The moment when Michael first sings, his voice caught between the fluid highs of his pre-teenage years and the confident falsetto that compensated for their loss in his adult career, is one that captures not only his personal dilemma, about which so much has been said, but also that of mainstream American culture more generally, with its promotion of an "adamant immaturity," as my friend Ron Alcalay so aptly put it, that would deny even grown-ups the feeling of being grown up. I don't think it's any accident that the liminal state that Michael Jackson sought to occupy in the temporal register had its corollary in his fixation on the color line. I have to give another shout out to Ron, here, who did a wonderful job of pondering the deeper implications of Jackson's famous video on the subject in an essay he wrote for Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life.
The Burden of Between
The moment when Michael first sings, his voice caught between the fluid highs of his pre-teenage years and the confident falsetto that compensated for their loss in his adult career, is one that captures not only his personal dilemma, about which so much has been said, but also that of mainstream American culture more generally, with its promotion of an "adamant immaturity," as my friend Ron Alcalay so aptly put it, that would deny even grown-ups the feeling of being grown up. I don't think it's any accident that the liminal state that Michael Jackson sought to occupy in the temporal register had its corollary in his fixation on the color line. I have to give another shout out to Ron, here, who did a wonderful job of pondering the deeper implications of Jackson's famous video on the subject in an essay he wrote for Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life.
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