Michael Jackson’s brilliant and desperate adolescence – Daniele Cassandro

For a child star, puberty means only one thing: the end of a career. Just as you enter adult life the world of managers, relatives and producers that revolves around you makes you feel like a retiree. If you’re a guy named Michael Jackson and your job has always been singing that’s your end. Your voice changes and your magic fades: you find yourself like Cinderella at midnight and one, dressed in rags and perched on a cracked pumpkin.

Jackson describes this feeling of acute dissociation in Moonwalk, his 1988 autobiography which, however sweetened, reveals glimpses of his denied childhood and his profoundly problematic adolescence. “My biggest fight was in front of the mirror,” she writes, “my identity as a person was inextricably linked to my identity as a celebrity. My appearance really started to change around the age of 14. I have grown a lot in stature. People who didn’t know me came in thinking they were the usual cute little Michael Jackson and ignored me. Then I would say, ‘I’m Michael’, and they looked at me in disbelief. Michael was a chubby and cute little boy while I was a lanky teenager of almost five feet ”. To complicate matters, a serious acne problem has also arrived, normal for a teenager, but catastrophic for a superstar who lives under the lights of the stage or TV studios. At the age of 14 Michael Jackson began to put on make-up (and apparently to “whiten”) to cover the defects of a skin that was no longer that of a child and that no one around him accepted.

When the Jackson 5, the Jackson brothers’ famous boy band, record Dancing machine, their ninth album for the Motown label, is 1974 and Michael is 15 years old. For some time now he has been the star of the group, the one who sings and dances best of all and who since he was six years old had been the chosen one by the founder of Motown Barry Gordy and sent to live in Los Angeles with Diana Ross, who would have took care of his show business education. At 15, Michael is restless and so are his brothers. Jermaine, the other main vocalist of the group already almost twenty, Tito, Jackie and Marlon paw and feel prisoners of a life marked by the industrial times of Motown: rehearsals, recording studio, endless tours and pre-packaged interviews with the press. On television there are cartoons in style Scooby-Doo who tell their adventures and all the African-American middle-class children go to school with the official Jackson 5 snack basket. diva on the avenue of the sunset.

Reason for discontent is also the repertoire that Motown chooses for the boys who, even if they are now consummate international performers and stars, have no say in the songs, arrangements, choreography or costumes. Barry Gordy and Joseph Jackson, the patriarch of the family, manage them with a military attitude: they decide everything, from the sound they must have their pieces to the answers to be given to the press during the interviews. It is a model of industrial and paramilitary management of boy bands very similar to the one used today in South Korea with famous groups such as BTS which, perhaps not surprisingly, openly refer to Michael Jackson in ephebic looks and choreography. .

Dancing machine is the compromise that Motown makes with its former child stars: an album already disco, with more contemporary sounds and more mature songs to avoid that, as Michael himself already feared, the Jackson 5 (which at that moment appeared as Jackson 5ive ) turned into a oldies acta nostalgic group that would sing forever I want you back e ABC in increasingly empty theaters.

The sound of Dancing machine it could be described as a kind of “progressive record”. The formula of disco music in 1974 was not yet as rigid as it would become in the second half of the seventies and often, especially when in the hands of refined musicians like the Motown team that produced the Jackson 5 albums, the formula could include elements of fusion and progressive rock.

The song that opens the disc, I am love, lasts seven minutes and, ambitiously, unfolds in different movements. It starts as a soft piece that already smells of quiet storm, a romantic sub-genre of rhythm and blues typical of the mid-seventies, to then gain altitude and turn into an instrumental ride full of pedal-distorted wah-wah guitars and electronic keyboards. Jermaine begins to sing and then gives space to the other brothers who alternate each with a verse. Michael’s voice, the second you hear, is immediately striking: it is still the voice of a child, but it has the volume and incisiveness of an adult’s voice. It is not falsetto; it is something different, it is a sort of artificially asexual contralto voice which, when it wishes, can return naturally to the high notes of the child soprano. It can be said that with Dancing machine Michael Jackson begins to find his voice in a gray area between his two great masters, Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross. And it will be his voice, further distilled and refined, that he will use in Off the wall, his solo debut and the last great monument of the final phase of disco music. In the other songs of the album Michael’s voice alternates with that of Jermaine who, although he is an excellent singer with an elegant and velvety timbre, finds himself crushed by the disruptive personality of his younger brother. What for Jermaine is just a job for Michael is survival.

The song that gives the title to the album, Dancing machine, marks another important moment in Michael Jackson’s evolution. In the rigidly prepared choreography for television appearances he manages to introduce a new element from the street: the robot. Michael breaks away from the line of brothers who dance in the usual way to move slouching like a mechanical man. A performance halfway between the mime and the b-boy and the first taste of the magic that would come more or less ten years later: the moonwalk. At the age of fifteen, Michael already knows all the tricks of the most consummate performer: forcing the audience to look wherever you want, grabbing her attention and deceiving her like a magician. The best songs are the ones more properly disco, like The life of the party and above all the extraordinary What you don’t know, based on a spectacular groove and an impossible to forget refrain. More traditional pieces, like It all begins and ends with loveserve to keep hooked the old Jackson brothers fans who would only want pieces like the old, sugary and irresistible I’ll be there.

The disc ends with a complex piece with funky and psychedelic tones entitled The mirrors of my mindin which the brothers harmonize beautifully amidst a flourish of flutes, conga and distorted electric bass.

Dancing machine it was at the time an attempt to actualize the sound of the Jackson 5, but above all, listened again today, it is in effect the beginning of the awareness of the young Michael Jackson as a singer and performer. What you hear in his adolescent voice but already artificially modulated is the desire for revenge, almost a subcutaneous anger masked by sweetness, an extreme act of survival in the only real world he knew: that of the music business.

The Jackson 5
Dancing machine
Motown, 1974