Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask, Part 2: Billie Jean and the Panther Dance
Lisha: Hello again, Harriet and Willa! In our last post, I feel like we covered so much ground in discovering how blackface minstrelsy is a much bigger phenomenon in American history than is generally understood. Rather than being an insignificant novelty act, it is actually the literal underpinning of the entertainment industry we think of today as being uniquely American.
Willa: That is so true, Lisha. As I look around, Harriet, I keep seeing traces of blackface that I never noticed before reading this new edition of your book, Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask. It feels like it’s all around me – even the very idea of what it means to be an American! So I’m eager to talk with you and learn more about this, especially how Michael Jackson pushed back against this history and its pervasive influence today.
Harriet: Hi again, both of you, and thank you for inviting me back to further discuss some of the ideas in my new book! We certainly covered a lot last time, didn’t we, and I hope that readers found it informative and helpful.
Willa: I think so! I know I found it really useful to hear your insights into that history, and I imagine others did too. Here’s a link to our discussion last week about the history of blackface – which lasted from the 1820s until well into the 1900s – and how important it was in shaping ideas about what it means to be Black and, just as importantly, what it means to be White.
Lisha: The big takeaway for me is realizing that the study of blackface minstrelsy is critically important if we’re really serious about understanding American racism. It’s not just a random topic in music history. It is much more. Minstrelsy functioned as a way for White Americans to dominate the social order. It’s as much about culture and society as it is about music and entertainment.
“Wacko Jacko” is just one example of how minstrel characters continue to resonate in the American psyche and in other countries it was exported to. The function remains the same: ordering the social hierarchy. When Michael Jackson’s tremendous success as a Black performer eclipsed popular White performers of the day and then spilled over into the music publishing business, big business, and even beyond, almost instantly the caricature “Wacko Jacko” appeared in the press. It functioned as a way of diminishing his power and position in a way we don’t see with White performers. Is that a fair summary?
Harriet: That is a brilliant summary, Lisha. I don’t think it was any coincidence that the rise of Michael Jackson to superstar and businessman was so swiftly followed by the derisive caricature “Wacko Jacko.” As you describe this, Lisha, it reveals how ideas of Black people, and especially Black men, rooted in minstrel caricature still resonate and are mobilized. In the specific case of Michael Jackson, I believe the rise of “Wacko Jacko” revealed how, at the time, the entertainment industry – which extended to the mainstream media – was motivated by the need to uphold its own hierarchy, which was one based on White privilege.
It was from such White, male hegemonic spaces as the music industry and mainstream press that “Wacko Jacko” and the harshest hostility towards Michael Jackson came, and it spun outwards to become typical representation. “Wacko Jacko” became a cultural “truth” and it saturated public consciousness, and to me that is all the stuff of traditional blackface minstrelsy. I can’t think of one White artist, no matter who they have been or done or come to represent – good or bad – who has been misrepresented in such a systemic and unchallengeable way as Michael Jackson.
Lisha: Wow. That’s such a powerful statement, Harriet, and I think I’m going to read your last two paragraphs over and over again. I’ve never heard it summarized as powerfully and succinctly as you just did.
Harriet: Why thank you, Lisha.
Lisha: And I believe it’s absolutely true! I also cannot think of another example of artist misrepresentation that even comes close to what has been manufactured about Michael Jackson. And that misrepresentation has become so common that it is now just accepted as “truth” – to the point it seems impossible to break through.
So I want that to sink in, but I also want to think through how Michael Jackson engaged with this racist history in terms of his art. We know he was extremely knowledgeable about the history of American music and dance. I have even heard academic dance historians describe him as a virtual “encyclopedia of dance” just from analyzing his movement alone. So it should be no surprise that we see echoes of minstrelsy reflected in his work.
Willa: Absolutely. He was very knowledgeable about the history of American entertainment. He said a number of times that he liked to study “the greats,” but he also studied historical trends in the entertainment industry. I was recently listening to a question-and-answer session he did with Anthony DeCurtis in 2001, and he explicitly talked about that:
Before I do anything, it could be any situation, I love studying the whole history of it before I take the first step to innovate. So I love studying any Vaudevillian, you know, who came from that era – even though they didn’t have TV – but they transcended into television later on. I love people like Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton….
The quote comes about 39:20 minutes in, and it shows how he made a conscious effort to study the whole history of popular entertainment – including Vaudeville – when creating his work. And while Vaudeville was before the development of TV, as he says, so we can’t actually see those performances, we can see traces of it “later on.” As he put it, it “transcended into television,” and he mentions a few early TV stars by name, including Jackie Gleason, a TV star of the mid-1950s, and Red Skelton, who got his start in minstrel shows before moving on to Vaudeville and ultimately movies and television.
Harriet: That’s a brilliant insight, Willa! I think all in all it’s impossible to believe that Michael Jackson did not know a great deal about the minstrel tradition. What is also important to note is that blackface minstrelsy was the only available gateway into show business for Black Americans traditionally. This was from around 1865, and minstrelsy’s conventions continued to dictate the parameters of Black performances well into Vaudeville some fifty years later. So minstrelsy – and how minstrelsy was contended with – very much provides the roots to the lineage of Black performers – as well as White – that eventually found us at Michael Jackson.
Lisha: In your book you get into some specifics of this through an analysis of the Motown 25 “Billie Jean” performance, and you use an old sheet music illustration to make a point about the historical lineage of minstrelsy.
I have to say I was so struck by this image! As you point out in the book, it is so reminiscent of Bob Fosse’s “A Snake in the Grass” from the 1974 film The Little Prince, as well as many other iconic moments from the old Hollywood musicals. Of course Michael Jackson fans cite “A Snake in the Grass” as a likely inspiration for the onstage “Billie Jean” routine. So I’m stunned how this one illustration so clearly connects those performances to a thread that runs all throughout American popular entertainment. The imagery seems to be in operation whether the artists intend it or not!
Willa: I agree, Lisha. We’ve talked before about Fosse’s “A Snake in the Grass” as inspiration for “Billie Jean,” like in this post with Elizabeth Bergman. But I hadn’t thought about it in terms of blackface minstrelsy before. Like Michael Jackson, Fosse had a good understanding of dance history, and he drew on so many different styles in his work. And in The Little Prince he wanted to portray a sly, scheming “snake in the grass” who tempts the Little Prince, a character who personifies innocence. And isn’t it interesting that Fosse drew on the forms of blackface minstrelsy to evoke a sense of duplicitousness and deceit? Given what you’ve told us about blackface, Harriet, and what it represented for White Americans, it makes perfect sense that Fosse would turn to those well-established forms to convey those negative characteristics to his audience.
But then Michael Jackson used those exact same forms but completely altered their meaning. There’s nothing devious about the character he portrays in his “Billie Jean” dance at Motown 25. It’s like he took those dance forms and rinsed them free of the negative connotations that had been attached to them for a hundred years. Wow. Great connection, Lisha! It really illustrates how Jackson was able to take these familiar tropes that derive from blackface minstrelsy and then completely change their meaning, just as you describe in your book, Harriet.
Harriet: Thanks for bringing that image into the discussion, Lisha, and for highlighting these connections, both of you! The “Lazy-Bones” illustration just jumped off the page when I first found it because of how it so clearly captures the lineage, or legacy, of blackface minstrelsy, right up to Michael Jackson. It dates from the early twentieth century, so that is towards the end of minstrelsy’s reign in American mass entertainment. But it’s just amazing because of the way it encapsulates a whole series of historic images but also foresees many of the future.
The central figure is a blackface dandy – a stock stage-type of minstrelsy that was originally intended to be the comic caricature of free, urban Black Americans. The pose the dancer strikes is very angular – kind of a zigzag shape – typical of pretty much all blackface iconography. Taken from the aesthetic of African dance and then distorted, this pose was a way minstrelsy crippled and sometimes even animalized the real Black male body.
Here are two earlier examples of this pose:
One presumes that this pose accompanying “Lazy-Bones” is intended to capture the “grotesqueness” of the dance in keeping with how all such poses, in their distortion, were traditionally used to ridicule and dehumanize real Black people. The image therefore conjures all the blackface actors and dancers that came before it who obsessively bent their bodies into versions of just that shape, and not least T.D. Rice and George Washington Dixon, pictured above, who led the way in those portrayals nearly a century earlier.
Yet at the same time, the image anticipates the classic iconography of early Hollywood: it’s a tap dancer’s pose and there is something unmistakably Fred Astaire about it. Also worth noting is the shadow of the dancer that stretches out to the left of the image, which seems to be Astaire’s infamous “shadow dance” lying in wait. (This is Astaire’s troubling blackface tribute in the movie musical Swing Time to the Black tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.)
The central figure also foresees the iconography of Broadway and, as you note Lisha, it really screams Bob Fosse and his performance in “A Snake in the Grass.” But the references are not limited to dancers. There is something reflected of the silent movie star Charlie Chaplin and his famous persona The Tramp and simultaneously Al Jolson – the Vaudevillian who became the blackface star of synchronized sound in film.
Lisha: Oh my goodness yes! The shadow figure on the left equally suggests Fred Astaire in Swing Time or Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp or any number of show business characters. And as Willa said earlier, once you tune into this imagery, minstrel characters seem to pop up everywhere. For example, here’s a scene from a recent TV show, Only Murders in the Building, that echoes “Lazy-Bones” in a comedy spoof of Broadway musical clichés.
Willa: Heavens, Lisha, you have such a good eye for these kinds of details! I watched that show and saw that dance, and the historical implications went right over my head. Didn’t faze me a bit. It just goes to show how pervasive the legacy of blackface really is. It’s been normalized to such a degree that we don’t even see it. It’s become as natural as the air we breathe. In fact, that was probably the biggest impact of your book on me, Harriet – opening my eyes to things I’d looked at so long I didn’t even see them anymore.
Harriet: Exactly, I’ve really come to understand this history and its influence as so pervasive that it’s just like the water we swim in, or as you describe it, Willa, “the air we breathe.” It’s just everywhere. And that screenshot you’ve just shared with us, Lisha, is a great example of that. The angulated “zigzag” pose is clear as day.
Lisha’s contemporary image really helps to illustrate how compressed into “Lazy-Bones” is a centuries-long performance lineage of American show business and what it owes to blackface minstrelsy. To put this another way, “Lazy-Bones” may be seen as the compression of what White American show business owes to the real Black male body, a body that has been obsessively mimicked and then transformed over time to serve anything from racist ideology to “tribute,” comedy to creative verve, fame and fortune, or any combination thereof.
So as you introduce above, Lisha, in my new book I draw on “Lazy-Bones” in my discussion of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” performance at Motown 25, a performance I use to illustrate how Michael Jackson responded artistically – and perhaps very intuitively – to this history. What is so exciting and fascinating is how Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” dance may be seen as just such a compression of entertainment history as that in “Lazy-Bones”! It’s almost the animated version of that image!
Of course, one departure is that “Billie Jean” is an honest tribute to veritable Black dance – there are reflections of James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Sammy Davis Jr, The Electric Boogaloos, and Shalamar’s Jeffrey Daniel, and there is lots we can say about that. But the routine seemingly draws from Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in very striking ways, as well as Bob Fosse, and “A Snake in the Grass” especially. In Michael Jackson’s vulnerability and his “longing eyes” there are certainly reflections of the pathos of Charlie Chaplin. And while the open palms and white glove might remind us of mime, both steep the dance in minstrelsy by evoking Al Jolson and seizing the most iconic emblem of minstrel costume. Fundamentally, the whole aesthetic of angulated moves, flexed limbs, and “zigzag” poses evokes minstrel performance, reanimating the tradition’s most recognizable stylization of the Black male body.
I believe this historical compression in “Billie Jean” represents one way that Michael Jackson responded powerfully in his art to blackface minstrelsy and its long enduring legacy. This is because, through being delivered by means of the veritable Black body of Michael Jackson, this historical lineage presented in “Billie Jean” becomes less a history lesson than a dramatic reclamation. In other words, “Billie Jean” may be seen as a sort of repatriation or recovery of the Black body that has been intrinsic to the evolution of mass entertainment but that has traditionally remained hidden behind, and transformed by, its most revered White stars. In “Billie Jean” at Motown 25, Michael Jackson made that body visible and made it visible for what it really was. Quite remarkably, this was expressed in part through the re-energization of minstrelsy’s cruelest poses and comic costume, which Michael Jackson, in an instant, claimed as his own.
Lisha: There it is! Unmistakable. He is quoting while reinventing and washing it clean of the cruelty and mockery of the past. Breathtakingly brilliant.
You know the great American ballet dancer, Misty Copeland, talks about this in Nelson George’s Thriller 40. When Michael Jackson introduced that iconic toe stand in Motown 25, a move from classical ballet, she believes that to be so radical that even today its true significance is not fully understood:
To see a black man standing on his toes … has made generations of black, brown, white – whatever color kids – feel like anything is possible. It’s bigger than we think and acknowledge.
I mean, is there a dance move more antithetical to minstrelsy than the toe stand from classical ballet? That became such an iconic Michael Jackson silhouette, you could recognize him from his feet alone! It was even used as a logo for his companies. I think it sums up his artistry so well.
Willa: It really is an iconic Michael Jackson pose – and he must have thought so too since, as you said, Lisha, he made it one of his logos.
So I want to get back to this idea of “reclamation” that you mentioned earlier, Harriet, not just in terms of the Black male body but also Black dance traditions. In your book you talk about how blackface minstrelsy “appropriated” forms and movements “from Black culture,” but deformed them and their meaning. As you explain, “In their original guise, these gestures had been about dynamism, agility, and spontaneity.” But then blackface twisted both those dance forms and what they represented:
In their white reimaginings, these gestures were transformed from symbols of ‘life and energy’ (and by extension, spirit, pride, skill, aptitude, a sense of freedom and even power) into signs of inadequacy, grotesquery and bestiality. This defined Black Americans as inferior, guaranteed white Americans as superior and legitimized the racial oppression of the day.
But then – amazingly – Michael Jackson undid all that in one brilliant dance. In his Motown 25 “Billie Jean” performance, he took the deformed stance of Jim Crow – even the white glove, too-short pants, and white socks of blackface ridicule – and made them glamorous. People were simply knocked out by that performance, by how elegant it was and how beautiful Michael Jackson was performing it. He completely inverted the meaning of that whole performance tradition, from something for White audiences to scorn to something they might aspire to. I’ve read so many accounts where young White dancers talk about how inspired they were by that performance, how they practiced for hours trying to perfect the moonwalk so they could be like Michael Jackson. I mean, it’s simply astonishing what he accomplished that night.
Harriet: It really is. It’s such a pivotal dance!
Willa: It’s like he washed away a hundred years of blackface derision and contempt and returned those forms back to their original meanings of “life and energy,” as you explained, Harriet.
Harriet: Yes! And as such, it could be argued Michael Jackson ushered in a whole new generation of blackface minstrelsy and one that turned the tradition on its head! By this, I mean the “Michaelmania” craze you talk about, Willa, was a new form of Black impersonation that caught the nation’s imagination – it spread like wildfire in schools, on the street, and in dance studios and became a huge cultural export for America. But this time, it wasn’t about the White ridicule of Black people, the White appropriation of Black dance, or the marginalization and non-credit of real Black talent, but about honest wonderment and real Black ownership! Here was a real Black body that was seemingly incompatible with the White world in a whole different way to that original blackface form – no longer bent over all awkward and stiff but agile, fluid, dynamic, other-worldly.
In this sense, on that night alone at Motown 25 – in fact, in the very first pose he struck – I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say Michael Jackson upturned history and the whole premise upon which show business had been built.
Willa: Amen! That is such an important act of reclamation, but I never recognized it for what it was until I read your book.
Lisha: I think this “act of reclamation” is strongly evidenced by the viewer response to the performance. Again from Thriller 40, music journalist Steven Ivory talked about being in the audience for the Motown 25 performance and he finds it hard to convey what really happened that night:
The tape that you can see of “Billie Jean” and the stuff you see going on in the audience? It does not capture what was happening in that crowd! These people were going absolutely berserk.… I mean, he just laid a bomb on that room.… After Mike finished, the producer had to get on the microphone and say “ladies and gentlemen, please, please! Gather yourselves and take your seats! We have more show to tape! There’s much more show coming!” And it took a minute.…
Harriet: And as Wesley Morris of The New York Times has reminisced of watching the performance unfold at home: “I can remember just sitting there in just absolute awe. You could feel it as you watched it. This man was changing everything.”
Willa: Absolutely! You can just picture kids across America trying to duplicate his dance moves, especially the moonwalk. A number of people have said that Motown 25 was like Michael Jackson’s coronation – the day his peers and others truly saw his talent. But Harriet, I feel like I never understood what that moment really meant until I read your book.…
Lisha: I feel the same way! And I can’t help relating the Motown 25 performance to another iconic Michael Jackson dance routine, the panther dance coda in the 1991 Black or White short film. It seems to me we are revisiting a lot of the same imagery there. Am I on the right track with that? The spotlight comes out of nowhere. The hat. By 1991, the glove is reserved only for the “Billie Jean” routine, so instead of a glove we see a white arm brace and medical tape on the fingers in its place: symbols of injury.
Willa: Oh, that’s interesting, Lisha.
Harriet: Yes, totally on the right track! So I see the panther dance from Black or White as another powerful example of how Michael Jackson challenged blackface minstrelsy and its legacy. Just like in “Billie Jean,” he opens the panther dance with a version of the “zigzag” pose as if to frame what is to come in the context of minstrelsy. He does this in such a way it can’t be missed.
Willa: Yes, though I have a feeling I’ve missed it a lot in the past! It just went right past me. But I agree – that zigzag pose is really striking once you learn to see it. In fact, in your book you call this opening pose “the figure of the seminal minstrel caricature Jim Crow.” And you go on to say that “Crow haunts the panther dance’s choreography.” So does this reference to minstrelsy function the same way here in the panther dance as it does in his Motown 25 “Billie Jean” performance?
Harriet: In the panther dance, I believe Michael Jackson opts to respond not so much to blackface minstrelsy in show business per se as to its legacy in the “real” world, on the street, which is where this dance takes place. As we note above, the dance starts with that very pose that we’re now familiar with, as if that is our framing reference. Interestingly, as Lisha mentions, it appears in a spotlight – a convention of the stage, not the street – and I see that as a way Michael Jackson connects the two. It’s almost like he is inviting us to see mass entertainment for what it has historically been and where it has taken us in real life today. As Michael Jackson once described it, this was a dance in which he “let out [his] frustration about injustice and prejudice and racism and bigotry.” For context, Black or White was released just months following the case of Rodney King.
The dance is all angular movements, stiff and postured – these are the continued hauntings of Jim Crow, or of blackface minstrelsy, that you’ve just noted, Willa. But in this dance, and in Michael Jackson’s expression of frustration, he opts to introduce some rather more unusual aspects in terms of choreography – specifically, insistent sexual gestures and outbursts of violence. In this regard, it’s a bold character portrayal – he is animalistic (he’s a panther, of course), he is overtly and inherently sexual, and he has a violent streak. This is so striking because in this portrayal he is dramatizing a pretty crude version of a contemporary Black male stereotype. Crucially, this is the stereotype writer and cultural critic Ralph Ellison has connected to the Black “bestial rapist” figure that had a defining role in early Hollywood film and that grew out of the worst aspects of minstrel caricature.
Lisha: And as you talk about in your book, Harriet, the world wasn’t quite ready for this angry, glass-smashing, sexually explicit Michael Jackson, judging from the over-the-top negative reaction to it. But complaints about the violent/sexual content never made a lot of sense given that the routine was actually pretty tame by the entertainment standards of the day.
So it fascinates me that he began this whole segment, unleashing all this new and provocative content, by holding that minstrel pose, so similar to how he began “Billie Jean.”
Harriet: Yes, Lisha. And while the two dances go on to be very different, what they have in common is how Michael Jackson takes aspects of minstrelsy’s legacy and then repurposes them. In the panther dance, he takes the most classic iconography of minstrelsy – or of Jim Crow, minstrelsy’s figurehead – and then goes on to conjure an image of a contemporary Black male stereotype, rooted in that very tradition. He uses these images to help us connect them and ultimately for the expression of his own anguish and rage towards where they’ve brought us, which is, in his own words, towards “prejudice and racism and bigotry.” So he is reclaiming this lineage of fantastical imagery and in such a way as to turn it against itself.
Lisha: As an artist he is exposing what lurks beneath all these show business traditions and the resulting negative stereotypes that affect us here in the real world, as you say. Something that I keep coming back to over and over again as I read your work is that the study of music and popular culture isn’t just for those of us with an interest in music and art. It really is about culture and society and our daily lives. Everyone needs to know how this works!
Harriet: They really do. And I can’t think of a better example than Michael Jackson in that regard.
Lisha: I can’t either, Harriet. There is so much to learn. And perhaps the most radical thing about Michael Jackson in relation to culture and society, and this dance in particular, we haven’t mentioned yet at all. In this very moment, Michael Jackson appears to have completely altered the color of his skin, from Black to White.
Harriet: Yes!
Lisha: I mean, think about it. The very thing that defines the cruelty of American slavery – that skin color was once considered a permanent, fixed trait that determined one’s position in society as either human or animal, free or enslaved – has now been utterly obliterated. The construct of fixity that underlies the entire system has been exposed, not just by singing “it don’t matter if you’re Black or White,” but by literally standing in front of us visually demonstrating that his skin color is neither fixed nor a basis for determining one’s social position or worth.
Harriet: And as such, he’s inverted the whole blackface tradition, which was built upon that very ideology! It’s perhaps the most powerful aspect of the panther dance, a dance in which he is challenging our ideas about stereotypes and where they’ve taken us.
Willa: It is such a powerful statement! After all, if individuals can change racial signifiers at will, then using race as an indicator of inherent status becomes meaningless – or rather, it’s revealed to be as meaningless as it’s always been. You summarized that so well, Lisha. I think it’s going to take decades of work for theorists to unpack the enormity of what Jackson accomplished with this one revolutionary work of art.
Harriet: It really is. It seems he revealed race for what it really is, and that’s not something that can be determined by skin color or other physical characteristics, to which character traits can be attached. Rather, it’s about experiences and sensibilities determined by the social construct of race.
Willa: Exactly! That’s what makes it such a paradigm-shifting work of art. But as you note in your book, critics denied the power of this revolutionary work by framing it as evidence of something pathological in Jackson’s character – namely, hatred of himself and his race. However, as you point out, Harriet, “the story of racial betrayal went against everything we knew already about Jackson up to that point in terms of his relationship with his heritage and his political stance.”
As you show so well, his art points toward other, more complicated interpretations of his changing appearance. As you go on to discuss in your book, the “medical circumstances” of vitiligo and lupus were very real, but that isn’t the end of the story:
Jackson as an artist had seemingly been given a unique opportunity to extend his art to the surface of his body, an opportunity I would argue he grasped to enable him to make his most profound and spectacular statement ever.
I was so excited when I read this! I think it’s going to take critics and theorists a long, long time to measure the full, far-reaching impact of this one work of art.
Lisha: I agree completely. So speaking of how “critics denied the power of this revolutionary work by framing it as evidence of something pathological in Jackson’s character,” anyone up for a discussion of Michael Jackson’s Ghosts?
Harriet: Count me in!
Willa: Great! See you both next week!
Posted on June 13, 2024, in Michael Jackson and tagged Billie Jean, Black or White, Harriet Manning, Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask, blackface minstrelsy, Motown 25, Michael Jackaon, panther dance, Wacko Jacko. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.
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