The other night I was in the grocery store, and I seemingly spontaneously remembered the mighty morphin’ models at the end of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video. And it cheered me up a surprising amount. While I like to think of myself as an intellectual, I suspect that I’m actually more like an infant who’s still struggling with object permanence, and who lights up whenever he sees the face of someone smiling and saying “Yeah yeah yeah.” I was giggling in the bagel aisle.
I’m struck by how The Youths probably can’t fully appreciate what a huge cultural touchstone that video was. Even in a world where Beyonce, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift all exist, it’s hard to imagine someone being so singularly, globally famous as Michael Jackson. He had the money and fame to do literally whatever he wanted, and he was just batshit enough to do it.
It felt as if everyone in the world was immediately familiar with that morphing sequence, and it’s still the part that I remember immediately. Watching the video again, I’d completely forgotten the whole Amblin-esque beginning, with its unnecessary flight through a suburban neighborhood model, culminating in Macaulay Culkin launching George Wendt across the planet with only the power of his electric guitar. I’d also remembered the rest of the video playing out on a sound stage, instead of having Jackson in the desert dancing with tons of Native Americans, many of whom were on horseback.
For that matter, I remembered a long sequence of Jackson in an alley smashing car windows with the power of a crowbar and his crotch-forward choreography, but had misremembered it as a completely different song. That version of the video was supposedly controversial at the time, but now it seems superfluous and more than a little bit silly, coming across like one of those Musicless Music Videos.1And I’d forgotten the most genuinely clever part of an otherwise extremely corny video: as director John Landis is talking to the last morphing dancer in front of a stock gray background on a sound stage, he can be overheard asking, “How did you do that?!”
Honestly, I’d been thinking that OK Go were pioneers in making ridiculously, excessively overwrought videos for catchy-but-let’s-be-honest-mostly-inoffensive-at-best pop songs, but this was a reminder that it goes way back to the early 1990s.
And while the morphing effect is still pretty solid even by 2023 standards, in my opinion, the thing that’s most effective about the whole video is simply the joy at the end. The smiles may be forced, but the sentiment’s not. I like that the most enduring image of the video is just a multicultural bunch of human beings being goofy and smiling at the camera. It kind of makes the rest seem unnecessary.
Which reminded me of “Overkill” by Colin Hay. Appropriately, the best versions of that song are the ones that remove the saxophone and the rest of the Men at Work, and just have an acoustic guitar and Hay’s amazing voice.