It’s been nearly a month since Michael Jackson died and amazingly it’s taken nearly this long for me to really understand what we’ve lost and how I feel about it. When Jackson’s Thriller came out in 1982 [corrected, thanks Noel] I was a youngster pretty much fresh out of high school. The music of the eighties was the music of my generation and Jackson competed with other artists of the time such as Prince, Cameo, Terrance Trent D’Arby, and George Clinton. There were also jazz, rock and blues artists taking up my attention such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Police, Miles Davis and George Benson.

While I enjoyed the dancing and singing that Mike introduced to the MTV generation, I was way more into artists such as Prince who were more instrument oriented. I was also extremely turned off as Micheal started to bleach his skin and point his nose, which I saw as a rejection of his blackness. As he became stranger and stranger I stopped paying much attention to him, after all, I’d been listening to MJ since the early 70s…yawn.

But you never miss anything until it’s gone.

I sat down the other day and watched one of Jackson’s concert films and it blew me away. By the late 80’s Michael Jackson had taken what he started with the Thriller videos and perfected his routine into an unbelievable display of skill, talent, and originality. Having reexamined his music and performances over the last couple of weeks I have a much greater appreciation of how MJ fits into pantheon of African American performing artists. I see now that Mike was just as much a student of African American dance as Prince was a student of African American musical performance. Jackson was the latest link in an evolutionary chain of incredible African American cultural expression. A link that started way back with Chicken George and continues to this day.

While the mainstream media, in it’s usual myopic way, pretends that Michael came out of nowhere to entertain America with his totally new and original performance styles, the video history that follows should go a long way in putting Mike in his proper place, not only as the “King of Pop”, but as the “Godson of Soul”, the “Prince of R&B” and a “Clone of Dr. Funkenstein”.

This first clip shows entertainers from the 30s and 40s including Cab Calloway, Bill Robinson, and Sammy Davis Jr. You’ll notice a guy doing a version of the moonwalk along with other moves similar to what we’ve seen Jackson and other modern dancers do.

Clip two is of the great Jackie Wilson, smooth as silk on the dance floor, and one of Michael’s admitted influences. He was no less amazing to his audiences than Michael was to his.

These next two clips are of the Godfather of Soul himself, James Brown, who held the title of “the hardest working man in show business (Michael was a close second)”. One thing to notice is the use of the mic and mic stand. early performers like Brown were limited by the fact that their microphones were static. Modern performers like Jackson had the advantage of wireless mics, and now just plain headphones. Tech played a part in allowing Jackson to advance the craft.

Here, Brown demonstrates some common dance steps that he uses in his act just as MJ used common black dances such as popping and locking.

The last clip focuses on Jeffrey Daniels influence on MJ. Daniels was part of the late 70s/early 80s singing group Shalamar. He also apparently helped choreograph some of MJ’s videos. To me he appears to be doing standard body popping though maybe some of those moves were his own. One things for sure, we already saw some guys doing it in the first clip, it probably just evolved.

Related posts:

1. Did Michael Jackson Invent the Moonwalk?
2. Did Michael Jackson Invent the Moonwalk?