卫报：评BEAT IT

MkGenie · 发表于 2008-2-8 22:41:57

This week, Anna Pickard watches and picks apart Michael Jackson's classic video for Beat It A grumpy man in 80s garb and a hat sits in a smoke-filled, grubby-looking diner, stirring his coffee, most likely with a cigarette or a dirty syringe. Yes, it's THAT filthy.

A man with a hat down deep over his eyes walks past and taps the coffee-sipping mardy-arse on the shoulder, and he peels away from the counter - literally, as it looks quite sticky. Suddenly, as they swing through a door marked "CLOSED"... ... BOWWW! ... BOW, BOW ... BOWWWW! A row of somewhat fey gang members appear and click their fingers.

Yeah! This is finger-clickin' good! Why? Because it's Beat It by Michael Jackson! Brilliant. A week after his sister took her place in the Pops light, we've spun around only to go "OW!" in a high-pitched voice, because we've smacked straight into Michael. Of course, this is Michael of 25 years ago, but featured here because he's currently pimping the reworked Thriller 25 - the original songs, but now turned into duets with current popular artistes. You know, for money. Meanwhile, in the video, other gang members appear. From out of drains.

We all know really hard street-gang lads like to hang out in sewers. That's what they go through all the crazy initiation ceremonies for. So they can hang out in underground piss canals. Anyway. So this is the old version of Beat It. Not the new version with Fergie, because we could only find an audio version of that. And it featured Fergie. The video: Our gangs are slowly gaining numbers, walking through alleyways and skirting dirty city pavements.

No, hang on, that's West Side Story. Still, one is based on the other (I'll leave you to decide which), so it's most appropriate to have the Jets jumping around in there somewhere. Especially as their video is better quality than the Beat It one. And their clothes more fashionable. Speaking of which, we finally meet Michael, who's looking ponderous in a simply decorated teenager's bedroom, most likely his own.

Michael turns and tosses, deep in thought in his single bed, wracked with guilt and worry. Suddenly, he leaps into action. His spidey sense is tingling! He senses there's a gang fight about to go down and he's the only man in town who can do something about it. He races to their aid, only stopping every two seconds to pull an iconic jerky dance move.

Seriously, it must take him forever to get anywhere. All that head-snapping and sudden arm-flicking, especially when he's walking backwards half the time. Is it a registered disability? At the site of the rumble, everything's going off.

No, sorry, that's West Side Story again. Still, it's very similar, but with knives - I mean, let's face it, this video has been referenced so many times in pop culture you probably don't even need to have actually seen it to have seen it. If you know what I mean. You might just have seen the Weird Al Yankovic version, which is, let's face it, funnier than his "hilarious" Bad spoof, but not as funny as that one recently that actually summed up both him AND all his fans all at once (White and Nerdy).

Or you might have been browsing YouTube one day and discovered whole sets of people making appalling homemade versions of the whole thing, starring avatars from The Sims.

Seriously. The whole thing. That's got to take DAYS. Wow. At the garage, Michael Jackson is breaking up the knife fight with the same kind of awesome power that would later enable him to save Humanity through the power of his wind alone in Earth Song.

Yes, of course, it's not realistic, but it's got concept, it's well made, and it hearkens back to a time when the music video was in itself an event. But that's what makes a classic - the kind of video that Japanese girl-rap groups are still referencing today.

(Halcali's Giri Giri Surfrider. Obv.) In the end, it all works out fine. The gangs all decide that whatever beef they may have with each other, the need they have to get their groove on surpasses it all.

And there we have it. A proper classic. Not the classic we wanted to do, of course. We wanted to do The Girl Is Mine - that's the single remixed with will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas that's actually out at the moment. But perhaps there wasn't time to make a new video, what with will.i.am too busy making promos for other, more important duet partners...

...and Michael being almost permanently in hiding in the desert. And we would have done the old Paul McCartney & Jackson version of The Girl Is Mine, but it was apparently so utterly bad that it's been wiped from the face of the internet. And we all know how hard that is. Still. Beat It can't be, you know, Beat. It's a video from the days when videos were videos, Michael Jackson was of determinate gender and race (and not in hiding)...