![]() Detaching itself, it gets lost in free flight. It's not warm or sensual or "black" but sharp, a squeezing of the throat's aperture, a voice of pure technique. It's a voice which starts into every split spare second, stretching like rubber, filling cracks like water. "AH DEE DADA DADA DADA DUNKA DUNKA DEE DADA DUNKA. "BE THEY AAARE!HICK! CAN YER FEEEL EEEEAAART! YIP!" Going up two octaves: "HEEEAH HEE HEE HEE! HEEEAH HEE HEE!" Down again. So engrossed is he by himself that his own responses to his voice are incorporated into the performance. But for Michael, every breath, every laugh, every "hick!" is a link, a phrase, a segment of the flow. The audience goes predictably ape: reflex gratification. Breaking free of accompaniment with the playful virtuosity of a saxophonist, he winds up 'I'll Be There' with a series of piercingly sustained shrieks, cutting up each cry with a tiny ripple of chuckles. On the Jacksons Live album, there's an extraordinary half-minute between 'I'll Be There' and 'Rock With You' which perhaps conveys more of Michael Jackson than anything he's ever done. He can take the human voice as far out as Diamanda Galas. One is saying that up on the stage, deep in the dark womb of the studio, Michael's voice is a vehicle of fantasy, an instrument ceaselessly running circles round itself, tripping itself up, playing make-believe. When one says that Michael lives in fantasy, one is not just referring to the fact that he thought ET was a real living creature, or that his favourite movie is Captains Courageous (would you believe one of its characters is a fisherman called Disko Troop?), or that he confides more in his pet llama and his mannequin collection than he does in his own family. So when he starts saying things that sound completely mad, like "if I could, I would sleep onstage", he is simply stating a logical implication. Like Howard Hughes, he doesn't have a public relationship with fame but abstractly embodies it. Seemingly withdrawn from it, in fact it cocoons him. The response was simple: "You're not even close." The promoters of this year's US festival offered over $1 million. There's no-one who can command his fee, precious few who can pay it. He is, after all, the biggest star on earth. Sometimes I wonder how great Michael Jackson really is, and how much of his "magic" derives purely from the spell of fame. How does Michael cut so deep? Why does he do me that way? And it won't stop till you've got enough. You're carried, you can't escape, you're ripped by the voice's current. The drum machine's programmed for eternity like a piston, it goes on hissing and revolving, turning and driving, too high to get over, too low to get under. ![]() He's charging these words with the bitterest twists, bending and dragging them, winding vowels round his throat, spitting syllables like darts of poison. ![]() Michael Jackson is singing "you're a vegetable", only it sounds like "nashty boy" or "nashty girl". ![]() Thirteen years on and still I wanna be startin' something. It had all the power and determination of a miniature James Brown.Īnd it was all I neeeeeed(ed). In the treble register it was anarchy – frantic strings, rippling guitars, hi-hats, tambourines – but through it came this tiny tantrum, a kindergarten whirlwind, belting and swaggering out of swaddling clothes. Berry Gordy could call it soulbubblegum for all I cared, I hadn't heard such crazed music in my life. From the piano cascade into the crashing cymbal and guitar, through the bass tearing the bottom out of my speakers, I was literally thrown back from the turntable. Like John Lennon When he first heard the booming organ lead-in to 'Stop! In The Name Of Love', I couldn't believe how loud it was. ![]() It was when I bought 'I Want You Back' that the Motown sound first knocked me sideways. The cover version of Sly's 'Stand' said it all: "there's a midget standing tall, and the giant beside him about to fall." I was green with envy. I was too busy watching Michael jump around the stage while Jackie and Tito loomed over him like giants, their Afros apparently growing bigger by the minute. I loved the Jackson Five records but I never teenybopped to them. ![]()
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