CHAPTER 3 – “EXACTLY WHICH MICHAEL JACKSON ARE WE TALKING ABOUT ANYWAY?” AGENCY AND IDENTITY IN BAD
Songs: “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “Speed Demon,” “Liberian Girl” The next three songs introduce the more specific normative constructs of gender, identity, and agency and go beyond troubling or disrupting them the way “Bad” did. They envision alternatives to hegemonic constructs and playfully experiment with different answers to questions such as these: What […]
CHAPTER 5 – DOUBLE ENTENDRE: THE MAN AND THE MEDIA
Songs: “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” “Dirty Diana,” “Leave Me Alone” Michael Jackson’s post-Bad career was very explicitly about redefining, questioning, subverting, and casting a critical eye on cultural assumptions (as Susan Fast documents in Dangerous). But he started these challenges on Bad. Hegemony has never been keen on admitting defeat, though, and the […]
CHAPTER 4 – “THERE IS NO DANGER” SANITIZING BAD AUTHORSHIP
Songs: “Just Good Friends,” “Man in the Mirror,” “Another Part of Me” (Captain EO) At the end of the last chapter, I hypothesized that hegemonic representations of Michael Jackson would generally aver their own authenticity in some way, while counter-hegemonic ones would disrupt any notion of fixity or permanence, even within themselves. This chapter explores […]
APPENDIX A: LIST OF SOURCES FOR SONGS AND VIDEOS
Sources for Songs and Videos: Songs: Jackson, Michael. Bad. Epic Records, 1987. CD. All songs used. Jackson, Michael and John Barnes. “We Are Here to Change the World.” Michael Jackson: The Ultimate Collection. MJJ Productions, 2004. CD. Videos: “Bad,” dir. Martin Scorsese. Part 1: Gentili, Kelly. “Michael Jackson Bad Part 1.” YouTube video. YouTube.com. 12 […]
CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION: LOCATING BAD’S PLACE IN POP CULTURE AND POP CULTURE’S PLACE IN SOCIETY
“I love to create magic—to put something together that’s so unusual, so unexpected that it blows people’s heads off. Something ahead of the times.” (Michael Jackson to Interview Magazine, October 1982). As you walk down the aisle at a record store, you spot a copy of Michael Jackson’s Bad. What strikes you about it? It […]
REFERENCES
Adorno, Theodor. “On Popular Music.” Storey Reader 73-84. Albrecht, Michael Mario. “Dead Man in the Mirror: The Performative Aspects of Michael Jackson’s Posthumous Body.” Journal of Popular Culture. 46.4 (2013): 705-724. Web. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Storey Reader 336-346. “Bad, adj., n.2, and adv.” Oxford English Dictionary. Web. 5 Nov. 2015. Barthes, […]
CHAPTER 2 – THE COUNTER-HEGEMONIC COMMODITY: A “BAD” SOLUTION TO THE HEGEMONY PROBLEM
Michael Jackson doesn’t fit neatly into the role of producer, since we consume not only the music he makes but also him and his performances. This signals that a more comprehensive model than the two presented in the introduction must be constructed to better understand the way he and his music affect cultural reproduction. Stuart […]
MJ Studies Today X
Abstract: In the October column, Kerry Hennigan talks about the role of advocacy as part of the Michael Jackson fan phenomenon. Column by Kerry Hennigan, editor of the monthly newsletter, A Candle for Michael, and administrator of the widely-subscribed Facebook group, Michael Jackson’s Short Film ‘Ghosts. REFERENCE AS: Hennigan, Kerry. “MJ Studies Today X (14-10-16).” […]