protecting the earth from the scum of the universe. In one scene in the sequel it transpires that all employees in a post office are aliens, all of them. They did a sequel because there were more aliens than were earlier estimated, including one in Neverland, California. Here’s the conversation Michael Jackson (who plays himself) has with Rip Torn who plays Zed, the head of MIB via video-conference:
Michael (in his high pitched stage whisper voice): Zed what about that position you promised me in Men in Black.
Zed: We are working on the Alien Affirmative Action Programme. I’ll keep you posted…
MJ: Wait a minute. That’s not what you promised me...
Zed: You are breaking up...I can’t hear you. I’ll call you back….
MJ: Zed? Hello….I could be Agent M...
Like Will Smith was Agent J, and Tommy Lee Jones Agent K. Of course this had the audiences laughing at the ability of the man to crack a joke at his own expense. There have been more jokes at his expense than honest appraisals. Conan O’ Brien is supposed to have sneered when MIB came out saying that it was the first time in a long time that Michael Jackson and the word Black have occurred in the same sentence. You do get the picture, don’t you? True, Michael Jackson was a little — how do we say this? — odd. He weighed 50 kg at death. Half of it must have been the make-up. The autopsy apparently established he had no nose, the clearest proof yet he didn’t sing in falsetto. (Aliens don’t have noses, do they?) Those who find the nose can make millions now on eBay. For someone who grabbed his own crotch so often Michael Jackson had precious little to show for his sexuality other than the pointed poses, the calculated swagger of his dance and the suggestive pitch of his songs (I Wanna Be Starting Something, PYT). In his famous interview with Oprah Winfrey, (though over 23 years old it is still relevant) Michael dressed in a pink full sleeve shirt with greenish epaulets, talks in controlled effeminate whispers. He doesn’t laugh. He giggles. Quite a lot. Oprah asks him straight out why he grabbed his crotch so often. Michael Jackson giggles. Then replies, grabbing his crotch once more: “I don’t think about it. It just happens. I’m a slave to the rhythm.” Oprah doesn’t give up. She asks the 34-year-old Michael Jackson: “Are you a virgin?” Michael replies: “I am a gentleman” — who at that time happened to be dating Brook Shields, the Blue Lagoon girl. (Do gentlemen rhythmically grab their crotch to choreography and music on camera, even with their clothes on?) Michael Jackson concedes his nose job to Oprah with a counter: “If all the people in Hollywood who had plastic surgery were to go on a vacation then there wouldn’t be a single person left in Hollywood.” Touché, I guess. And yes, the make-up was to give an even tone to his skin that was going white in ugly blotches. And with make-up on, I swear, in one of his videos he looks beautiful, just like Julia Roberts. Well, almost. As far as I know only aliens can look amazingly like Julia Roberts (ah, those lips) and manage to sing like Michael Jackson (ah, that voice) at the same time. No doubt about it.
Michael Jackson sang terrific, danced fantastic and wrote pretty decent songs. His version of Girlfriend is better than Paul McCartney’s, yes, in London Town where I think Paul sings the song in falsetto, a put on. Just the way Bee Gees sang many of their songs, or even Prince (think Kiss).
Michael Jackson’s voice, that’s another thing that’s odd. Odd and fantastic. According to Seth Riggs, who helped maintain his vocal form in Bad, Thriller, HIStory, and Dangerous, it spanned a full four octaves. Even Nat King Cole’s voice covered about half as many octaves, albeit the lower registers. Marvin Gaye had a three-octave range. If you listen to Michael Jackson sing he moves through the upper registers with supreme ease. His pitch is perfect, his control tremendous, and his phrasing great. He could teach Bobby McFerrin a few tricks. His sense of harmony was wonderful (Will You Be There). It was a voice made for tender ballads. But here’s the odd thing: Michael Jackson grew up. His voice didn’t quite catch up. We know he grew up because Quincy Jones says that when Michael sang She’s Out of My Life he’d break down and cry. You can feel the pain. Quincy says they had to do the song about eleven times and each time Michael Jackson broke down and cried, even though he had not experienced a mature emotion of the kind the song talked about.
If you listen to his voice in One Day In Your Life (Forever, Michael, 1975, his last Motown album), it sounds the same as She’s Out of My Life (Off the Wall, 1979) and it doesn’t change even in The Lady in My Life (Thriller, released in the end of 1982), You Are Not Alone (HIStory, 1995), You Are My Life (Invincible, 2001, his last album). If you didn’t know this was Michael Jackson and were given a blindfold test, you’d say this was a great womanly voice and with the years it had more texture, more nuances, more variations in pitch, more timbre. For someone who recorded and delivered consistently remarkable music for more than forty years, he didn’t have to reinvent himself for nearly thirty years even as the world changed around him. All of us grow up and our voices change. That’s the way of all flesh. It’s human. In Michael Jackson’s case he grew up and his voice changed from a girl’s voice to that of a slightly bigger girl. I don’t know what he did to make his voice stop from growing up but it isn’t human. He must have been an alien. Agent M. M for music. Agent M from a galaxy far, far away. It will be a while before another one comes along on earth.
sudarshan@epmltd.com
About the author:
V Sudarshan is the Executive Editor of ‘The New Indian Express’