Michael
Jackson's GHOSTS
Music For & Of The Body
published in Real Time No.20, Sydney,
1997
In
the Straub/Huillet film MOSES AND AARON (1976) based on
Schoenberg's opera, a chorus of dancers perform a somewhat
gangly mock-ritual, culminating in their surging forward
to the camera, falling into an unseen heap beneath the bottom
of the frame. The music score continues, with the camera
holding on an empty frame of the Roman arena within which
much of the film's action occurs. Ruthlessly and rigourously
affixed to the dialectic of their transposition of the Schoenberg
text into film, Straub/Huillet's camera-blocking simply
falls dead to allow the prime text - the music - precedence
and presence. Many similar 'dead' moments recur through
the two and half hour film - that is, until one realizes
that the scene is far from 'dead'.
The
sound is live. While staring at the empty arena, we hear
a mass of invisible bodies panting and gasping from the
energy their bodies spent dancing. The moment is moist,
saline, pornographic. It is also a reminder of how, when
and where the sounds of the body are allowed to be rendered
- in this case, exemplified by their privileging of live,
continuous location sound recording.
Straub/Huillet
are representative of an approach to film sound which has
typified the bulk of European sound design for the last
30 years. The resulting aesthetic (in some cases, a politic
of form) shapes film soundtracks to indelibly fuse the actual
live sound of the on/off-screen action with the energy of
the recorded performance in its original spatial location.
Without resorting to vague, pseudo-mystical discourse, it
must be stated that the simulation of densely textured live
sound is extremely difficult to achieve in the post-production
environment. Debates still rage across the world today as
to the acceptable degree of naturalism and artificiality
in film sound. The French, in particular, seem very divided
about this still. Yet while they have tended mostly to reject
the Hollywood model of excessive post-production - which,
ironically, owes much to French musique concrete - they
nonetheless have given us rich models of how live sound
can be employed as a vast reservoir for the dimensional
irrigation of cinematic soundscapes (for example, in the
work of Jean Pierre-Melville, Jean Luc Godard, Margueritte
Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet).
That
sonic moment of exasperation in MOSES AND AARON rarely surfaces
in the cinema. It happens in pornography, naturally enough,
where any and all bodily audio-visuality can eroticize the
clumsy proceedings. It happens in loquacious, brutish films
by Sidney Lumet, Robert Aldrich, Arthur Penn, Robert Altman,
John Cassavettes and Abel Ferrara, where the throat, chest
and voice of actors are struck like drums to perform with
a heightened sono-physical presence. And it happens most
of all in the video clips of Michael Jackson. In THRILLER
(1983), the protracted dance sequence overflows with the
sound of bodies: gasping, spitting, heaving as their animated
corpses (and yes, that's all the screen body is no matter
how you dress it up) are energized by the music. The sound
of the body is always celebrated by Jackson - not only in
his self-multiplication and self-granulation into a myriad
of snap-crackle-and-vocal-pops for his songs, but also in
the overlaid sound effects for nearly all his video clips:
the foot stomping of THRILLER, the sexual humping of THE
WAY YOU MAKE ME FEEL (1986), the kung-fu chopping of BAD
(1987), the primal screaming of BLACK OR WHITE (1992).
GHOSTS
(1997) recently aired on national television with the pomp
and circumstance which accompany all Michael Jackson 'premieres'.
As the hype and special effects hoo-hah resides, I am reminded
of how little truly contemporary apparitions of radical
sound design exist in that oozing pool of audio-visual potential
we call the cinema. GHOSTS stands as a unashamedly freakish
pillar of bodily difference and sonic distinction. Like
the uncompromising work of Straub/Huillet, it ruptures the
dull felt blanket which muffles film sound, giving rise
to aural experiences and tactile imaginings.
But
before discussing the sound design of GHOSTS, let's be clear
about a few things to do with 'the cinema'. In its admittedly
strained attempt to 'be cinema', Michael Jackson's video
clips transcend cinema. They do not fall short in the pomo
pit of pathetic allusions of quotation and appropriation;
nor do they deconstruct/reconstruct historical film texts.
In an epoch of cinema held to ransom by 19th century music
and 18th century novels, Michael Jackson's pseudo-cinema
is more real than real. It pushes past experimentalism,
beyond acinema, and into a realm of reinvented cinema. Forget
the skin of the eye, its fetishized optics and attendant
photochemical grain. Listen to the colour of skin and the
grain of the body.
GHOSTS
opens with a surfeit of cinematic cliches typical of the
rock video vision, recreating the warm yet chilling world
of a spooky old movie on late night television. But instead
of a crackly old TV turning violins into buzzsaws, the orchestral
recording is scintillating, panoramic, majestic. Listening
to it in full stereo playback, one notices that this kind
of mix is rarely - if at all - allowed in film music mixes.
The spatialization is hyper-detailed: every instrument holds
its own focal point, creating a sense of ornate spatialization
that film convention would deem too distracting for a lumbering
narrative. The instruments dance across the stereo field
so much so that one experiences space more than sound. Such
an aesthetic is born from the recording and producing of
music, wherein music becomes sound in the act of recording.
In film sound, music - formally, aesthetically, technically
- is mostly regarded as an unmediated source, as if what
you hear is 'pure music'. This has historically dictated
that a blurred naturalism govern its presence and placement,
as if we are at the turn of the century sitting in front
of an orchestral pit of semi-muted live musicians in a dampened
theatre. GHOSTS creates a sharply defined spectral environment
of sound within which musicality is a by-product of its
incorporation in the soundtrack. Here - as beautifully claimed
by Japan's Pizzicato Five - music is organized by sound.
This
in itself would mark GHOSTS at the vanguard of film sound
- but there is more (most of which is beyond the scope of
this brief article). This 'spectral environment' is part
of a spatial narrative which unfolds as the video clip dovetails
sequences, numbers, set-pieces and effects into each other.
We start outside the ghostly mansion, with orchestral gestures
sonically flitting about us like animated cobwebs and flickering
shadows. A series of thunder cracks (the rupturing of the
ether sphere) and door slams (the transgression of architecture)
erupt from the soundtrack in complex figuration. Each event
is a monolithic event, ground-shaking, space-warping, shape-changing
phoneme, signalling an erotic transgression of forbidden
realms. Upon entering the mansion, the orchestral detailing
is swept up by a swirling network of shifting breaths. The
space is not simply 'live': it is alive, for we are now
inside the body of Michael Jackson. It is weird, it is strange,
and I like it.
GHOSTS
is a clear message about transgression. Michael Jackson
transgresses what we call 'race' and 'gender'; now we are
inside his world ("Whose the freak, now?"), and our homey,
hokey, uptight sensibilities transgress the ethereal, metamorphic
nature of his home turf. Michael Jackson's sense of his
own being - something which most of us will only ever ridicule
rather than understand its fundamental otherness - has consistently
determined the sounds and images of himself which he mysteriously
conjures forth and methodically sculpts. The ornate spatialization
of the orchestra thus aptly reflects what could conceivably
be the interior of his body. Inside, we are in a newly-defined
world of sound and vision. Things behave aurally in ways
unacceptable in our constricted world of sanctioned physical
form. Building upon his previous tactic of overlaying sound
effects, every move Michael Jackson makes - a point of the
finger, a twist of the neck, a dart of the eye - is marked
by a momentous sonic event. He conducts all that inhabit
his terrain; he performs by aurally animating that terrain
purely through his movement therein; and he generally unnaturalizes
the audio-visual make-up of his depicted world. As the dancers
(themselves signs of the rich and fetid roots that stem
back to New Orleans Jazz and the explosion of Afro-American
culture throughout the new land of America) move from earth-bound
steps to mid-air flights to Escher-like gravity-defying
movements, as their footsteps reverberate with a glorious
artificiality that confirms their post-bodily state.
Because
Michael Jackson is first and foremost a musician, his world
- like MOSES AND AARON's cinematic text - obeys musical
logic and aural form. (It is important to note that all
other forms of narratology are either irrelevant, inconsequential
or incidental, and no matter how many novels you read, a
literary perspective will render you illiterate in front
of this soundscape.) Listening to HISTORY (1995), one can
hear the excessive ornamentation that has consistently governed
Jackson's music, no matter whether he is working with Quincy
Jones, Baby Ford or Teddy Riley. The funk of Jackson's arrangements
is Gothic, Frankensteinian, lurid, technological. It follows
the 'baroque bayou' stylings historically defined by arrangers
like Barry White and Isaac Hayes and contemporaneously embraced
by producers like Prince. In place of the muscular, pumped
thickness of hip hop (low ground swells, deep booms, fattened
slaps and grinding rhythms), Jackson has aligned himself
with the slicker, streamlined post-funk of New Jack Swing.
Its brittle, crystalline nature allows for hyper-detailing
along a convey-belt which creates an interlocking grid of
digitally-edited rhythms whose complexity is far in advance
of rarefied computer music and a precursor to the often
obvious editing of Drum & Bass.
The
succession of songs in GHOSTS skates across shiny, eclectic,
post-funked platforms. Each is heterogeneously stitched
together in a fractal patchwork light years away from classical,
romantic and modern form - because in funk, everything is
held in place by falling apart. It is the aesthetic of the
collapse and the pleasure of the breakage (as opposed to
the tyrany of being 'tight' so championed by white culture),
both of which can be heard in Michael Jackson's music, seen
in his persona, and experienced in the sound design of his
video clips. He fractures space as gleefully as he recomposes
his own face; he excerpts sound as violently as he destroys
his own body. In the being of Michael Jackson, a more absolute
meld of sound and vision does not exist. He has left our
world where plastic surgery is frowned upon, race must be
black or white, music is required to be pure, and video
clips are excluded from the cinema. How fitting that he
now tags himself as a ghost.
