Who could have predicted that black stars would so dominate the 80s pop firmament? Any accounting of the decade’s most important acts would have to include at least three black acts in the top, oh, four or so, by my reckoning–Prince edging out Bruce for number one, the two of them followed closely by Run-D.M.C. and Michael Jackson. Plastic Princess Whitney Houston will never inherit the throne of Queen of Soul, but her phenomenal sales figures have at least to be acknowledged. And even if the rappers from Queens now seem passe, and even if Jackson is (finally) on the wane after the unfortunate Bad, there are still L.L. and Public Enemy on the rap front to contend with, and in pop-crossover fantasyland there’s the looming ambition of Terence Trent D’Arby, a guy who wants to be both Prince and Michael Jackson.
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“And if U2 didn’t have any soul . . .” Bono stopped and grinned. “If U2 didn’t have any soul we’d get better reviews in the Village Voice.” The joke was that Prince had just run away with the Voice’s annual Pazz and Jop Poll, leaving U2’s The Joshua Tree way behind. (It can charitably be said that the Pazz and Jop award is a shade more prestigious than following in the footsteps of such previous Grammy sweepers as the Doobie Brothers and Toto.) Anyway, Bono’s point was an interesting one: not literally, but for the implicit assertion of an elemental universality that comes out of a black soul-funk-pop-rock idiom–because such an idiom is, of course, what Jackson has been trafficking in since his breakthrough Off the Wall LP in 1979. Jackson gets hit about the head and shoulders a lot for his almost nauseating single-mindedness about selling zillions of records. He told intimates before the release of Thriller that he expected it to be the biggest record ever made, and part of the clever image-making that attended Bad had Michael staring into a mirror in one corner of which was tucked a piece of paper bearing the inscription “100”–i.e., 100 million, or three times the sales of Thriller, which was the biggest record ever made. That sort of thinking surpasses the pathological and approaches the cosmic–particularly since Thriller’s secret weapons were “Billie Jean” and “Beat It,” two last-minute, emergency additions to an already long-delayed project.
Jackson’s number-crunching is not so much crass as weird. What’s truly interesting about it is his methodology, which is quite remote from lowest-common-denominator calculation. The feelings that emanate from his records aren’t the shotgun blasts of a gotta-please-everybody entertainer. They’re extraordinarily sophisticated high-tech weaponry designed by an expert in mass-market enthrallment. Michael Jackson is the Aegis Early Warning System of popular music. And if the system sometimes fucks up–downing a civilian airliner or producing Bad–you still gotta thrill at the gadgetry. Indeed, Bad’s four number-one singles and ten million plus in sales, even in the face of some of the worst publicity ever endured by such a star, is not, um, bad. What did it, of course, is personality, production, and some good tunes; but I’m also convinced that it has something to do with the utter confidence with which Jackson constructed the gospel cadences of “Man in the Mirror,” the quiet authority that underlies “The Way You Make Me Feel,” with its loping, call-and-response chorus. Other people have understood this concept–the fecundity, if not the primacy, of the funk-soul-pop-etc black musical language; one of them was Berry Gordy, Jackson’s creator and exploiter. But no one’s done it with Jackson’s zeal or talent before, and it’s doubtful that anyone will again–the point being, of course, that after Jackson one might not need to. The world, in a small dumb way, will be a better place–or so it is hoped.
There was a big problem with the sound, which was horrendous; this may have been in part due to Prince’s novel in-the-round staging, which might have made demands on any hall. But “barn” is too kind a word to describe the Rosemont: the sounds came out from the speakers in an undifferentiated mess; frequently the bass, the guitars, and the keyboards could not be individually discerned. Melodies sank in the murk and were sometimes lost altogether; Prince’s voice was sometimes inaudible. It got me thinking how even the biggest star in the world can’t buy an adequate facility to present his work. Here, in the third largest city in America, he had a choice between two outdoor amphitheaters entirely inaccessible to most of his public and the Horizon, whose small virtues–relative accessibility by public transit, something approaching intimacy given the in-the-round staging–were far, far outweighed by its ruinous acoustics. This is not a good situation for rock ‘n’ roll fans. (Why doesn’t someone construct a 12,000-seat hall built in such a way that balconies or certain other parts could be blocked off, so as to accommodate everything from 3,000-seat acts to stars like Prince? Its versatility should be able to keep it in business.)
One to wash my body Two to wash my hair Three to wash me here And four to wash me … there!
Amazingly, so does Prince, at 29 the most advanced rock star on earth. The second half of his show comprised most of the rest of Lovesexy and some more crowd-pleasing fragments: “1999,” “Kiss,” “Let’s Go Crazy.” For me, the high point of the show was “The Cross,” Prince’s most unambiguous statement of faith. It started with him standing alone, strumming an electric guitar: “Don’t die / Without knowing / the Cross.” The band came in halfway through, building to a thunderous, rapturous crescendo that provided the evening’s one moment of sheer drama. No fragments here. But contrast that moment with the end of the bluesy, obscene riff in the middle of “When You Were Mine.” Prince was dressed in a Louis XIV coat that looked like it had been decorated by Jackson Pollock, if Jackson Pollock had worked in brocade. His hair was pulled back in a short ponytail, and as the blues riff ended, and a scream from Prince brought the band back into the concussive exuberance of “When You Were Mine,” the brilliant producer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist-performer-dancer-singer-impresario stood illuminated for a minute looking like no one so much as the giggly, ribald Tom Hulce in Amadeus.
