Saying the Unsayable: The Non-verbal

Vocalisations of Michael Jackson

Melissa Campbell

Lift your head up high

And scream out to the world
I know I am someone
And let the truth unfurl 1

In Performing Rites, Simon Frith asks: ‘What is the relationship between the voice as a carrier
of sounds, the singing voice, making “gestures”, and the voice as a carrier of words, the speaking
voice, making “utterances”?’2 The voice is more than just another musical instrument, Frith
writes, not just because it is capable of language, but because it is produced by the body itself,
so it represents the physical presence of the singer in a way other instruments do only indirectly.3
This physicality ties the singer’s performance tightly to his or her persona. Frith argues that:

a pop star is like a film star, taking on many parts but retaining an essential ‘personality’
that is common to all of them and is the basis of their popular appeal. For the pop star
the “real me” is a promise that lies in the way we hear the voice.4

In that case, it is difficult ever to hear the ‘real Michael Jackson.’ His pop music is thematically
orthodox, composed chiefly of macho dance numbers, romantic love songs and sappy ballads.
Yet his public persona is much more ambiguous and disturbing. Is he an habitual child abuser,
or a boy who never grew up? A surgically created Caucasian, or proud African-American? A
loving family man, or an asexual deviant who created his kids in test-tubes and dangled his
younger son from a hotel balcony? A persecuted tabloid victim, or a canny businessman who
never misses an opportunity for self-promotion?

1
Michael Jackson, ‘Wannabe Startin’ Somethin’.’
2
Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996) 186.
3
Frith, Performing Rites 191.
4
Frith, Performing Rites 199.
18 Context 26 (Spring 2003)

It is not the aim of this article to provide any definitive answers to these questions. In the
light of his notorious interview with Martin Bashir,5 his accusations of racism against Sony
boss Tommy Mottola,6 and his current indictment on child sexual abuse charges,7 it seems
unlikely that even Michael Jackson can make sense of his own contradictions. Instead, the aim
here is to investigate the Jackson phenomenon through an analysis of one of its key attributes:
Jackson’s idiosyncratic non-verbal vocalisations. This may seem like a frivolous enterprise, or
even like the worst excesses of academic fandom. After all, despite believing himself the Artist
of the Millennium,8 Michael Jackson looks suspiciously like a washed-up Eighties star whose
wacky personal life has usurped his musical talent. Do his increasingly banal songs really
warrant further academic attention? I believe they do. The non-verbal vocalisations are one of
the best-known yet least-investigated aspects of Jackson’s music.
But Jackson is the subject of this article for another, more important reason: his non-verbal
vocalisations open up potential readings of pop music beyond ideas like ‘songs as text’ or
‘music as affect.’ This unproductive dichotomy has led to something of an impasse in popular
music studies. Of course, songs are texts: they contain semiotic cues which can be ‘read’ by
listeners (and watchers of music videos), and analysed by researchers. However, these signifiers
exist within and between cultural contexts; their meanings are largely connotative rather than
denotative. By contrast, some musicological analyses are almost purely denotative: reducing
pop songs to verses, phrases, video frames, even syllables. They might find symbolic or

5
Jackson granted television journalist, Martin Bashir, full access to his home and family for eight months.
The resulting documentary, Living with Michael Jackson, was aired in February 2003, to strong worldwide
reactions. Among other things, Jackson revealed that he allowed a 12-year-old boy to sleep in his bed,
recounted how he snatched his newborn daughter from the hospital still covered in placenta, and said he
would commit suicide if there were no children in the world. An angry Jackson later claimed that Bashir
had manipulated the footage, and revealed further footage he had recorded himself, in which Bashir
praised his parenting abilities. See ‘Inside Michael Jackson’s Odd World,’ ABC News Online [US], 6 February
2003: available from <abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/DailyNews/michael_jackson_doc_030206.html>
[accessed: 6 February 2003].
6
In July 2002, Jackson appeared at a press conference convened by African-American activist, the Reverend
Al Sharpton, at Sharpton’s national Action Network headquarters in New York City’s Harlem
neighbourhood. Jackson said of Mottola, ‘He’s mean. He’s a racist, and he’s very, very, very devilish.’
Jackson also claimed Mottola had used racist slurs on an unnamed African-American artist. Commentators
speculated that poor sales of Jackson’s Invincible album, which had cost $US300 million to promote, were
behind his feud with Sony Music. Prominent African Americans in the music industry refused to back up
Jackson’s allegations. In a statement, Sony Music called Jackson’s comments ‘ludicrous, spiteful, and
hurtful,’ adding: ‘We are appalled that Mr. Jackson would stoop so low in his constant quest for publicity.’
See ‘Jackson Blasts Music Industry for Racism,’ ABC News Online [US], 8 July 2002: available from
<abcnews.go.com/sections/entertainment/DailyNews/Jackson020708.html> [accessed: 8 July 2002].
7
At the time of writing this article, Jackson had been indicted on ten counts in Santa Barbara County,
stemming from his relationship with the 12-year-old boy featured in the Bashir documentary. The charges
included child molestation, conspiracy to falsely imprison and abduct someone (he allegedly planned to
have the boy’s family taken to Brazil so they could not alert authorities), and extortion. Jackson faced
court in September 2004. He pleaded not guilty to all the charges. See Bill Lagattuta, ‘A Michael Jackson
Conspiracy?’ CBS News Online [US], 2 June 2004: available from <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/
2004/06/02/48hours/main620746.shtml> [accessed: 5 June 2004].
8
At the 2002 MTV Music Video Awards, pop star Britney Spears summoned Jackson to the stage, referring
to him as the ‘artist of the millennium.’ Jackson expressed surprise and humility at receiving this honour;
but it turned out that MTV was giving no such award. It was Jackson’s birthday, and what Spears had
handed to Jackson was not an award statuette, but a birthday cake. See Matt Drudge, ‘Michael Jackson
Blowup: MTV Takes Away Award it Never Gave?’ The Drudge Report, 30 August 2002: available from
<www.drudgereport.com/mtv.htm> [accessed: 30 August 2003].
Michael Jackson 19

narrative meaning within lyrics, or map a song’s words onto its cadences and melodies, but
they are at a loss to engage the wider repertoire of cultural conventions that often make popular
music so compelling.
This tendency is particularly striking in David Brackett’s analysis of the James Brown
song ‘Superbad.’9 Brackett realises that ‘social “competence,”’ or in his terms, intuitively being
able to recognise a ‘groove,’ is the key to appreciating soul music.10 His aim is to make explicit
the ‘rhythmic syntax’ of this groove for those (white?) listeners who lack this cultural
knowledge. He divides the overall song structure, as well as individual phrases, into sections
labelled by letters, transcribing key vocalisations into classical notation form. Unfortunately,
Brown’s transcribed vocalisations come across as faintly ludicrous: the melody-focused notation
system is barely able to contain their exuberant glissandos and tremolos; and the ‘lyrical’
content is negligible (for example: ‘yaay—Hay—Hay—Hay—; huh-yaay——’). Brackett’s
‘decoding’ technique also does not read well:

Figures a and e tend to occur in tandem at the end of the B sections … the last two
statements of figure a occur at the end of section B3 and frame within them the final
statements of both figure d and figure e.11

While it certainly foregrounds the ‘syntax’ of soul, this mercilessly close semiotic reading
does not offer much insight into how the text ‘Superbad’ reveals its cultural contexts and
ideologically positions its audiences, although, as will be argued below, Brackett’s wider
argument about ‘signifyin’ ’ as a black performative practice is more useful.
Another strand of popular music studies sees music as affective, hence, as a practice rather
than a text. This approach is experiential, arguing that the ‘meanings’ of music can be located
in the cultural formations associated with particular styles, such as moshing in hard rock and
heavy metal, or raving in electronic dance music. This can be a valuable approach.12 It becomes
dangerous, however, when critical attention drifts from the affective possibilities of the music
itself to the organisational or industrial structures of these audiences, whether they are called
‘subcultures,’ ‘scenes’ or ‘crowds.’ This methodology also excludes the possibilities of affect
in the production (that is, recording or performance) of music—how it manifests the emotions
and experiences of the performers.
This article uses Michael Jackson’s non-verbal vocalisations as a way of negotiating a
potential ‘middle path’ between too little and too much focus on the cultures of creating,
distributing and appreciating popular music. It draws on analyses of both the songs themselves
and of the social and critical climate in which they were released. While only one possible
interpretation of Jackson’s music is offered (rather than an ethnographic survey), I believe this
reading to be both legitimate and productive.
Three issues in the non-verbal vocalisations will be examined—race, sexuality and gender—
by mapping them onto the themes of Jackson’s songs. The spin Jackson himself puts on them

9
David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) 108–
56.
10
Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music 144.
11
Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music 135.
12
Melissa Campbell, ‘Bass in Space: How Low-Frequency Music Gives Youth Subcultures Room to Move,’
AntiTHESIS 12 (2001): 219–31.
20 Context 26 (Spring 2003)

in his 1994 song ‘Scream,’ a duet with his sister Janet, will then be discussed. Overall, the
contention is that the non-verbal vocalisations perform Jackson’s complicated identity far
more successfully than the hegemonic, racially unmarked masculinity conveyed in his lyrics
and video clips.

The Non-verbal Vocalisations

‘An odd thing about Michael Jackson,’ notes Village Voice critic Frank Kogan, ‘is that he has a
totally spectacular voice but he doesn’t feel the need to amaze us with it … On dance songs he
makes his voice as hard and compact as the percussion, reducing himself to icy shards and
chilly wails.’13 Other critics have referred to these ‘wails’ as ‘yelps,’ ‘coos and hiccups.’14 There
is the instantly recognisable, high-pitched ‘Hoo!’ or ‘Ow!’ and the related ‘Hee-hee!’. Jackson
also punctuates his lyrics with gutteral grunts and sharp expulsions of breath, and creates
rhythmic ‘beatbox’ effects.
What do these non-verbal vocalisations mean? It is arguable that they are primal screams
of deep anguish or pleasure, innately representative of the inner emotions that escape
expression in Jackson’s lyrics and melodies. However, that argument does not accord with
how stylised they are, nor why Jackson uses them so much and so predictably. On the other
end of the signification scale, they might be just a pastiche of trills, tics and vocal embellishments
from other musical eras and styles, with no specific meaning at all. Perhaps Jackson picked
them up as a child imitating his soul singer idols, and now, like bad grammar, he finds them
hard to shake. That possibility needs unpacking.
Before this unpacking, however, it is important to examine our need as audiences and
critics to imbue non-verbal sounds with meaning. Frith calls them ‘willed sounds’ because
audiences will them to be significant. Rather than entertain the idea that we find them
meaningless, we choose to interpret them ‘as words we do not understand, or as sounds made
by someone who has chosen to be inarticulate.’15 From another perspective, Australian
postcolonial critic Paul Carter calls them ‘sounds in-between.’16 For Carter, sounds in-between
define the space of first encounters between people without a common language, like colonisers
and indigenous people, or migrants and their host cultures. Yet by definition, sounds in-between
are confusing and ambiguous to both parties because they are not pure spectacles to be
appreciated aesthetically, nor do they follow linguistic rules.17
Carter’s example is the Australian indigenous vocalisation ‘cooee,’ which, he argues, was
originally a greeting. European settlers misinterpreted this meaning, coming to view ‘cooee’
as a method of communicating over long distances for the arbitrary reason that its tonal
qualities lent themselves to amplification. Consequently, many Australians now believe that
Aborigines ‘authentically’ used ‘cooee’ to call out to others in the bush. Thus, something that

13
Frank Kogan, ‘The Man in the Distance,’ review of Invincible by Michael Jackson, Village Voice (28
November–4 December 2001), <www.villagevoice.com/issues/0148/kogan.php> [accessed: 7 June 2003].
14
Pete Scrivener, ‘Invincible,’ review of Invincible by Michael Jackson, BBC <www.bbc.co.uk/music/pop/
reviews/jackson_invinc.shtml> [accessed 6 June 2003].
15
Frith, Performing Rites 190.
16
Paul Carter, The Sound In-between: Voice, Space, Performance (Kensington, NSW: University of New South
Wales Press, 1992).
17
Carter, The Sound In-between 13.
Michael Jackson 21

‘begins in a desire for dialogue’ takes on an altogether different meaning through mutual
misunderstanding.18
This idea of communicating with sounds-in-between might seem somewhat futile—but
only from the perspective that communication ‘fails’ if intended meanings do not match
interpreted meanings. Instead, I find the sound in-between provides a productive intersection
with Frith’s notion of willed sounds. While Frith identifies audiences as the primary meaning-
makers of pop music, Carter writes that non-verbal vocalisations delineate ‘a space where, in
future, misapprehensions and differences can begin to form the basis of a new cross-cultural
argot.’19 Just as sounds in-between historically led to hybrid forms of communication like
pidgin, Michael Jackson’s non-verbal vocalisations are an attempt to bridge the gap between
the things he says and the things his audiences assume about him, while simultaneously
acknowledging the very precariousness of assigning these meanings.

Race: ‘It don’t Matter if you’re Black or White’

Like Jackson’s persona, the non-verbal vocalisations are an ambivalent mix of race, sexuality
and gender. There are two ways to look at their racialisation. From Carter comes the idea that
they occupy ‘the borderline between what can be said and what can only be acted out.’20 Thus,
they do not fit into a white aesthetic tradition of narrative communication: ‘Except in
performance [they have] no place; except as notation for actions [they have] no meaning.’21
White culture places them in an orientalist tradition of blackness as exotic spectacle. Brackett
describes several instances of white Americans observing West African slaves celebrating and
worshipping: he writes that what they saw ‘did not present itself in a way that they could
comprehend as ordered.’22
Mark Anthony Neal, however, argues that non-verbal vocalisations are perfectly
comprehensible—to African Americans. These sounds derive their meanings from what
theorists of black speech call ‘tonal semantics.’ ‘The practice of “polytonal” expression,’ Neal
writes, ‘in which complex and varying meanings were conveyed via vocal tones, represents a
unique process emblematic of the African-American experience.’23
Neal argues that tonal semantics created a privileged black cultural sphere. Slaves were
denied the musical instruments used in African polyrhythms, and lived under a degree of
surveillance that impeded the social activities and individual expression that would usually
take place in the private sphere. Polytonal expression therefore ‘created the context for the
creation of covert social space(s) in which the parameters were not physical, but aural.’24 Indeed,
there is a rich tradition of non-verbal vocalisation in African-American music: call-and-response
field hollers, gospel congregationists speaking in tongues, jazz scatting and the anguished
cries of blues and soul.

18
Carter, The Sound In-between 12.
19
Carter, The Sound In-between 13.
20
Carter, The Sound In-between 16.
21
Carter, The Sound In-between 16.
22
Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music 114.
23
Mark Anthony Neal, ‘Michael Jackson: Love Songs,’ review of Love Songs by Michael Jackson, Popmatters
<www.popstars.com/music/reviews/j/jacksonmichael-love.html> [Accessed: 6 June 2003].
24
Neal, ‘Michael Jackson: Love Songs.’
22 Context 26 (Spring 2003)

However, Michael Jackson is a product of a different kind of African-American musical

expression—the Motown philosophy of integrating ‘black’ music with wider American popular
culture to produce the ‘Sound of Young America.’ Neal points out that, while this process of
depoliticisation ‘satiated both mainstream curiosities about Blackness and African Americans’
desire to consume their own images,’ it also eroded the significance of tonal semantics.25 I
would argue that Michael Jackson’s non-verbal vocalisations are a kind of racial residue, a
stylised form of blackness that doesn’t threaten mainstream white audiences. As his long-
time producer Quincy Jones told Time magazine in 1984, ‘Michael has connected with every
soul in the world.’26
Jackson’s non-verbal vocalisations also form another kind of racial residue: an extension
of the African-American musical practice of citation or sampling. Andrew Bartlett argues that
‘there is a clear continuum in which African-American artists have put things learned by
listening into action by way of performance.’ Digital sampling in hip hop, Bartlett writes, is a
process of ‘selective archiving,’ mining the back catalogue of African American music for
fragments worth preserving.27 Bebop musicians performed a similar, although less high-tech,
process. By appropriating melodic lines from other soloists, they transformed what might
have been just a pet phrase or one-off improvisation into a canonical sample that, by subsequent
repetition, took on an existence of its own.
Michael Jackson’s childhood performances reveal him to be a keen student of this technique.
Reviewing a compilation album of early songs, Neal remarks: ‘for damn sure he could plead
James Brown-style (“Please, please, please”) as he does during the break-down section of ‘I
Want you Back’ (“All I want, all I need / All I want, all I need!”).’28 As an adult, he has become
self-referential, to the point where the vocalisations intrude upon and even replace his singing.
Perhaps Jackson has been performing these vocalisations for so long that, like the proliferation
of images that Fredric Jameson associates with late-capitalist postmodern culture, any affective
possibilities they once contained have long since waned.29 Or, to continue this Jamesonian
train of thought, perhaps Jackson’s endless pastiche of his own childhood vocalisations has a
nostalgic impetus.30 It is well documented that Jackson idealises childhood, prefers the company
of children to adults, and behaves in childish ways.
Jameson’s postmodernist framework, however, fails to account for the still-racialised nature
of Jackson’s self-citation. The non-verbal vocalisations are like jazz licks that have become
standards, or classic rhymes repeated by dozens of MCs. While they are no longer spontan-
eous or tonally nuanced, they still demonstrate a knowledge of the musical terrain, a homage
to previous African-American vocal stylings, and membership of an imagined Black
community.

25
Neal, ‘Michael Jackson: Love Songs.’
26
Reported in Jay Cocks, ‘Why he’s a Thriller: Michael Jackson’s Songs, Steps and Sexy Aura Set a Flashy
Beat for the Decade,’ Time 123.12 (19 March 1984): 54-60.
27
Andrew Bartlett, ‘Airshafts, Loudspeakers, and the Hip Hop Sample: Contexts and African American
Musical Aesthetics,’ African American Review (Winter 1994).
28
Neal, ‘Michael Jackson: Love Songs.’
29
Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ Postmodernism: A Reader,
ed. Thomas Docherty (Hemel, Hamps.: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) 69-70.
30
Jameson, ‘Postmodernism’ 75-76.
Michael Jackson 23

Gender: ‘I’m Starting with the Man in the Mirror’

Just as Michael Jackson’s racial appearance has gradually morphed from black to white, his
external markers of gender have become more ambiguous. In the late-1970s, he had a mop of
short, curly hair and got about in a tuxedo. By 1990 his hair was ponytail-length and he was
wearing obvious makeup, pseudo-military outfits and mirrored aviator sunglasses: a kind of
camp Gaddafi. Today, even this kind of performativity seems beyond Jackson. He just looks
like a woman.
My use of the word ‘camp’ is deliberate. Ambiguous, arch gender performance was par
for the course in Western Eighties pop. Boy George, Adam Ant, and assorted soft-metal bands
and New Romantics were continuing the androgynous, disco-and-David Bowie tradition of
the Seventies. Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video reveals some sense of this irony. Wearing a letterman
sweater, he informs his date, ‘I’ve got something to tell ya … I’m not like other guys,’ before
morphing into a leather-clad ‘self’ that the video clearly codes as ‘monstrous.’31
Yet, his songs are strangely un-ironic, narrating a masculinity that is mainly signified by
criminality. This sits uneasily with Jackson’s stagey androgyny—in the ‘Bad’ video, gang leader
Wesley Snipes appears bemused by a gyrating Jackson dripping in silver-buckled vinyl,
shrieking how ‘bad’ he is. Jackson’s gender, like the sound in-between, has been lost in trans-
lation; it makes an unconvincing spectacle as well as disobeying social rules for interpreting
gender. But Jackson’s non-verbal vocalisations can help make sense of gender in his music.
It is interesting here to compare different understandings of Jackson in the Soviet Union,
where in 1988 he was chosen to promote Pepsi. ‘Russians like men who look like men and
women who look like women,’ said Pepsi’s US translator. ‘When you add their distaste for
[Western] rock music to the fact that they can’t tell if Michael Jackson is male or female, they
find him absolutely horrifying.’32 Soviet teenagers, however, loved him. Of course, to a
generation just awakening to glasnost and perestroika, Jackson’s ambiguity probably signified
the general glamour and exoticism of Western pop music. But the point I want to make is that
Jackson’s gender performance may have made more sense to them because ‘they don’t even
understand the words. They just like the beat.’33
It might be difficult to imagine Jackson’s high-pitched screams as articulations of
masculinity. But Frith notes that masculinity in pop music is linked to qualities with which we
endow particular vocal pitches: ‘The high [male] voice is heard as the young voice, and rock is
a youth form.’34 Furthermore, Frith argues, the high-pitched male voice in Western pop isn’t
effeminate; it is ‘the sound of seduction, of intimacy, of the private man … [W]e now take it for
granted that a male voice will move up a pitch to register more intense feeling, that the more
strained the note, the more sincere the singer.’35
This might explain the sublime yowls of soft-metal singers like Axl Rose and Steve Tyler,
or the keening of indie popsters like Coldplay’s Chris Martin and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.
But Michael Jackson’s shrieks are not expressions of masculine intimacy. Indeed, they seem

31
Kobena Mercer, ‘Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson’s Thriller,’ Sound and Vision: The Music
Video Reader, ed. Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Routledge, 1993)
100–103.
32
Cited in Blayne Cutler, ‘Soda Superstar,’ American Demographics 10.12 (December 1988) 54.
33
Cutler, ‘Soda Superstar’ 54.
34
Frith, Performing Rites 195.
35
Frith, Performing Rites 195.
24 Context 26 (Spring 2003)

calculated to distance the listener: their loudness rudely disrupts any illusions of privacy or
sincerity. Earlier, the reviewer Kogan was quoted on the hardness and iciness of Jackson’s
voice. Kogan elaborates: ‘Michael’s not throwing his voice into these songs; he’s deliberately
spare.’36 Jackson interrupts each phrase with snarls or hiccups that clamp down on meaning,
unlike the tonal semantics employed by soul singers, which open meaning up. Despite his
aggressive lyrics, Jackson does not draw his masculinity from action, but from dispassionate,
unrelenting observation. To use his own preferred criminological metaphors, he’s a stalker,
not an attacker.
This masculine severity is most evident in ‘Smooth Criminal,’ which finds poetry and
almost pleasure in a violent attack on a woman. Jackson’s vocal tones are harsh; his voice
seems strained—or more precisely, restrained—as if deliberately limiting his expressive
capabilities. The repetitive, chant-like melody of the verse spans only four notes. Jackson begins
each line with expulsions of breath, and pauses in the middle of phrases, seemingly for no
reason other than rhythmic effect:
(Ach) As he came in through the window
It was the sound of (pause) a crescendo
(Ach) He came into her apartment
He left the bloodstains (pause) on the carpet
(Ach) She ran underneath the table
He could see she (pause) was unable
(Ach) Then she ran into the bedroom
She was struck down, (pause) it was her doom
Despite the song’s refrain—‘Annie, are you okay?’—there is no hint that Jackson is an active
participant in the scenario he narrates. Nor, despite the fact that Annie is obviously not okay,
does Jackson imply that he deplores her bloody end. The non-verbal vocalisations act as a
distancing tool, establishing Jackson’s impassive control over the narrative as a trope of
masculinity.

Sexuality: ‘Keep it in the Closet’

It has been well documented that white fears of moral degradation and miscegenation have
historically surrounded forms of popular music associated with African Americans, like jazz,
rock’n’roll, disco and hip hop. The same fears accompanied ‘cross-over’ artists like Eminem
and Elvis Presley. Interestingly, Elvis’s black-shoe-white-sock look and dance move of standing
on the toes have become Michael Jackson’s signatures. However, the sexuality conveyed in
Jackson’s songs and persona was never racialised. Rather, as Richard Lacayo wrote in 1989 in
People Weekly, he is:

the prince of paradox. Has there ever been another sex symbol who displayed so little
offstage libido? The gentle boy with the whispering voice who shed tears while
recording the E.T. storybook album never accorded with the impregnable warrior on
‘Bad’ who snarls, ‘Your butt is mine.’ Michael spoke from the groin or he spoke from
the clouds, but rarely from any point in between.37

36
Kogan, ‘The Man in the Distance.’
37
Richard Lacayo, ‘Michael Jackson (20 who Defined the Decade),’ People Weekly 32 (Fall 1989): 68–69.
Michael Jackson 25

This oddly bipolar sexuality neutralises any racialised sexual threat to mainstream white
audiences. For Time magazine’s Jay Cocks, Jackson is ‘[u]ndeniably sexy. Absolutely safe.
Eroticism at arm’s length.’38 However in recent times, the gap between his songs and the
perceived bizarreness of his persona has widened to the point where Jackson is no longer
ethereally sexy, but incomprehensibly perverted. Alexis Petridis from England’s Guardian
newspaper writes bluntly that:

the very fact [that banal romantic lyrics] are being sung by Jackson gives them a whiff
of weirdness. ‘Let’s walk down to the park, making love until it gets dark,’ he trills.
The thought of Jackson having sex is odd and frankly distressing.39

Jackson’s compositions have always been fraught with sexual anxieties that threaten to
disrupt his credibility as a ‘heteromantic’ subject. Jackson usually casts himself as a desirable
(but racially unmarked) man, whose naivete and generosity are sexually and financially
exploited by predatory women. Particular examples are ‘Billie Jean,’ ‘Wanna be Startin’
Somethin’’ and ‘Dirty Diana.’ Other songs, notably ‘In the Closet,’ ‘The Way you Make me
Feel’ and ‘Remember the Time,’ express desire for permanence and control over women and
relationships.
The obvious use for non-verbal vocalisations in this sort of song would be as sexual noises;
and the master of this type of vocalisation is self-proclaimed sex machine, James Brown. Brown’s
non-verbal vocalisations stem from the call-and-response interplay between himself and
members of his band, especially saxophonist Maceo Parker, all over an insistent groove set up
by the JBs’ rhythm section. The vocalisations are narcissistic as well as orgasmic: he likes to
shout ‘Watch me!’ and ‘I got it!’ between expostulations and grunts.40 Brown’s speciality,
however, is a brand of screaming that he imbues with visceral intensity. Philip Gourevitch
describes Brown in action:

The scream has a sound of such overwhelming feeling that you cannot believe the man
controls it. The impression, to the contrary, is that he is controlled by it, as if out of all
the throats in the cosmos it had found his, and rendered him wild … Take this spectacle
as you will—as death or birth; conquest or surrender; hellfire or apotheosis; sexual
climax or heartbreak’s abjection; vaudeville hamming or sublime authenticity—you
won’t be wrong. James Brown is a master of the simultaneous suggestion of opposing
possibilities.41

By contrast, Jackson’s few attempts to use vocalisations as sexual noises are dismal. In the
bridge of ‘In the Closet,’ they amount to whimpers and yelps, like an ignored puppy. While
Brown performs his vocalisations over a simple, looped rhythmic pattern, Jackson requires
swelling strings in the background to lend his vocalisations a sense of climax. It is telling that
although ‘In the Closet’ was an international top-ten chart hit in 1992, it did not make Jackson’s
greatest-hits compilation.

38
Cocks, ‘Why he’s a Thriller’.
39
Alexis Petridis, ‘Normality Play,’ review of Invincible by Michael Jackson, The Guardian [UK] (26 October
2001), <www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/review/0,1169,743666,00.html> [accessed: 6 June 2003].
40
Philip Gourevitch, ‘Mr Brown,’ The New Yorker (29 July 2002).
41
Gourevitch, ‘Mr Brown.’
26 Context 26 (Spring 2003)

On other occasions, Jackson uses the non-verbal vocalisations as a stand-in when words
fail him. But where singers of tonal semantics like James Brown, Wilson Pickett or Jackie
Wilson employ gospel-style wails, Jackson turns his voice into a robotic instrument, yelling
on-beat like a metronome. In ‘Remember the Time,’ an impassioned bridge sequence dissolves
into scatting: ‘Do you remember girl? / Do you? Do you? / Drrrr-up, dup-dup-dup! Drrrr-up
duppa-dup!’ He sounds like a machine; but importantly, he is not a sex machine.

Conclusion: ‘Don’t it Make you Wanna Scream?’

As has been argued, reading non-verbal vocalisations is a tricky process. As willed sounds,
not only is it impossible to tell whether the ‘meaning’ we understand is what the singer or
speaker intends, it is also just about guaranteed that we will get that meaning ‘wrong.’ But
sounds in-between also enable otherwise ‘unsayable’ things to be said.
To this point, one subgenre of Jackson songs has not been mentioned: his pleas for peace.
The earliest of these, ‘Man in the Mirror’ and ‘We are the World,’ were co-written or written
by others, and have a proactive, optimistic tone. As Jackson’s career has progressed, these
songs have become more embittered and defensive, linking the world’s ills to what Jackson
perceives as his own victimisation by the media. Music critics tend to assess the value of
songs either by comparing their aesthetic or formal aspects to other, similar songs, or by treating
the lyrics as narrative texts. In Jackson’s case, critics tend to use a third approach: using his
lyrics as keys to ‘unlock’ his public persona. Accordingly, Jackson’s most recent album,
Invincible, got a bollocking. In New Musical Express, Mark Beaumont rails against self-pitying
lyrics like ‘unblock my privacy’ and ‘stop maliciously attacking my integrity:’

Alright then, Whacksie, here’s the deal. You stop floating twenty foot statues of yourself
down rivers, having your tackle discussed in court, organising ludicrous tribute concerts
to yourself, having race-changes and spending billions of dollars violently ramming
your image as a superhuman pop masterbeing down our throats, right, and we’ll stop
taking any notice of you.42

A much more effective treatment of the same theme is 1994’s ‘Scream,’ a duet with his
sister Janet in which Jackson redeploys the non-verbal vocalisations. He not only discusses
them in the lyrics, but explicitly assigns them a use: as expressions of frustration and mutiny
against a system he feels has entrapped him. The screams in question are consonant with the
uses of non-verbal vocalisation that have been discussed in this paper. Their tones do not
signify a particular emotion; instead, they are a stylised, distanced representation of emotion.
Janet’s vocals, usually quite mellifluous, sound hard and crystalline here, like her brother’s.
Importantly, this emotional distance forms an operational strategy for Jackson. By
screaming, he retreats from being a victim to his favoured position of observer and narrator. If
we are ever to make sense of this contradictory and troubled artist—and, by extension, of the
complicated meanings surrounding popular music in general—we, too, must take a step back.
Forgetting what we are told, we will find out more about popular music by listening to what
it cannot say.

42
Mark Beaumont, ‘Michael Jackson: Invincible,’ review of Invincible by Michael Jackson, New Musical
Express (30 October 2001), <www.nme.com/reviews/8926.htm> [accessed: 7 June 2003].