Fluent Essays

You will write a response (650 words) to each performance you attend for class. These are similar to the reading responses, but have a focused performance that you must analyze using course concepts. Using the ideas and concepts we have talked about in the course, you will discuss the role of your object or site within the context of contemporary popular music culture. Don’t write a simple summary or review of the performance. While these aspects may be included, the primary goal of the paper is to analyze and critically engage the performance using course theories and concepts. One performance should be something you would regularly see over the course of the semester and the other performance should be outside of your comfort zone, or something you wouldn’t go to were you not in this class. You should see at least one of the performances with at least one other person from this class. You are expected to use relevant concepts up to the day you turn in your response. You should not recreate your analysis from your reading responses. While some of what you say in those may be relevant, the analysis should be new and push your understanding further. Thus, you should try to use new concepts that you have not engaged yet. https://youtu.be/fHcSNQJfwVE Notes, and sources from class to apply to the essay. The video link is the live performance that I will be examining for the paper. I am black male, that listens to a variety amount of music. My favorite type of musics are R&B, Hip Hop, and Rap. (Notes on me). 9'������" �>���� ����� ��?����� ��� �' ������#��?�'� ��� ���+�55===3��� ?������3��"5������5:�'����2�?��"�����@:�'������ �A�+" �� 8�(� � ��0���BC��<�� ��!���������������������+���D���E 8 �����4�F��'��!����6%�;����,��. ���� ���� ��� ���������� �������������������������� �����!��"� �����#���� �$�%�� &���$����''((()� ��*�� ���)��%' ��'��% !� +, �-��.� �������$��&/����%0� ���1�� ����2 3��� ����2� ���4 ����5� � ,$�� �6��$ �� �� .��������$� � ���� ������� � ����� ����������������������������������� !"#���� $�������%�& '������%��� �(��!��)� �%�*�+'�����' ����� � �����!%�,-���%�./����%�012� ��3��4�5�,��//663����37,.4,� .�� ��7�����$� � ���� �������+�55 83 ��3���5��3��4�5�,��//663����37,.4,� *'#�� �� ������������9�#�����3 '#"���!�'���������������� �:�'����� ;�������<��= ����.7 $��=������� �������� � �������������� ����$��=��������������� � http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rpms20 http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpms20 http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/03007766.2011.539831 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.539831 http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rpms20&page=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rpms20&page=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/03007766.2011.539831 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/03007766.2011.539831 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/03007766.2011.539831#tabModule http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/03007766.2011.539831#tabModule “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”: Symbolic Violence, Education, and Kanye West Chris Richardson In 2004, Kanye West burst onto the music scene with The College Dropout. His follow- ups, Late Registration (2005) and Graduation (2007), continued to advance a theme critical of institutional education and the broader social distinctions it produces. By examining West’s critique of higher education, this paper demonstrates how Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, defined as the ability to impose meanings while concealing their underlying power relations, is a valuable tool for analyzing discourses in hip hop and for moving beyond the hype about crime and physical violence that pervades popular debates. Introduction In 1982, The New York Times announced that Grand Master Flash’s “The Message” was “blasting out of radios and portable cassette players on the subways and in the streets all over the city, but especially in predominantly black neighborhoods” (Palmer C4). And it was “angry” (C4). This article was one of the first in a major American newspaper describing a popular new style of music called “rap”.1 Within the next few years, The New York Times published dozens of articles linking the music to criminality and youth violence. Headlines included “Fights Follow a Film on Rap Music” (May B1), “7 Youth Injured in Concert Fights; Roving Groups Flow through Midtown after ‘Rap’ Music Show” (Kerr 23), and “18 Are Arrested after Rap Concert” (no author B3). By 1985, the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC), founded by a number of politically well-connected women, including the wives of two US senators, called for these “offensive” rap records not to be sold to young people and to carry warning labels (Binder; Chastagner). By the 1990s, moral panics linking hip hop to violence and aggression exploded in the popular news media. Much of the literature on hip hop has been an attempt to come to terms with this notoriety. In 1994, Tricia Rose addressed the media’s fixation on rap and violence, suggesting that “the way rap and rap-related violence are discussed in the popular media is fundamentally linked to the larger social discourse on spatial control of black people” (Black Noise 125). More than a decade later, Rose remains caught up in this ISSN 0300-7766 (print)/ISSN 1740-1712 (online) q 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/03007766.2011.539831 Popular Music and Society Vol. 34, No. 1, February 2011, pp. 97–112 D ow nl oa de d by [U ni ve rs ity N or th C ar ol in a - C ha pe l H ill ] a t 2 3: 19 0 8 Ja nu ar y 20 16 debate, dedicating an entire chapter of Hip Hop Wars to deconstructing the ongoing argument that “hip hop causes violence” (33–60). She writes that “not only are the larger nonblack cultural reasons for these violent themes ignored but, worse, the reasons are attributed to black people themselves” (ibid. 53). Other critics argue that record labels are “selling Black violence, misogyny, and sexuality to a white teenage audience” (Asante Jr. 114) and assert that such violence is symptomatic of a more central notion of “American democracy and cultural self-expression” (Dyson, Know What I Mean? 93). Whatever one’s political leanings, there is no shortage of studies linking hip hop and its fans to violent behavior (see Chen et al.; Kelley; Mahiri and Conner; Squires et al.). While “gangsta rap” entered the popular vocabulary in the 1980s, artists such as 2Pac, Eazy-E, and Ice Cube reveled in tales of guns, gangs, and prostitution and, as these artists have passed away or become more family friendly (Ice Cube recently starred in the child-centered comedies Are We There Yet? (2005) and Are We Done Yet? (2007)), many younger artists seem eager to replace them. By now everyone has heard NWA’s “Fuck tha Police” (1988) and Body Count’s “Cop Killer” (1992) as well as the myriad arguments suggesting these songs either perpetuate physical violence or reflect its ubiquity in America. Focusing on this particular element of hip hop, however, largely overshadows another form of violence that the culture has been documenting from the start—a symbolic violence that conceals and subjugates the practical knowledges and experiences of young, predominantly black Americans living in neighborhoods where drugs, poverty, and crime are pervasive. The concept of symbolic violence, which Bourdieu and Passeron define as a power “to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force” (4), is a valuable tool for examining how certain experiences continue to be silenced or ignored while issues of crime and violence pervade the discussions surrounding hip hop. Building on Weber’s description of politics as a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (78), Bourdieu and Passeron argue that modern society requires “the transmission of power and privileges to take, more than in any other society, the indirect paths of academic consecration” (xxi). This movement from a direct physical violence to a more subtle one prevents “pedagogic violence from manifesting itself as the social violence it objectively is” (ibid.).2 This force works on a largely symbolic level by imposing dominant ways of seeing and acting in the world that become universalized. This paper focuses on the work of Kanye West as a popular and revealing example of how symbolic violence can be negotiated within hip-hop culture. As West’s “big brother” Jay-Z points out “the folks from the suburbs and the private schools so concerned with putting warning labels on [hip-hop] records missed the point” (x). He argues that the realities of poverty, racism, and violence that hip hop addresses are symptoms of a broader social arrangement—not the causes. “People can act like rappers spread these things, but that is not true” (xi). West presents one of the more nuanced approaches to this issue by espousing certain dominant worldviews while also questioning the symbolic violence they perpetuate. Although a number of other 98 C. Richardson D ow nl oa de d by [U ni ve rs ity N or th C ar ol in a - C ha pe l H ill ] a t 2 3: 19 0 8 Ja nu ar y 20 16 Christopher Dahlie artists are pursuing more overt political discourses—Dead Prez, Immortal Technique, KRS-One, Lauryn Hill, Lupe Fiasco—West’s popularity and commercial success have left him generally free of the “conscious rapper” moniker that has condemned these artists to mainstream obscurity, allowing West to explore self-reflexively the misrecognition these dominant worldviews can foster while presenting his insights to a broad audience. To explore this side of West’s work, I first examine how he challenges the idea of the universal subject by placing his own unique point of view at the center of his music videos and the discourses within them. I then examine the imagery of school and the education system through which West articulates his experiences as an “outcast on the inside” (Bourdieu, “Outcasts” 421). I conclude by examining the message of hope and inspiration with which West infuses his songs through sampling older artists and using key musical and political figures from the past as reference points from which future generations can gain insights. Ultimately, I argue that West presents one of the most powerful critiques of symbolic violence in hip hop through these acts, which illuminate many of the underlying social problems that can lead to the physical violence emphasized in popular debates. Identification: “Seen through Yves Saint Laurent Glasses” In 2004, West earned celebrity status with his video for “All Falls Down.” Although he had made music videos for “Through the Wire” (2004) and “Slow Jamz” (2004), it was director Chris Milk’s stunning visuals that helped West capture the attention of the MTVand BET crowds.3 The video is cut as a series of point-of-view shots in which the viewer literally sees what West sees as he arrives at an airport and escorts his girlfriend, played by Stacey Dash, to her departure terminal. Even when a young boy spills mustard on West’s shirt and he steps into a washroom to clean himself, one sees the reflection of West’s face in the mirror, placing the viewer in West’s shoes as he raps about insecurity, college, and money problems. The dominance of this perspective in the video is a significant shift for audiences, who, as rapper Nas points out, can sometimes be more “comfortable watching a black man on a surveillance camera” (154). In fact, the only time the camera breaks from West’s point-of-view is when he is forced through a baggage X-ray machine by security guards (one then sees a skeleton rapping in the monitor as he slides along the conveyor belt). By moving away from the particular filmic convention of treating the camera as an omnipresent, universal viewpoint, the video for “All Falls Down” works to subvert the idea of a single, dominant perspective that is often naturalized in popular films and television programs. Bourdieu writes that “the ‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education” (Distinction 3). How viewers learn to see and identify with television and film personalities is usually from the eyes of a dominant culture, which presents a “legitimate” worldview that coincides with the outlook of middle- to upper-class, white, heterosexual males (see Hall, “The Spectacle”; hooks, Black Looks; Mercer). Though not all viewers will necessarily identify with West as they watch the video, this disjunction between the point-of-view shots and the “natural” way of seeing the world Popular Music and Society 99 D ow nl oa de d by [U ni ve rs ity N or th C ar ol in a - C ha pe l H ill ] a t 2 3: 19 0 8 Ja nu ar y 20 16 Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie through the white male gaze represents a symbolic shift in power. Even when he is turned away at security and X-rayed, the viewer, after having walked the length of the airport in West’s shoes, is likely to identify with West and feel belittled and dehumanized by this act of surveillance, rather than identifying with the white security guard who represents the “legitimate” authority figure. It is important, therefore, that the primacy of this worldview is called into question as West takes control of the camera in his first major music video, setting a precedent for others to come. While the visuals in All Falls Down refocus the object/subject of identification, West’s lyrical performance adds to the critique of dominant ways of seeing. As Bourdieu notes, the words and gestures one uses to describe the world greatly affect how one sees it. “The capacity to see (voir) is a function of knowledge (savoir),” he writes, adding that the concepts “available to name visible things . . . are, as it were, programs for perception” (Bourdieu, Distinction 2). When West pronounces words like “secure”—which sounds like “skur” in the song—he not only emphasizes an alternative dialect but highlights a different way of seeing the world. This program for perception is an exaggeration of the black vernacular likely to be found on street corners of certain Chicago communities but definitely not in university campuses or mainstream media. By presenting these alternative ways of speaking about the world West demonstrates that alternative views of the world are produced not only through the eyes but also through the ears. In the video, he raps: Now, tell me that ain’t [email protected] [insecure]. The concept of school seems so [email protected] [secure]. Sophomore three [email protected] [years] ain’t picked a [email protected] [career]. West’s emphasis on a different pronunciation of these words, whether made in jest or seriously, draws attention to the arbitrariness of the “legitimate” language. This is not to say that all utterances ought to be considered equal—Bourdieu even argues against slang, suggesting that it works to perpetuate symbolic violence by leading “stigmatized groups to claim the stigma as a sign of their identity” (In Other Words 155). The importance of this example rests not in the question of whether West presents a valid alternative to the dominant language but in challenging the primacy of academic discourses as the “natural” or only ways of communicating. West later raps “I can’t even pronounce nothing—yo pass that ver-say-she [Versace].” This break with the Queen’s English not only comments on the barriers between the “high” culture of designer fashion and the “low” culture of “the ghetto,” it also critiques how hierarchies are constructed through distinctions in the objects and discourses that define the social world. In the foreword to his mother’s memoirs, West recounts a time when he asked her whether the things he said were proper. Her response was that “[i]f you’re in a room full of people and everyone is speaking Ebonics and you break out with the Queen’s English, super proper, then even if you’re speaking so-called correct English, you’re not correct” (x). West writes that he “remembered that when I wrote my songs” (x). Thus, the pronunciations West emphasizes in his performances force 100 C. Richardson D ow nl oa de d by [U ni ve rs ity N or th C ar ol in a - C ha pe l H ill ] a t 2 3: 19 0 8 Ja nu ar y 20 16 listeners to think about the “proper” language that ought to be in its place as well as to whom that language belongs. As West raps in another song, “They say I talk with so much emphasis, Oooh they so sen-sa-tive” (“Can’t Tell Me Nothing” 2007). Through this kind of word play, West draws attention to different ways of seeing and speaking and presents an alternative view to which audiences can relate. Identification is an important factor in much of West’s world. In a Rolling Stone profile, Touré draws attention to a larger-than-life poster of himself that West hangs on a wall in his loft. The journalist interprets this decoration as evidence of “a certain arrogance” (52) and it would be difficult to refute this claim considering West’s braggadocio musical persona. But the poster, I would argue, may point to something more—to a lack of role models with whom West could identify and to whom he could turn for support while growing up. West tells the journalist “I put me on the wall because I was the only person that had me on the wall at that time” (Touré 52). More than arrogance, this simple act illustrates how many young black students continue to enter schools and other social institutions only to be presented with European men who have become exemplars of the disciplines they study.4 As Cornel West argues, young people like Kanye West come from a history of “white-supremacist assaults on black intelligence, ability, beauty and character” that have required “persistent black efforts to hold self-doubt, self-contempt and even self-hatred at bay” (“The New Cultural” 128). He suggests that “we haven’t reached a point where we’ve convinced enough young black brothers and sisters that to engage in philosophical discourse in academic spaces is desirable, attractive, appealing or just hip or cool” (“On My Intellectual” 25). Cornel West attributes this problem to the image of the scholar whose work can be “clever, sharp and good at drawing distinctions, but who doesn’t really relate it to history, struggle [and] engagement with suffering” (“On My Intellectual” 25). Kanye West’s critique of the education system can be read as a similar, if much more dramatic, iteration of this argument. Pedagogic Violence: “School Spirit, Motherfucker!” From Boogie Down Production’s “Edutainment” (1990) to Dead Prez’s “They Schools” (2000) to Jay-Z’s “So Ambitious” (2009), hip-hop artists have been documenting struggles in the education system for decades. In songs like these, rappers use school and its imagery to talk about the ways dominant worldviews are imposed as universal truths that exclude their own experiences and practices. Kanye West, more than any other artist, has been taking up this critique of America’s education system and presenting it to a large and diverse fan base. His first album, The College Dropout (2004), featured half a dozen skits about nasty faculty members and out-of-touch students. A year later, he released Late Registration (2005), with an equal number of skits, this time featuring the fraternity “Broke Phi Broke” and lines like “Now I’m in the shop class or the basket weavin’ with all the rest of the motherfuckers underachievin’” (“Late” 2005). In 2007, he released his most successful album to date, Graduation, in which he announces “I guess this is my dissertation, homie” (“Good Popular Music and Society 101 D ow nl oa de d by [U ni ve rs ity N or th C ar ol in a - C ha pe l H ill ] a t 2 3: 19 0 8 Ja nu ar y 20 16 Christopher Dahlie Morning”).5 Despite some obvious differences, Bourdieu and West share a common concern relating to the way the education system can reproduce social hierarchies based on pretenses of equality and universality.6 Bourdieu writes that he was always interested in challenging institutional power, especially “the institution of the university and all the violence, imposture and sanctified stupidity that it conceals” (In Other Words 4). This goes beyond what Bourdieu calls “academic anti-academicism” (Pascalian Meditations 28), in which academics earn a certain amount of cultural capital by posturing as if they were against the system in which they take part. Rather, Bourdieu argues that his work represents an attempt to step away from the taken-for-granted position of many academics that “implies more or less triumphant ignorance . . . of the economic and social conditions that make it possible” (Pascalian Meditations 15). Similarly, Kanye West is one of the most outspoken critics of academe in the music industry, spitting lines like “Look at the valedictorian . . . complacent career student. Some people graduate but be still stupid” (“Good Morning” 2007). West’s critique of higher learning often overshadows the fact that he did attend university. He took English and music classes for a few years before he became “the college dropout” that music fans know. This brief encounter with post-secondary education, and the fact that he grew up in an academic household where his mother was an English professor, could explain why education is a central theme in West’s work. As Rolling Stone has suggested, West may be “the most successful college dropout since Bill Gates” (Touré 52). Other magazines have argued that West is the first hip-hop artist successfully to incorporate a “Buppi” (black yuppie) sensibility into hip hop since the rise of gangsta rap in the 90s (Tyrangiel, “Why You Can’t Ignore” 34). This claim points to a dramatic shift in the discourse of hip hop in the 21st century. Tyrangiel notes that, while early artists like LL Cool J and A Tribe Called Quest managed to weave “suburban perspectives into rebellious music” (ibid. 34), gangsta rap stripped mainstream hip hop down to sex, crime, and violence. “When gangsta rap arrived, nuance was smothered by a blanket of extreme poses,” Tyrangiel writes, reminding readers that Tupac Shakur had THUG LIFE inked across his chest when he died. The idea of a successful rapper from a middle-class family who wrote rhymes about pink polos, the suburbs, and college degrees was unimaginable in the 1990s. With The College Dropout (2004), West discovered a formula that bridged the divide between middle-class sensibilities and ghettocentric rap without alienating audiences on either side. In fact, some critics have suggested that West presents a Du Boisian double-consciousness in which he confronts many of the contradictions in black America (Ciccariello-Maher; Kitterman). Like Du Bois, who writes that double consciousness is “a sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (364), West recognizes that a university degree is necessary for attaining status and the hope of a well-paying career but is also a way for the dominant culture to judge others and legitimate social hierarchies and segregation. As Kitterman argues, 102 C. Richardson D ow nl oa de d by [U ni ve rs ity N or th C ar ol in a - C ha pe l H ill ] a t 2 3: 19 0 8 Ja nu ar y 20 16 Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie “West has been called the Barack Obama of hip-hop, a golden boy whose mixture of soulful beats and social consciousness appeals to middle-class young people but has street credibility too” (B5). West’s ability to bridge these social spheres, Kitterman argues, demonstrates how “the College Dropout” can teach both young listeners and college professors a thing or two. Perhaps this ability to reach multiple audiences can be attributed to West’s mother, Donda West, who was an English professor at Chicago State University. Before her death in 2007, she wrote Raising Kanye: Life Lessons from the Mother of a Hip-Hop Superstar, in which she recalls “I had that black, middle-class ethic that said you must go to school, do very well, and get at least one degree” (West and Hunter 104). But after her son dropped out, she supported his choice. With Kanye West’s success in the music industry, Donda West joined a circle of academic hip-hop moms that includes Dr Brenda Greene, mother of Talibe Kweli, and Dr Mahalia Hines, mother of Common. The not-so-concealed secret that a number of rappers have been raised by university professors provokes a couple of questions: How has West’s experience as the son of two academics—his father Ray West taught photography and media production—affected his views on the education system? And can West be put into the same category as rappers like 2Pac or Nas who left the education system in their early teens? West was not pre-emptively weeded out of the education system like many hip-hop artists, particularly those from low-income areas where few people attend post- secondary institutions.7 However, the fact that West had access to higher education and was expected to earn a degree did not make the symbolic violence that can occur in university any less traumatic. Instead, West entered the “ivory tower” for a short time only to feel like what Bourdieu calls an “outcast … The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work !"#$%& &'()*' JUDITH HAMER A, professor of perfor- mance studies at Texas A&M University, College Station, is the author of Parlor Ponds: The Cultural Work of the American Home Aquarium, 1850–1970 (U of Michi- gan P, 2012) and Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference, and Connection in the Global City (Palgrave, 2007). Her current research examines intersections of performance and American deindus- trialization, with particular attention to Michael Jackson. Neverland could never have happened without Gary [Indiana]. —Denise Jordan Walker, tour guide (qtd. in Rousseau) Automatic, Systematic / Full of color, self- contained / Tuned and gentle to your vibe —+e Jackson 5 (“Dancing Machine”)  B Y ANY OBJECTIVE CRITERION, MICHAEL JACKSON IS THE CLOSEST thing to a consensual virtuoso performer that late- twentieth- century popular culture produced. Sales ,gures, fans’ a-ective investments, the acclaim of virtuosic peers, the foundational contri- butions and innovations for which he is credited—all attest to his command of the central paradox intrinsic to virtuosity: the ability to appear path- breakingly original in a way that is collectively obvious. Further, if all virtuosity can be described as “precarious excellence,” Jackson’s was more precarious than most: veering spectacularly from an inde,nably pleasurable surplus (more talented, more charismatic, more “something” than his brothers) to equally inde,nable and un- toward excesses (too many strange stunts, too many surgeries and antics with boys, too much of too much).. +e narrative arc of his virtuosity was always already entangled in multiple overlapping narratives of di-erence, including raced and gendered histories of American popular performance, the possibilities and limits of the mutable self, the bedrock or millstone of family, the pleasures and perils of spectacle, and the permissions and constraints of celebrity. +ese narratives have been picked apart in the popular press and, to a lesser degree, in the academy, while another issue remains largely unexamined: the relationship between Jackson’s virtuosity and the / 0 1 . 2 ] [ © 0 3/ 0 45 % & ) (6#)* 7 8 ' 79"'9) ' : :6 ;$ '% $67 6< ' ( )* $; ' ] 1=/ Christopher Dahlie changing political economy of American work. Scholars have commented on Jack- son’s discom!ting ability to straddle multiple binaries: man/ woman, gay/ straight, black/ white, child/ man.2 Yet one underlying binary remains unremarked except, as the !rst epi- graph indicates, by those in his hometown: that of Gary/ Neverland—the seeming !xity of industrialization versus the neither- here- nor- there #uidity of neoliberal globalization or, in broader terms, Zygmunt Bauman’s “solid” versus “liquid modernity” (6–8). Jack- son’s virtuosity cannot be understood apart from these conditions. Jackson’s virtuosity as a dancer at the height of his career reveals a neglected as- pect of virtuosity in dance more generally: its highly allegorical, nostalgic activation of imagined, idealized relationships between the body and work abandoned by the relentless motility of capital, allowing audiences to view these vanishing modes with a romantic, back- ward glance. Some dance techniques generate this nostalgia by mystifying these relation- ships. Ballet soloists, for example, beckon spectators with the phantasmic possibility of artisanal ownership of one’s own labor through e$orts so exceptional and so sublime they transcend even gravity. Jackson’s vir- tuosity does not work in this way, though it does include its own speci!c appeal to tran- scendence, about which I say more below. His particular virtuosity triggers nostalgia for a vanishing industrial past in ways best under- stood through the trope of the human mo- tor, while only barely containing the multiple contradictions and exclusions endemic to the industrial modernist project, especially those around race. %is trope is set in motion by the intersection of his movement vocabulary and key elements in the narrative construction of his celebrity, especially as these appear in his autobiography, Moonwalk (1988). Under- standing Jackson’s virtuosity as the performa- tive activation of industrial nostalgia allows us to make sense of some puzzling critical responses to his dancing and o$ers new in- sights into relationships between dance and work in the last half of the twentieth century. This essay examines selected perfor- mances from 1983 to 1988, the height of Jack- son’s dance career—the short !lms (the term he preferred to video) Thriller and Smooth Criminal and his performance on the tele- vised anniversary celebration Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever—as well as the autobiography, which serves as the rhetori- cal underpinning of his virtuoso narrative. I begin by discussing the key factors that po- sitioned Jackson as a potent cultural actor during this period: the relational economy of virtuosity leading to a$ective investment in the exceptional performer, the allegorical potential of dance to illuminate other forms of labor, and the complex intersections of race, performance, and industrial modernity that pre!gured him and persist in his reper- toire. From a theoretical and historical back- ground, I turn to analyses of Jackson’s dances and movement vocabulary. Virtuous and Virtuosic Work Dancing is work: a job, the product of labor. It is also allegorical: a “mix of making and reading” regimes of work “combined in one” (Fletcher 10). %is dual status makes dancers significant, if largely unrecognized, rhetori- cal actors in public imaginings of bodies and work. Bodies in motion offer visible, potent templates for imagining ways work is produced and consumed. Virtuoso performers illumi- nate these dynamics with special intensity. Three aspects of virtuoso performance contribute to its critical slipperiness. First, its de!nitional precision is inversely propor- tional to its seeming self- evidence. Audiences know it when they see it, and what they see challenges referentiality while inviting a veri- table mash- up of metaphors. Virtuosos are “angels,” “devils,” “heroes,” “monsters,” “ma- gicians,” and “machines,” sometimes all at  The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work [ P M L A Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie once.3 As these images suggest, virtuosos are human, but not quite: they are something else, something more than the sum of their merely human parts, and de"nitions strain to cap- ture both the performer’s humanity and this peculiar excess. #e term virtuoso migrated from Romantic classical concert music. Criti- cal histories of virtuosity o$en begin with the violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), whose performances enraptured audiences and led peers to proclaim themselves “already dead,” so great was the perceived gulf between his talent and their own (Brandstetter 178). David Palmer uses Paganini as the paradigm case for de"ning virtuosity as “the art of incredible skill which displays a heightened sense of self- expression, evokes a distinctive a%ecting pres- ence and transforms ways of viewing human agency” (345), to which Brandstetter, also us- ing Paganini, adds the exceptional “charisma” projected by the performer (178).4 Second, de"nitions of virtuosity are most effectively operationalized in comparisons with nonvirtuosos. Jackson’s performance with his brothers as the reunited Jackson 5 at the televised celebration of Motown’s twenty- "$h anniversary is illustrative. Jackson sang “Billy Jean” and introduced the moonwalk at this concert, but his solo e%ort was preceded by the group’s rendition of Jackson 5 hits. Michael is clearly the front man, though the medley features shared choreography. Many of his moves seem almost throwaway—time- keeping or rhythmic punctuation—but are executed with a precision and vehemence rendered more compelling and eye- catching against the comparative docility and root- edness of his brothers. He inserts rapid- "re corkscrew kicks and effortless close- legged spins almost gratuitously. The casualness with which the spins are tossed off belies their tightness and smoothness: he looks as if he is on ice while his brothers are weighted down. In line formations, he is visibly more taut and, simultaneously, very loose- jointed. His hip thrusts are sharper, his dimestops (complete pauses, usually transitions between moves) more abrupt, and his crouches with turned- in knees so extreme they are almost grotesque. Yet these moves resolve so quickly into other steps that the group choreography seems utterly staid by comparison, and this underscores Michael’s virtuosity even fur- ther. His dancing is so superior to his broth- ers’ that he seems to physically enact the group’s inability to contain him (Jackson 5, “Motown Medley”). Finally, though virtuosity presents itself as a quality of exceptional individuals, it is a relational economy—relational in more ways than in one performer’s surpassing of an ac- companying ensemble. It does not operate apart from communally sanctioned ideals of appropriate, even virtuous, display, and this is the source of the virtuoso’s power as an allegorical cultural actor. “Knowing it when seeing it” is recognition of the preexist- ing consensual template for reading the per- former’s seemingly effortless effort and the audience’s affective responses, conjured by the performance. #is template binds the au- dience to the performer, inviting attachment, identi"cation, and desire across some dimen- sions of di%erence—for example, gender and race—while performatively reinforcing oth- ers, which are then coded as “talent” or “ge- nius.” Simply put, virtuosity is a recognizable plot into which audiences set an exception- ally skilled, charismatic performer. It orga- nizes their own attachments and longings by projecting these onto, then enabling them to consume, others’ bodies on stage. Virtuosity alerts audiences to the noteworthy aspects of such bodies (both virtuous work and the transcendence of it) and to “appropriate” feelings about them (identification as well as alienation). Virtuosos incarnate “plots of possibility” for audiences—seeming mastery of one’s own labor and the a%ective surplus it generates—even while demonstrating the au- diences’ inability to activate these plots them- selves. #ey are objects of both attraction and 1 2 7 . 4 ] Judith Hamera  Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie anxiety simultaneously: reassuring and dis- turbing (Hamera 42). In the public sphere, their successful performances pull together a!ect and e"cient work so that these appear to coalesce naturally into ideologically potent plots of virtuous, visible labor and its equally virtuous consumption. Virtuosity as a relational economy is par- ticularly complex in popular performance, in which communal ideals of virtuous labor cir- culate within frames of reference more elas- tic than classical concert music and dance. Consider the case of the saxophonist Kenny G., who, the musicologist Rob Walser asserts, “is in fact a virtuoso of a particular kind. His intonation is #awless, even on the treacher- ous alto sax. He plays #urries of notes with tremendous technical precision. He controls his instruments perfectly, doing with them exactly what he wants to. He plays ornaments on his ornaments, with nuances on his nu- ances” (34). Yet, despite his popularity, Kenny G. is also reviled, particularly by jazz a$cio- nados, who seem to delight in imagining his demise. For these detractors, Kenny G. is not virtuous enough. He violates jazz norms of “finding music” through “struggle” (36). %e jazz virtuoso should be more hero than magician, more devil than angel. Walser ar- gues that “violent reactions to [his] music . . . surely betray a widespread cultural discom- fort with, even contempt for, sensitivity” (37). This virtuoso reassures too easily and too well: Kenny G.’s perceived excessive emotion- alism is too much, while his e!ortless e!ort is not enough. He is too problematic an object for identi$cation, at least for one potential fan base, to earn his virtuosity. As a dancer, Michael Jackson demon- strates the exceptional sk ill, self- evident, almost fantastic agency, charisma, and tran- scendence of nonvirtuosic peers common to all virtuosos. Yet his dancing is too o'en dismissed, in part because it falls between the conventions of popular and concert dance that de$ne virtuous work in performance. Virtu- osity in concert dance is most obvious at the ends of a continuum of labor visibility: battles with technique that are clearly battles and po- sition the artist as hero, as in athletic butoh, or those in which the technique is so over- matched by the performer that it looks easy, as in ballet or tap, which positions the artist to be read as angel, magician, or machine. In popular dance, virtuosity is most recogniz- able in athletic, spectacular, “di"cult” moves that are, at the same time, strongly narrative and highly emotional. Jackson’s virtuosity is subtler and more complex. He combines ex- ceptional musicality, precise execution, and a repertoire that draws from so many genres it is best described as “polycorporeal” with re- curring invocations of hard work belied by the apparent e!ortlessness of his performances. Conventional virtuoso dancers make visibly difficult moves look easy; Jackson takes de- ceptively simple steps and complicates them in performance. His virtuosity is a function of his execution of these moves, not any inherent complexity of the moves themselves. Critics of his dancing o'en miss the vir- tuosity of his execution—the actual work he does in performance—defaulting instead to presumptions about originality and spectacu- lar di"culty putatively intrinsic to particular steps. For example, in an otherwise laudatory essay Joan Acocella obser ves that Jackson “didn’t have a lot of moves. You can almost count them on your fingers. . . . He created very little dancing that was different from his own prior numbers, or anyone else’s.” She concludes that in his short $lms “dance is ter- tiary, even quaternary. . . . Jackson didn’t value his dancing enough” (77). Likewise, Peggy Phelan describes him as a “captivating (albeit relatively narrow) dancer,” while noting his “two- step, the double gesture of appropriating and transforming” other artists’ moves (944). But to fully grasp the complexity of Jackson’s virtuosity and its allegorical relationship to the changing nature of American work, it is important to read the speci$c dynamics of his  The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work [ P M L A Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie performances, as well as to probe the precise point where “narrowness” and polycorporeal appropriations meet in performance. Jack son’s movement vocabu la r y was relatively small, though his repertoire be- came richer and more complex over the pe- riod considered here. !e moves in !riller (1983) and in his performance of “Billy Jean” at the Motown twenty- "#h- anniversary con- cert (1983) are simpler than those in Smooth Criminal (1988), one reason the "rst two are more frequently reproduced by fans. Taken together, these three performances represent the range of his dancing at the height of his career. He makes extensive use of his knees, especially Charleston- informed moves from turned in to turned out, as well as isolations, quick corkscrew kicks, closed- leg spins, pelvic thrusts, toe stands, variations on the electric slide, and standing struts. He pops and locks his joints, juxtaposing these against seem- ingly weightless glides. He also makes ex- tensive use of “the robot” and variants, and of the dimestop. !ese elements are not dif- "cult in and of themselves. Indeed, in Smooth Criminal, they are reproduced, albeit not nearly as well, by one of the children spying on Jackson in the "lm’s nightclub setting. His virtuosity comes from the interrelationship of his musicality and the sharpness of his at- tack. Jackson seemed proud of this dimension of his performance style, underscoring the point by invoking Fred Astaire, who report- edly called him “a hell of a mover” (qtd. in Jackson, Moonwalk 213). As Margo Je$erson aptly observed, Jack- son’s moves, particularly his quick changes of weight, are both “liquid and percussive” (87). He is able to forcefully insert half and quar- ter steps while visibly working within, not against, the music. He is also extraordinarily clean, even while extremely fast. His lean line emphasizes that every strut and kick is sharp and fully stretched, completed to the tips of his toes. In rapid- "re combinations, his pre- cision, especially his articulate management of his joints and his feet, makes him readily discernible from others in the ensembles he leads or in crowd scenes when neither his face nor his costume is fully visible. He also dis- plays an impressive ability to clearly present contrasting moves in the same choreographic phrase. Thriller is an interesting case in point. In an early scene, when he and Ola Ray skip from the theater toward their eventual zombie encounter, Jackson’s liquid, almost weightless skips make his sti$- armed zom- bie walks seconds later seem so extreme and, therefore, so playful. His dance with his zom- bie chorines begins with isolations on beat, then switches to quick pelvic g yrations: a simple physical passage that is challenging to execute with the requisite sharpness, as dem- onstrated by hundreds of Jackson’s %ash- mob imitators. A few of his moves, like his forward lean and hyperspin in Smooth Criminal, were enabled by special e$ects. But these e$ects- assisted moves differ from the rest only in degree, not in quality: a bit more extreme, but exhibiting the same intricate coupling of grace and vehement precision that character- izes Jackson’s dance in this period. Romantic constructions of virtuosity ob- scure the mechanics of creative production: hence the mystifications of the performing “angel” or “magician.” In contrast, Jackson routinely exposed the very labors that vir- tuosic dance—and his particular percus- sive liquidity—generally conceal, disrupting conventional visual equations of economy of input yielding spectacular output. E&ciency and precision in performance are always de- scribed as work. Jackson insisted on narrat- ing the labor involved, even in rare moments when he “let the dance create itself,” as he did when he choreographed the moonwalk for his performance of “Billie Jean” on Motown 25 (Moonwalk 210). Yet even here, as if to em- phasize that no dance really creates itself, he also highlighted his efforts as a choreogra- pher for the same show in ensemble numbers with his brothers that he “choreographed and 1 2 7 . 4 ] Judith Hamera  Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie rehearsed . . . for days” (208). Jackson never colluded in the rhetorical consignment of his virtuosity to the ephemerality of talent; it was always produced through repetitive hard work. Most important, he did not im- provise in performance; he consistently de- ployed the vocabulary of choreography and rehearsal as a way of establishing the labor pedigree of his dances. In so doing, Jackson exposed the unseen work of virtuoso perfor- mance—the labors that defined him by, in his view, erasing his childhood—and aggres- sively intervened in the stereotype of African Americans as “natural” dancers. He writes, “Black people are truly innovative dancers; they create many of the new dances pure and simple” (210). "e agency articulated in the terms “innovative” and “create” challenges racist dismissal of African American dancers as mere imitators of European culture just as Jackson’s adult invocations of hard work fore- close a priori attribution of his abilities to ei- ther “genes” or “genius” (Gottschild 110). On the rare occasions when he presents himself as a uniquely gi#ed dancer, it is not as a cho- reographer, nor as an instinctual artist, but rather as a quick study (Moonwalk 136). In addition to his physical facility and discipline, Jackson’s virtuosity is inextricably linked to place and race: the socioeconomic landscapes from which it emerged or, as the popular mythos has it, the places from and to which he “escaped.” He was a child of the American industrial heartland, born in the steel- mill town of Gary, Indiana, and molded in the self- consciously Fordist studios of Detroit’s Hitsville, U.S.A.: Motown. His re- peated references to his childhood as a non- stop regimen of rehearsals and performances lay the narrative groundwork authorizing his virtuosity as something other than talent, charisma, or luck. This was not simply the dancer’s pleasure of practice, though Jackson does write about his love of performing. Even so, from a very young age, he argues, he was another working sti$ who did not and could not control his own labor. In Moonwalk he writes, “I was reminded of that old song by Clarence Carter called ‘Patches,’ where the oldest son is asked to take care of the farm a#er his father dies and his mother tells him she’s depending on him. Well, we weren’t sharecroppers and I wasn’t the oldest, but those were slim shoulders on which to place such burdens” (150). Jackson’s repeated refer- ences to the burdens of his childhood and the image of the sharecropper, albeit disavowed, underscore the black body’s very speci%c and intimate relationship to oppressive regimes of work. Jayna Brown notes that this relation- ship was embodied by a much earlier genera- tion of black child performers crossing the country, and the ocean, over a century before Jackson took the stage with new versions of some of their moves.5 For Jackson this was a matter very close to home. Michael Jackson was the driven son of a driven father. Joseph Jackson, Michael’s fa- ther, was a crane operator for U.S. Steel and an R & B guitarist. In Moonwalk, he seems much more of a shi# boss. Both father’s and son’s escapes from alienating regimes of work required strict adherence to more of the same: slowly building capital through “overtime” re- hearsals and performances, the equivalent of second and third shi#s to re%ne routines with Taylorist precision.6 Reference to the share- cropper aside, Jackson’s family was itself a site of industrial (re)production: a factory turning out professional entertainers. In Michael’s ac- count, Joseph’s demands for productivity in this arrangement unrelentingly trumped the unstructured pleasures of childhood. In this regard, the Jackson family dynamic resonates powerfully with Robin D. G. Kelley’s obser- vations about the e$ects of racist, exploitative labor practices in black working- class fami- lies. He writes that these families were sites for internal con(icts as well as key institutions for sustaining a sense of commu- nity and solidarity. If patriarchal families are,  The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work [ P M L A Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie at the very least, a system by which exploited male wage earners control and exploit the la- bor of women and children, then one would presumably !nd a material basis for a good dea l of intrafamily conf lict, and perhaps an array of resistance strategies, all framed within an ideology that justi!es the subordi- nate status of women and children. (36) "e trope of the family as locus of production was repeated when Jackson and his brothers signed with Motown, whose corporate dy- namic operated through a rhetorical sleight of hand that shifted between business and family, most notably in the uncanny ability of Berry Gordy, the company’s founder, to oper- ate as pater familias and factory boss. Gordy had in fact worked at the Ford Wayne Assem- bly Plant and spoke explicitly about the assem- bly line as Motown’s production model (Smith 14). "is same tropic intertwining of family and factory circulated through the vernacu- lar of American industrial modernity: union members were “brothers” and a corporation like General Motors was a “generous mother.” "e trope also recalls other sites where black bodies, the family, and (re) production as work were intimately linked, including the “family” of a plantation, where, as Hortense Spillers writes, “fathers could and did sell their sons and daughters” (qtd. in Brown, Babylon Girls 24), and troupes of black performers that were literal families (e.g., the Whitman Sisters) or metaphorical ones. Jackson’s virtuosity is inextricably tied to working- class credentials forged through both his own labors and those of his father. He observed, “A part of my earliest memories is my father’s job working in the steel mill. It was tough, mind- numbing work and he played music for escape” (Moonwalk 8). In underscoring his class background, Jackson made members of the working class gener- ally, and the black working class in particu- lar, visible as creative cultural actors in the hegemonic American public sphere. This was in itself a meaningful intervention, as the normative working body of American in- dustrialization was presumptively white and heteronormatively male. Jackson would not trouble the latter attribute until later in his career, but his insistence on recognition of his labor pedigree challenged typical representa- tions of black life as bimodal (elites versus the multigenerational poor), even as it challenged virtuosity as magically produced (Pitts 99). It also performatively refuted the “sneering ref- erences” to black workers as lazy that “typi- !ed the manner in which whites could still use Blacks as a counterpoint to come to terms with their own acceptance of steady and even regimented labor” (Roedinger 180). In his own “escape” from Gary to Nev- erla nd, Jack son seemed to incarnate t he promise of Fordist labor, one rendered retro- spectively simpler, more desirable, and more egalitarian by the emerging economic disloca- tions of deindustrialization. He could parlay the discipline and sweat equity of the mill and the assembly line into virtuosic class mobil- ity. Of course there are multiple ironies here. First, as noted above, he could embody a ge- neric American industrial imaginary that in fact consolidated itself through the exclusion and exploitation of black workers. Second, his father’s insistence on f lawless execution and his own perfectionism positioned Jack- son within what Paolo Virno calls “servile virtuosity,” a de!ning mode of post- Fordism characterized by, among other things, the imperative to be excellent all the time as the only bulwark against one’s own dispensability (196).7 Finally, Jackson could only embody a longing for this vanishing industrial past be- cause he so completely escaped it. From the 1970s through the period covered here, he was the Horatio Alger of the moment at which industrialization’s putative promises were morphing into something else: something seemingly more precarious, more Darwinian. Indeed, the entire arc of Jackson’s career par- allels the dismantling of this very industrial infrastructure; both accelerated in the 1980s. 1 2 7 . 4 ] Judith Hamera  Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Relocated to “Neverland” in California, later in his career and in a period not covered in this essay, he could no longer embody both the virtuous results of industrial discipline and escape from it. Instead, he seemingly … Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Christopher Dahlie Slide 1 Slide 2 Slide 3 Slide 4 Slide 5 Slide 6 Slide 7 Slide 8 Slide 9