有关MJ声音的深度研究文章：Say the Unsayable

alextoalex

居然让我给找到了这篇文章，这是我发的另外一个帖子里有关对MJ进行学术研究的文章索引中提到的一篇，对此很感兴趣，其中分析了MJ歌曲中非歌词部分那些声音（Hoo or Ow!，尖叫，吐气等等）的含义。
http://www.jpanafrican.com/docs/vol3no7/3.7MJ-Wanna-3.pdf

Campbell, Mel. “Say the Unsayable: The Non-Verbal Vocalizations of Michael Jackson.” Context: Journal of Music Research. 26 (Spring 2003): 17-26.

The author goes beyond Jackson’s lyrics, gestures, and singing vocals, analyzing those non¬verbal vocalizations of Jackson’s “whoops, yelps, grunts, squeals,” etc., and there is a definite, decipherable “Hoo or Ow!” that is indentified with Jackson. The author points out that non¬verbal vocalizations have a long history within slave spirituals, but Jackson’s vocalizations have little in common with those. We can learn about issues of race, sexuality, and gender by listening more closely to what Jackson doesn’t sing.

作者绕过Jackson的歌词，舞步和唱腔，分析那些非歌词部分的Jackson的那些“哎呦，短声尖叫， 嘟囔，啸叫”等等的声音，还有那个Jackson特有的可清晰判读的“Hoo”或者“Ow”。作者指出那些非歌词的声音根植于很长历史的黑人灵歌，但是Jackson的声音与此又有很大的区别。我们可以从中更密切的倾听Jackson所没有唱出来的有关种族，性和性别的含义。

这个网站http://www.theenthusiast.com.au/tags/michael-jackson/，登有全文。还没有看完，应该是挺有意思的一篇文章。
坦白的说，这是篇音乐专业的文章，音乐术语较多，所以有点超出我的能力范围。众TX中应该有这方面比我知道的多得多的高人，不知是否有人能帮忙。不然的话就只有等我慢慢的磨了，这可比翻fanfic要难得多。

alextoalex

Saying The Unsayable, Part 1: Non-Verbal Vocalisations

Lift your head up high
And scream out to the world
I know I am someone
And let the truth unfurl

– Michael Jackson, ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’

In Performing Rites, rock critic 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’?”

For Frith, the voice is more than just another musical instrument – not just because it’s capable of language, but also because it’s produced by the body itself, so it represents the physical presence of the singer in a way other instruments do only indirectly.

This physicality ties the singer’s performance tightly to his or her persona. Frith argues: “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”.

In that case, it’s 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. Was he a 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 manipulated by a callous entourage of ‘enablers’, or a canny businessman who never missed an opportunity for self-promotion?

It’s not my aim in this article to provide any definitive answers to these questions. In the light of his notorious interview with Martin Bashir, his accusations of racism against Sony boss Tommy Mottola, and his child sexual abuse court case, it seems unlikely that even Michael Jackson could make sense of his own contradictions. Instead, let’s investigate the Jackson phenomenon by examining 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 fandom. After all, despite believing himself the Artist of the Millennium, Michael Jackson died as a sad, washed-up ’80s star whose wacky personal life had usurped his musical talent. However, the non-verbal vocalisations are one of the best-known but least-investigated aspects of Jackson’s music. They provide another way of appreciating songs so iconic they’ve become clichés.

But Jackson’s wordless cries are also interesting because they open up potential readings of pop music beyond ideas like ‘songs as text’ or ‘music as feeling’. This unproductive dichotomy has led to something of an impasse in music research.

Of course songs are texts: they contain cues which can be ‘read’ by listeners (and watchers of music videos), and analysed by researchers. However, these texts exist within and between cultural contexts; their meanings largely rely on inferences and connotations. Some academic musicologists try to peel pop songs apart, reducing them to verses, phrases, video frames, even syllables. They might find symbolic or 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 music so compelling.

This tendency is particularly striking in David Brackett’s analysis of the James Brown song ‘Superbad‘. Brackett realises that “social ‘competence’”, or in his terms, intuitively being able to recognise a groove, is the key to appreciating soul music. 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 doesn’t 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.”

While it certainly foregrounds the syntax of soul, this mercilessly close reading doesn’t really offer much insight into how ‘Superbad’ reveals its cultural contexts and addresses its audiences; although as I’ll go on to argue, Brackett’s wider argument about “signifyin’” as a black performative practice is more intriguing.

Another strand of pop music criticism argues that music is ‘experienced’ rather than ‘read’, and tries to locate the ‘meanings’ of music in the cultural formations associated with particular styles, such as moshing in rock and metal, or raving in electronic music. This can be a valuable approach; I’ve used it myself.

It gets dangerous, however, when critical attention drifts from the affective possibilities of the music itself to the organisational or industrial structures of its audiences, whether they’re called ‘subcultures’, ‘scenes’ or ‘crowds’. This methodology also excludes the feelings in the production (that is, recording or performance) of music — how it manifests the emotions and experiences of the performers.

Michael Jackson’s non-verbal vocalisations are a way of negotiating a potential ‘middle path’ between too little and too much focus on the cultures of creating, distributing and appreciating music. I analyse the songs themselves, as well as the social and critical climate in which they were released.

alextoalex

Specifically, I want to show how the non-verbal vocalisations provide insights into three of the most vexed questions about Jackson – race, sexuality and gender – and discuss the spin Jackson himself puts on them in ‘Scream’, his 1994 duet with his sister Janet. Ultimately, the non-verbal vocalisations perform Jackson’s complicated identity far more successfully than his lyrics and video clips.
“yaay — Hay — Hay — Hay —; huh-yaay ——”

“yaay — Hay — Hay — Hay —; huh-yaay ——”

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.” Other critics have referred to these “wails” as “whoops and yelps”, “grunts, squeals, hiccups, moans, and asides”. There’s 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’s 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 doesn’t accord with how stylised they are, nor why Jackson uses them so much and so predictably.

On the other hand, 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.

But as audiences and critics, we should consider our need to imbue non-verbal sounds with meaning. Simon 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.”

From another perspective, Australian postcolonial critic Paul Carter calls them “sounds in-between”. For Carter, sounds in-between define the space of first encounters between people without a common language – 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 aren’t pure spectacles to be appreciated aesthetically, nor do they follow linguistic rules.

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 begins in a desire for dialogue takes on an altogether different meaning through mutual misunderstanding.

The idea of communicating with sounds-in-between might seem somewhat futile – but only from the perspective that communication ‘fails’ if intended meanings don’t match interpreted meanings. Instead, the concept of the sound in-between intersects 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”.

And, 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.

alextoalex

Saying The Unsayable, Part 2: Race

By Mel Campbell on July 3rd, 2009 at 3:23 pm

(Read Part 1 of this story)

Like Michael Jackson’s persona, his non-verbal vocalisations are an ambivalent mix of race, sexuality and gender. There are two ways to look at their racialisation. From Paul Carter comes the idea that they occupy “the borderline between what can be said and what can only be acted out.” Therefore, they don’t fit into white traditions of narrative communication. As Carter notes: “Except in performance [they have] no place; except as notation for actions [they have] no meaning.”

So, white culture places them in an orientalist tradition of blackness as exotic spectacle. For instance, in letters and diary entries white Americans recorded their observations of West African slaves celebrating and worshipping, and as David Brackett writes, what they saw “did not present itself in a way that they could comprehend as ordered.”

However, Mark Anthony Neal 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.”

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 which would usually take place in the private sphere. So, polytonal expression “created the context for the creation of covert social space(s) in which the parameters were not physical, but aural,” Neal argues.

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.

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.

So, 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.”

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. 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!”).

As an adult, he became self-referential, to the point where the vocalisations intruded upon and even replaced his singing. Perhaps Jackson performed these vocalisations for so long that any affective possibilities they once contained had long since waned. Certainly, the adult Jackson was a perfectionist and harsh self-critic who seemed to have lost the joy that’s so lovely to watch in footage of the child singer – after his landmark performance of ‘Billie Jean’ at the Motown 25 concert, he famously chastised himself for not holding his toe-stand longer.

Or perhaps Jackson’s endless pastiche of his own childhood vocalisations had a nostalgic impetus. It’s been exhaustively documented that Jackson idealised childhood, preferred the company of children to adults, and behaved in childish ways.

But Jackson’s self-citation is still racialised. The non-verbal vocalisations are like jazz licks that have become standards, or classic rhymes repeated by dozens of MCs. While they’re no longer spontaneous 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.

alextoalex

Saying The Unsayable, Part 3: Gender
By Mel Campbell on July 4th, 2009 at 10:03 am

Just as Michael Jackson’s racial appearance has gradually morphed from black to white, the visible signs of his 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, like a kind of camp Gaddafi. By the end of his life, even this kind of performativity seemed beyond Jackson. He just looked like a woman.

My use of the word ‘camp’ is deliberate. Ambiguous, arch gender performance was par for the course in Western ’80s pop. Boy George, Adam Ant, and assorted hair-metal bands and New Romantics were continuing the androgynous, disco-and-David Bowie tradition of the ’70s.

Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video reveals some sense of this irony. Wearing a letterman sweater in the video’s film-within-a-film, he informs his date, “I have something I want to tell ya … I’m not like other guys,” before transforming into two different ’selves’ – a werewolf and a zombie – that the video clearly considers ‘monstrous’.

Yet, his songs are strangely un-ironic, narrating a masculinity that’s 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 translation; 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’s 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 at the time. “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.”

Soviet teenagers, however, loved him. Of course, to a generation just awakening to glasnost and perestroika, Jackson’s ambiguity probably represented 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 didn’t understand the words.

It might be difficult to imagine Jackson’s high-pitched screams as articulations of masculinity. But Simon Frith notes that masculinity in pop music depends on the qualities with which we endow particular vocal pitches: “The high [male] voice is heard as the young voice, and rock is a youth form”. Further, Frith argues that the high-pitched male voice in Western pop isn’t effeminate; it’s “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.”

This might explain the sublime yowls of soft-metal singers including Axl Rose, David Lee Roth and Steve Tyler, or the keening of indie popsters such as Coldplay’s Chris Martin and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. But Michael Jackson’s shrieks are not expressions of masculine intimacy. Indeed, they seem calculated to distance the listener: their loudness rudely disrupts any illusions of privacy or sincerity.

Earlier, I quoted the reviewer Frank Kogan on the hardness and iciness of Jackson’s voice. Kogan elaborates: “Michael’s not throwing his voice into these songs; he’s deliberately spare”. 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. So, despite his aggressive lyrics, Jackson doesn’t 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 other reason than rhythmic effect.

Despite the song’s refrain, “Annie are you okay?”, there’s 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 that Jackson’s impassive control over the narrative is a trope of masculinity.

The breakdown section of the video is especially fascinating because it shows the non-verbal vocalisations escaping the lip-synched song and spilling over into the world of the video. One of Jackson’s screams breaks the ceiling of the club (a glass-shattering trope he was to repeat at the aggressive, car-destroying end of the extended ‘Black Or White‘ video), triggering a dream-like sequence in which Jackson’s finger-clicking, moans and percussive vocal effects appear to put the entire crowd under his control.

The spell is broken by Jackson’s kinetic dance routine. It actually reminds me of the moment in ‘Thriller’ in which the nightmarish tension of encroaching zombies culminates in the instant transformation of Jackson into their menacing leader. Like ‘Thriller’, the ‘Smooth Criminal’ choreography is a stylised performance of masculine restraint as Jackson and his dancers pop-lock, hip-thrust and spin across the floor, even defying gravity, Gravity, you see, is for pussies.

While the masculine theatrics of ‘Bad’ belong on the Broadway stage (the video comes across like Beat Street meets West Side Story), the striking thing about this video is the way Jackson and his gang of toughs soundtrack their dance moves with all manner of grunts, snarls and Nutri-Grain-esque yells. It’s actually quite weird in a music video to see Jackson alternating between mouthing the words on the recording and adding his own sounds live; the famous high-pitched “Hoo! Hoo!” cries towards the end of the song are performed by Jackson on set, rather than on the soundtrack. The ‘badness’ he insists he possesses might not be especially convincing, yet his barrage of vocalisations is an exercise in masculine intimidation.

alextoalex

Saying The Unsayable, Part 4: Sexuality
By Mel Campbell on July 6th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Michael Jackson on stage at his 30th anniversary celebration on 10 September, 2001 at Madison Square Garden, New York. Image: Dave Hogan

Michael Jackson on stage at his 30th anniversary celebration on 10 September, 2001 at Madison Square Garden, New York. Image: Dave Hogan


It has been well documented that white fears of moral degradation and miscegenation have historically surrounded forms of popular music associated with African-Americans, including 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 became Michael Jackson’s signatures. And even Jackson himself apparently sensed the darker parallels between Elvis and himself.

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 ET 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.”

This oddly bipolar sexuality neutralises any racialised sexual threat to mainstream white audiences. For Time magazine’s Jay Cocks, writing in 1984, Jackson was: “Undeniably sexy. Absolutely safe. Eroticism at arm’s length.” More recently, however, the gap between his songs and the perceived bizarreness of his persona widened to the point where Jackson was no longer ethereally sexy, but incomprehensibly perverted. Alexis Petridis from The 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.”

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 naïvete and generosity are sexually and financially exploited by predatory women, themes that are particularly prominent in ‘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.

Brown’s speciality, however, is a brand of screaming that he imbues with visceral intensity. In a landmark New Yorker profile, 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.”

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’s telling that although ‘In The Closet’ was an international top-ten chart hit in 1992, it didn’t make Jackson’s HIStory greatest-hits compilation.

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’s not a sex machine.

And finally: “Don’t it make you wanna scream?”

As I’ve argued from the beginning, reading non-verbal vocalisations is a tricky process. As they’re willed sounds, it’s not only impossible to tell whether the ‘meaning’ we understand is what the singer or speaker intends; it’s also just about guaranteed that we’ll get that meaning ‘wrong’. But sounds in-between also enable otherwise ‘unsayable’ things to be said.

So far, I haven’t mentioned one subgenre of Jackson songs: 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 progressed, these songs became more embittered and defensive, linking the world’s ills to what Jackson perceived as his own victimisation by the media.

As I’ve outlined, 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 final studio album, Invincible, got a bollocking. In the NME, 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.”

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 also explicitly assigns them a use: as expressions of frustration and mutiny against a system he feels has entrapped him.

The screams in question are used in the same way Jackson deployed non-verbal vocalisations throughout his career. Their tones don’t signify a particular emotion; instead, they’re 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’re ever to make sense of this contradictory and troubled artist – and, by extension, of the complicated meanings surrounding music in general – we, too, must take a step back. Forgetting what we’re told, we’ll find out more about song by listening to what it cannot say.

This is an edited version of an academic paper that was first presented at the 2003 Australasian conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and later published in the musicology journal Context.

mj4everlover

呵呵,跟着LZ一定没错.总有宝藏. 感谢又是好文一篇.收藏先.再慢看.看完再来感想  啊,对不起,不知LZ帖完了没有? 我站错台阶了吗?

Mirabel.Zhang

traslate pls

148cat

It is really interesting.  I always wonder why he made  those sounds in his songs.

不是归人

坐等翻译    英语水平有限

MJ太空步

LZ真是辛劳的小蜜蜂。又一篇专业分析文，上次也有一篇关于舞蹈的。感谢！！！
这么长的英文想真正看懂还不太容易哦。收藏慢慢啃。。。。。。

hawleye

翻译一下啊，这么长。

MJ与MOZART

我只有等告人的翻译了。谢谢LZ!

lds1993

水平有限
只好等翻译

Callas

thanks a lot. it's good to introduce such a articel on MJ's art.