In honor of Michael Jackson, we're raiding our archives. Below, Scott Poulson-Bryant's review of the Michael Jackson/Michael Jordan convergence that was the video for "Jam," first published in August, 1992.

Be Like Mike

You've been ruminating on Black Beauty. Not the horse, but the concept. Especially since you're about to jet off to L.A. for the fab beach party that everyone's told you about. And especially since music videos are again a part of your life. And especially because Michael Jackson has debuted a new clip that takes your blackboy breath away. But first a haircut.

In honor of Michael Jackson, we're raiding our archives. Below, Elvis Mitchell's review of Jackson's straight-to-DVD Moonwalker, published in May of 1989.

Psycho Shopper

I recently had a truly astonishing viewing experience, catching "Moonwalker," the Michael Jackson Fan Club photo album with moving pictures, on Showtime. (Or is it "Michael Jackson's Moonwalker"? After all, we don't want a phalanx of lawyers with sticky perms and sparkly socks delivering a sheaf of papers that will turn this column into a biweekly legal apology.) "Moonwalker" provoked a number of reactions in me. Sure, boredom was one. But "Moonwalker" is, essentially, the most expensive vanity project of all time. It mixes concert sequences, in which spectators scream and faint in several different languages, with what seems like an extended version of the "Smooth Criminal" music video and an extremely long Claymation film in which Jackson and his paranoia mount a motorcycle and are pursued by fans and the rest of the spiritually unwashed.

In honor of Michael Jackson, we're raiding our archives. Here's Robert Christgau's titanic 1984 piece on arena rock, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson and the complicated place where all three meet.

Working the Crowd

If you'd told me five years ago that I'd willingly spend the first weekend of August 1984 watching rock and roll in sports arenas, I'd have prayed for the souls of Strummer & Jones and wondered whether Debbie Harry would ever learn to dance. Such miracles seemed unlikely, but pop moves in mysterious ways: maybe "new wave" would breach the beachheads after all. And of course it has: if I'd so chosen, I could have gone to see the Pretenders at the Garden the following Tuesday. But instead I spent Tuesday's music time with General Public at the Ritz. Sensitive young people may find it tawdry, but Ritz still seems made to order for beachhead-breaching "new wavers." Arenas are for Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen.

In honor of Michael Jackson, we're raiding our archives. Here's Chuck Eddy on Michael Jackson's 1991 hated-on-mostly-but-still-plenty-epic Dangerous.

Sound of Breaking Glass

Hey, so how come nobody's compared the fucker to There's a Riot Goin' On?

Well, maybe Riot without the cocaine. Or okay, okay, Fresh then, with all the reversion to mere professionalism that implies. But I swear they're parallels: Sly warned us of "a mickey in the tastin' of disaster"; Mcihael's drawing back from a woman with "a mojo in her pocket." And then there's the unintelligibility, the Delta dirge tempos, the creaky abrasions tearing the music apart, the shapeless melodies, the disorienting changes (well, they disorient me, anyway). The whole defeated fugitive-turning-hermit mood of the thing (or at least the second half of the thing). Michael's obsessing on his "darkest hour and deepest despair," "the agony inside the dying head," confession and pain and anguish. Not to mention world hunger, illiteracy, AIDS, homelessness, gang violence, drug addiction, police brutality, and "streetwalkers walkin' into darkness."

In honor of Michael Jackson, we're raiding our archives. Here's Nelson George, reviewing a show Jackson and his brothers played at Madison Square Garden in 1984.

Chocolate Chips at the Ice Capades

Three years before the Jacksons' current magical mystery tour (the magic is Michael, the mystery where you can buy tickets), they rolled into Madison Square Garden with one of the best pop concerts since Earth, Wind & Fire at its mid-'70s peak. The boys rose out of the floor, backlit by blinding white lights that themselves rose up to hover above the stage; clips from the messianic The Triumph video and Ed Sullivan show heightened excitement; and a Doug Henning now-you-see-Michael-now-you-don't illusion during "Don't Stop ('Til You Get Enough)" boogied that dance classic right through the Garden roof. The Jacksons, in the midst of what was then their most lucrative national tour, were in peak form. Randy's rumbling piano intro to "Shake Your Body," Tito's (yes Tito's) re-creation of the jagged "Heartbreak Hotel" guitar solo, and Marlon and Jackie's capable if static harmonies were more than adequate. Michael was in exquisite voice: thrilling on "Can You Feel It," soap-opera sentimental on "She's Out of My Life" and "Ben," and just as smooth and gritty as he needed to be on "Heartbreak Hotel" and "Rock with Me." The Jackson boys did their usual pointing they-went-thataway steps. Even occasional hit-and-run mugging attacks couldn't undercut the positive feeling. The predominantly black teen and young adult crowd had grown up with Michael, and watching him stride so confidently across the stage, a young man no longer a boy, was an affirmation of our maturity. The Jacksons had been introduced by Motown as a great black family and despite some rough spots--Jermaine remained behind when the family skipped to Epic for big money--they had survived 10 years in the entertainment business, dignity intact. They were black royalty, sort of like the Kennedy kids except not fucked up.

In honor of Michael Jackson, we're raiding our archives. Here's Simon Frith's London dispatch--it ran in Frith's regular 'Brit Beat' column--on the bonkers media spectacle that broke out when Jackson came to town in 1988.

Wack Attack

"Pandemonium broke out in Soho, London, when a Michael Jackson look-alike was confronted by fans, bringing traffic to a standstill, a court heard yesterday. Ronnie Beharry of Peckham, South London, admitted behaviour constituting a disturbance of the peace, and was bound over for six months in the sum of 100 pounds by Bow Street magistrates."--(news item, July 26, 1988)

I was quite wrong about Michael Jackson. I thought his visit would be a matter of spectacular routine, a familiar star (familiar from a million hoardings, radio spots, and video clips) going through familiar paces (like Bruce Springsteen the week before) to familiar feelings of wonderment and awe.

In honor of Michael Jackson, we're raiding our archives. Here's Stanley Crouch, writing in response to twin hit pieces on Jackson (by Greg Tate and Guy Trebay) published in the Voice two months prior.

Man in the Mirror

Because Afro-Americans have presented challenges to one order or another almost as long as they have been here, fear and contempt have frequently influenced the way black behavior is assessed. The controversy over Michael Jackson is the most recent example, resulting in a good number of jokes, articles in this periodical and others, and even the barely articulate letter by the singer himself that was published in People. Jackson has inspired debate over his cosmetic decisions because the residue of the '60s black nationalism and the condescension of those who would pity or mock black Americans have met over the issue of his face, his skin tone, his hair.

In honor of Michael Jackson, we're raiding our archives. Here's Guy Trebay on the inscrutable and surgically air-brushed creature Jackson had become in 1987. It ran alongside a Greg Tate piece on the same subject.

There's no longer any question that Michael Jackson is America's preeminent geek. Even New Yorkers, who traditionally give a lot of latitude to the strange, can't seem to get over the inscrutable and surgically airbrushed creature Jackson's become. It appeared that, in the weeks following release of Bad and his primetime video, all you heard people talking about on radio, on the subways, and the streets was the sad gnome with the Porcelana complexion, the dated dance steps, and a terminal case of Jheri curl.

"I think Michael went too far in the white direction," said John Hightower, portaging his Peugeot to work last week on the subway. Hightower and some fellow bike messengers were wedged into the last car of the IRT #6.

In honor of Michael Jackson, we're raiding our archives. Here's Greg Tate on what's wrong with Michael Jackson in 1987. It ran side by side with a piece on the same topic by Guy Trebay.

I'm White!

There are other ways to read Michael Jackson's blanched skin and disfigured African features than as signs of black self-hatred become self-mutilation. Waxing fanciful, we can imagine the-boy-who-would-be-white a William Gibson-ish work of science fiction: harbinger of a transracial tomorrow where genetic deconstruction has become the norm and Narcissism wears the face of all human Desire. Musing empathetic, we may put the question, whom does Mikey want to be today? The Pied Piper, Peter Pan, Christopher Reeve, Skeletor, or Miss Diana Ross? Our Howard Hughes? Digging into our black nationalist bag, Jackson emerges a casualty of America's ongoing race war--another Negro gone mad because his mirror reports that his face does not conform to the Nordic ideal.

In honor of Michael Jackson, we're raiding our archives. Here's Vince Aletti on Jackson's Thriller in 1982.

E.T as Mr. Entertainment

Michael Jackson, who has been "touring, singing, dancing" since the age of five told Interview recently that he had only vague memories of growing up in Gary, Indiana: "little things like the corner store or certain people in the neighborhood. The high school behind us always had a big band with trumpets and trombones and drums coming down the street--I used to love that--like a parade. That's all I remember." When Andy Warhol asked him if he ever thought he'd grow up to be a singer, Michael said, "I don't ever remember not singing, so I never dreamed of singing." Instead, Michael says in this month's Ebony, he dreamed of flying, "and I still dream about it all the time." Not flying in a plane, of course, but flying like Superman or, more to the point, like E.T., who holds Jackson in a creaturely embrace on Ebony's cover. This tantalizing dream is one of the reasons Michael agreed to narrate the E.T. "storybook album," he says--that and his feeling that E.T.'s "story is the story of my life in many ways." Not many profound ways, it turns out. But he seems to be getting at something when, at the top of his list, he puts being in a "strange place" and wanting to be "accepted."