November 30, 2017: 80s AlbumStudying: Thriller and Dualities

[November 30^th marks the 35^th anniversary of the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, one of the most popular and influential 1980s albums (as well as albums period). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such albums, including Jackson’s and other greats from the decade. I’d love your AlbumStudying thoughts, on these or any others, in comments!]

On three ways that Michael Jackson’s seminal album combined both ends of a spectrum to achieve maximum audience engagement and success.

1)      Old and New: By 1982 Jackson himself was a music industry veteran at the age of 24, having begun recording with the Jackson 5 in 1964 (at the age of 6!) and having launched a solo career as early as 1971 with the single “Got to Be There” (part of his debut solo album the following year). For Thriller he enlisted a number of other even more seasoned entertainers and artists, from Paul McCartney (whose duet with Michael, “The Girl is Mine,” was the album’s first single) to horror legend Vincent Price (whose narration in “Thriller” remains one of the most distinctive and signature moments in all of pop music). Yet at the same time, singles like “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” (among others) offered a strikingly new sound, one that built on disco and dance but also connected to some of the earliest strains of hip hop and rap. To put it succinctly, Thriller both reminded audiences of nostalgic favorites and pushed them toward new musical horizons, and that combination comprised a significant element in its mega-success.

2)      Aural and Visual: All those aspects of the album’s sound—or rather its combination of sounds, often within individual songs but certainly across the nine total tracks (seven of which were released as singles, with all reaching the Billboard Top 10)—helped make it an irresistible mega-hit. But Jackson was also tuned in as early as any artist to the new possibilities offered by MTV (just over a year old at the time) and music videos, and used the form to striking success with a number of Thriller’s biggest hits. And he did so in a trio of interestingly distinct ways: the story video for “Beat It” mirrors the song’s lyrics quite closely; the epic mini-movie for “Thriller” likewise does so at times, but also extends and expands the song into an entirely new form; while the video for “Billie Jean” becomes something wholly different, focusing on Jackson’s dancing skills in a captivating performance largely unrelated to the song. Taken together, those three videos epitomize most everything that the genre could include, and pushed the album even further into the stratosphere.

3)      Safe and Risky: One of the dangers of historical topics—which are, of course, the majority of topics I feature in this space—is that they can seem inevitable and obvious in retrospect; that, to coin a phrase, hindsight is 20-20. Which is to say, given the album’s record-breaking sales and success, all of Jackson’s choices on Thriller can seem geared toward such achievements, and thus perhaps safe or mainstream. But for every such choice (like, say, a lead-single duet with one of the most acclaimed songwriters and pop musicians of all time), there are others that were unquestionably risky in their moment (using a rock and roll guitarist in the middle of a pop/dance song? Featuring a solid minute of Vincent Price speaking and laughing evilly in another song, and then making a 14-minute movie that also features an extended zombie dance sequence?). That the latter choices now feel inevitable or safe isn’t just an effect of time, of course—it’s also a testament to how well they succeeded, to the rewards that came from those risks (and I think it’s telling that the riskier choices and songs have endured far more fully than that duet with McCartney). If future artists could learn anything from Jackson’s towering success, I’d say that duality is a particularly strong lesson to take away.

Last AlbumStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other ‘80s albums you’d highlight and analyze?

November 29, 2017: 80s AlbumStudying: Building the Perfect Beast and Political Pop

[November 30^th marks the 35^th anniversary of the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, one of the most popular and influential 1980s albums. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such albums, including Jackson’s and other greats from the decade. I’d love your AlbumStudying thoughts, on these or any others, in comments!]

On three different ways a classic pop album can also offer political statements.

At nearly the exact midpoint of Don Henley’s Building the Perfect Beast (1984), sixth and seventh out of the album’s eleven total tracks, are two songs that offer overt political and social critiques of 1980s America. Track six is the title song (seemingly not available on YouTube, sorry!), an epic, semi-allegorical commentary (not dissimilar to “Hotel California”) on the gap between America’s ideals and where the nation seems to have arrived in the mid-1980s. And track seven is “All She Wants to Do is Dance,” an irresistible dance track (duh) that doubles as a scathing depiction of ugly Americans (both individual and foreign-policy-related) behaving badly in Central America. Like the title track of Henley’s next album, The End of the Innocence (1989; also not on YouTube!), these are well-crafted pop songs that at the same time offer particularly overt and important criticisms of both the Reagan Administration specifically and American society and culture in the decade more broadly, and by themselves would be more than enough to make Building the Perfect Beast a strikingly political pop album.

They’re not by themselves, though, and Building features other, more subtle and perhaps more interesting political pop songs as well. One follows directly after “Dance” on the cassette and CD versions (although interestingly not on the LP, perhaps because it was recorded a bit later than the rest of the album): “A Month of Sundays” (also not on YouTube—Henley might be committed to keeping his music off the site), a quiet ballad narrated in the first-person by an aging farmer. Released a year before John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Rain on the Scarecrow” (1985), Henley’s song is thus more ground-breaking than it might seem, and at least has to be paired with Mellencamp’s song (and whole Scarecrow album) as part of these mid-1980s cultural engagements with farming communities and lives (a trend that would also produce 1985’s first Farm Aid concert, which featured both Henley and Mellencamp among many other artists). And I would argue that Henley’s first-person speaker is created with a bit more intimacy and subtlety than Mellencamp’s in “Scarecrow,” particularly in the song’s mysterious and moving closing lines: “And I sit here on the backporch in the twilight/And I hear the crickets hum/And I sit and watch the lighting in the distance/But the showers never come/And I sit here listen to the wind blow/And I sit here and rub my hands/And I sit here and listen to the clock strike/And I wonder when I'll see my companion again.”

The album’s other political pop songs don’t really seem political at all, but offer important social commentaries nonetheless. I wrote about one of them in this June 2016 post: the wonderful opening song “The Boys of Summer,” and its multi-layered and even contradictory visions of nostalgia’s dangers and appeals. “Boys” has a corollary in “The Sunset Grill,” a song that frames the album’s conclusion and offers an even more complicated image of the relationship between the past and the present in 1980s America. On the one hand, “Sunset” uses a semi-mythic (or at least idealized) vision of the past to critique the present, with lines like “These days a man makes you something/And you never see his face.” But at the same time, the song ends with playful lines that both imagine a possible future and embrace the flawed but wonderful present: “Maybe we’ll leave come springtime/Meanwhile, have another beer/What would we do without all these jerks anyway?/Besides, all our friends are here.” That closing, especially when coupled with the next and final song “Land of the Living” (chorus: “I wanna stay in the land of the living/I wanna stay here with you”), offers an optimistic counterpoint and coda to some of the album’s darker or more critical visions—and that’s a pretty important political purpose for pop music as well!

Next AlbumStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other ‘80s albums you’d highlight and analyze?

November 28, 2017: 80s AlbumStudying: Public Enemy, N.W.A, and Protest Rap

[November 30^th marks the 35^th anniversary of the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, one of the most popular and influential 1980s albums. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such albums, including Jackson’s and other greats from the decade. I’d love your AlbumStudying thoughts, on these or any others, in comments!]

On the two protest albums that probably changed rap—and definitely changed America.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on rap—not that I would claim to be an expert on most of the topics about which I write here (John Sayles and Bruce Springsteen, maybe, but not most of them), but I am particularly less-well-informed when it comes to the multi-decade history and evolution of rap. When someone who grew up on the genre, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, writes about it, it quickly becomes clear to me how many of the artists who were influential to him are barely (if at all) familiar to me, and how uniquely unqualified I thus would be to judge which artists or records have been the most significant in rap history. But on the other hand, one of the genres with which I’m most familiar is American political and protest music—the more my Springsteen tastes started to include his most explicitly political albums and songs (like most of The Ghost of Tom Joad, an album that I hated on first listen and have come to love), the more I both delved back into artists like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Tom Waits and came to appreciate contemporary ones like Rage Against the Machine and Ani DiFranco. And so I feel entirely qualified to assert that Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) is one of the greatest political and protest albums in American history.

Although I was too young to recognize it at the time, 1988 seems to have been the single most important year in rap’s transition from an underground, fully counter-culture genre to a dominant force in popular music—the Beastie Boys had started the shift a year or two earlier, but ’88 saw the release of both Public Enemy’s album (their second, but the first had been Def Jam Records’ worst-selling album of all time, so it was this second that really broke them) and N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton. While there are certainly points of connection and overlap between the two albums, their central voices and styles are hugely distinct, and can perhaps be captured in their two best-selling singles (which I use side by side in my Intro to American Studies course on the 1980s): N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police,” an intentionally extreme, vulgar, and violent response to police brutality and profiling; and Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype,” a sophisticated and media-savvy response to critics’ and mainstream musical outlets’ stereotyping of the group. I think there is most definitely a place and role for both songs in our understanding of (among other things) South Central Los Angeles, life for young African American men, and race in the 1980s, but it is unquestionably easier to fixate on the extremes in N.W.A. and thus miss the serious and social questions behind them; whereas Public Enemy’s song, like their entire album, forces us to engage seriously and meaningfully with its central themes and perspectives.

Which doesn’t mean it isn’t fun. The real genius of Nation of Millions, what puts it in the same conversation with works like “This Land is Your Land,” “The Hurricane,” and “Born in the U.S.A.,” is that it weds tremendous popular appeal with cutting political critiques and radical messages; it’s got a beat and you can dance to it, but while you’re doing so your perspective and understanding of American identities and communities, present and past, are being significantly impacted and (at least for someone not a product of inner-city Los Angeles; or, to put it more exactly, at least for me) significantly altered. Political protest music doesn’t have to feel pedantic (I’m looking at you, Neil Young’s “Southern Man”) or explicitly divisive (ditto, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”); it can instead unite its listeners across any and all categories and identities, bringing audiences together and to their feet and then hitting them in their collective consciousness. In the final verse of “Don’t Believe the Hype,” Chuck D raps that he and the group will “rock the hard jams, treat it like a seminar/Teach the bourgeoisie, and rock the boulevard,” and that’s exactly the balance that the whole album achieves.

If working with college students day in and day out for the last decade and a half has taught me anything, it’s how centrally important music is to their lives and identities and perspectives; pop culture in general has a big influence, of course, but while I have some students for whom that means movies and some for whom it’s TV, some who are all about various websites and some who read a ton of science fiction (to cite only four of the many pursuits and obsessions I encounter), I would say that music is hugely significant for pretty much every one of them. And that makes it especially important than American Studies scholarship pay particular attention to an album like Nation of Millions, a best-selling work of popular music that managed to engage, with sophistication and humor and intelligence, with some of our nation’s most pressing and complex questions. Next AlbumStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other ‘80s albums you’d highlight and analyze?