Hee hee hee: Michael Jackson and the transgendered erotics of voice
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In hindsight, of course, it seems obvious that my own awkwardness that year after our move to Chicago, and my panic at participating in the rituals of heterosex-readiness around me was because I was—am—queer. But are sexualities always so clearly retraceable? Maybe, as writer Dale Peck says, at thirteen we're all queer, if "queer was the desire to live in another time, queer was the dream of traveling to another planet, queer was the need to do something."
In Off the Wall, I found a soundtrack for those desires that were floating around me, but for which I didn't have a name. Yes, Jackson sang of "dancing into sunlight" and "putting that nine to five up on the shelf" and other bright, simple fantasies, but he also spoke to something deeper in the moments when he didn't use words—the "ch ch huhs," the "oohs!" and the "hee hee hee hee hees," fueled by mysterious elements like "the beat," "the force," "the madness in the music," and "a lot of power." Listening to Jackson at home or at our end-of-the-year dance, boys and girls grinding with determination around me, I ignored the romantic stories of the lyrics and focused on the sounds, the timbre of his voice, and the pauses in between. Listening to those nonverbal moments—the murmured opening of "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" or his sobbed breakdown at the end of "She's Out of My Life"—I discovered the erotic, described by Audre Lorde as "a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings."
We might link Jackson's voice with the tradition of the male falsetto in soul, blues, and gospel music. Singers like Frankie Lymon, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Prince, and more recently D'Angelo, all use a high masculine vocal range and yet are often connected to heterosexual masculine seductiveness. In the falsetto tradition, there can be tremendous power, as well as vulnerability—a crack in the macho posture, the expression of need. In Jackson's voice, there were these aspects of the tradition, as well as something else—the suggestion of being on the verge of something new.
For Jackson, Off the Wall marks the transition between child performer and adult. Although it is not his first solo album (his first, Got to be There, was in 1972), it was the first solo album to mark his independence from Motown, his new creative relationship with producer and mentor Quincy Jones, and his increasing artistic freedom in his crafting of his songs. He takes new creative risks, particularly in his forays into disco sounds, in his experiments with instrument arrangement, and in the dubbing and the widening of his vocal range and technique. Yet, while Jackson was twenty-one when he released Off the Wall, it still captures the prepubescent mood of his earlier work. Glimmers of sexual knowledge are there in his sound as well as in his lyrics, as they were in childhood songs like "Whose Loving You" and "Got to be There." But those moments still manage to take us by surprise, framed as they are by relatively innocuous romantic situations, like taking a spin on the dance floor. It is this element of suspended sexuality that I found so seductive. Historically, Off the Wall straddles the 1970s and the 1980s and the move from Carter's Democratic administration to the Reagan era. This transition coincides with what critics Nelson George and Mark Anthony Neal call the "post-soul" era of black cultural production: the mainstreaming of disco, the birth of hip-hop, and the creation of a black postmodern/bohemian intelligencia. In Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, Neal suggests that this era might produce a generation of thinkers positioned to critically engage with the legacies of the civil rights and black power movements, while also embracing "the oppositional possibilities of urban and hip-hop aesthetics, mass media, and popular culture as vehicles for mass social praxis." This aesthetic remains insistently heteronormative.
If we revise the post-civil rights cultural landscape to foreground a transgender aesthetic that is both black and queer, our conception of a "post-soul identity" might look quite different. This is particularly important given the ways that black popular cultural production continues to be plagued by homophobia and otherwise inflexible standards of masculinity and femininity, from R. Kelly to Beenie Man. We might link the transgendered erotics of Michael Jackson to two very different conceptions of transsexuality that bookend the 1970s and the mid-'80s: the underreported presence of black drag kings and queens at the Stonewall Uprising and in other queer bars and spaces in the early '70s; and on the other end, Marlon Rigg's Tongues Untied (1985), and the beauty, grace, and eloquence that his film gives to a variety of black masculinities, including transgender identity.
Much has been made of Michael Jackson's Dorian Gray-like evolution of image. Jackson's celebrity, especially as a solo performer, has been greatly enhanced by his use of music videos to frame each new transition in his image. From the little boy who sang love songs like an adult, to the adult who hangs out with children and animals on Neverland ranch; from his rumored associations with mummification (including his taste for sleeping in oxygen chambers and his collection of the bones of the original Elephant Man) to his alleged experiments with his own visage through plastic surgery, makeup, and acid washes for the skin, Jackson, shape shifter, style changer, thriller, is the ultimate figure of becoming.
There hasn't been enough theorization of Jackson's becoming-gender as experienced through less material modes like voice, however. Through his cries, whispers, groans, whines, and grunts, Jackson occupies a third space of gender, one which often undercuts his audience's expectations of erotic identification. In this way, his vocal performances anticipate ongoing debates around transgender identity and notions of desiring bodies.
Voice, because of its link to the theatrical, and because it is both embodied and disembodied, can operate in a way that allows gender transgression to play differently from full body performances. The throat is an erotic space that can both encode and undercut gender. It is the site of performative expression where desire becomes evidentwhere desire is transformed into communication. The larynx turns the air, warm from our mouths, and shapes it into expression. The larynx is a collaborative part, polyamorous, working with teeth and tongue and diaphragm and lungs, but sometimes it has its own ideas. It can be temperamental. A diva. Many performers treat it as if it had its own mind, coaxing and coddling it after a particularly difficult night. Throats are part of the erotic act, commanding, whispering, swallowing. Like the brain, the throat is a sexual organ that both genders, all genders, share. It is not surprising then, that the throat has been an important site for rituals of sexual identity and the surveillance of gender codes, from Renaissance castrati to Freud's Dora to Linda Lovelace.
Jackson's vocal style betrays an intelligence of the throat's strengths and its limits. His chucks, grunts, clicks, rasps, groans, gasps, stops. His use of emotional expressiveness, vocal range, volume and pitch provide a depth that often adds layers to the sometimes simplistic lyrics of his songs. Roland Barthes talks about the "grain" of the voice. It is the aspect of authenticity that speaks of a combination of the body - the "muscles, membranes, cartilage," the rasping of the throat, the state of the vocal chords - and its relationship to the symbolic: "The 'grain' is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs."
The grain of the voice is not just its physical quality, but also the friction of the body against meaning, against language. Cultural critic Kobena Mercer suggests that the grain of Michael Jackson's voice not only adds a subtext of sexuality to his lyrics, but also is ultimately about a larger "eroticization of the body" that "transcends the denotation of the lyrics and escapes analytic reduction." For Mercer, this eroticization queers traditional notions of black masculinity.
In trans activist Kate Bornstein's writing in Gender Outlaw, we get the chance to think about what a transgender aesthetic and a transgender 'voice' might look and sound like. Bornstein uses cut-and-paste techniques of the flotsam and jetsam gathered from a life lived on the borders, the baggage from a culture that does and does not see her: bits of theory, songs, passages from novels, unwitting insults from others. These are transformed by her placement of them. She calls this work "sewing sequins onto our cultural hand-me-downs." She says that she wants her writing to capture the process of integration and reintegration that her life has become: "I keep trying to make all the pieces into one piece. As a result, my identity becomes my body which becomes my fashion which becomes my writing style. Then I perform what I've written in effort to integrate my life, and that becomes my identity, after a fashion." Ultimately, Bornstein says, her goal in her writing style is to make sense of her own life, to perform her "view" or "take" on the world, and perhaps, too, to create a "transgendered" experience in the reader.
While coming from different historical and political trajectories, we might be able to link the transgendered aesthetic of Bornstein's 'Sewing sequins onto our cultural hand-me-downs" with the expressionism and the 'bluing' of music from the African Diasporic tradition that we hear in Jackson's work. Both present an aesthetic of transformation of performer and listener; both attempt to capture the beauty of a lived experience in the body; both counter dominant narratives and makers of meaning. And both can move the reader/listener into a form of transcendence. In the African Diasporic musical tradition, singers like Billie Holiday, Sonny Terry, Al Jarreau, and Bobby McFerrin are praised for the ability to imitate the sound of instruments. Musicians are lauded for their ability to make their instruments sound like the human voice, sometimes crossing gender boundaries to become male or female, to imitate animals or to become spirit. Expressionism, cultural critic Philip Royster says, is:
The 'dramatic value that prefers vocal and instrumental performances delivered to convince the listener that the performer has actually experienced the content of the performance. This value probably has its source in African religious experiences of spiritual possession, as well as ceremonies involving the periodic return of various spirit entities to the village and in African-American religious experiences in 'getting happy,' that is, becoming filled with (or anointed by) the Holy Spirit.
In many ways, we might think of Jackson's "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" as a secular expression of "getting happy." In this song, we can hear aspects of expressionism. Jackson's voice imitates percussion instruments like the quica and the kalimba, and he alters his voice to create his own 'female' chorus, all to construct a building energy and persuasive power to get the listener to similarly push the limits of desire to 'get enough.' At the same time, we might think about the cut and paste aspects of the production itself as similar to Bornstein's transgender writing aesthetic. Consider Jackson's description of his production process in his memoir Moonwalk:
Don't Stop Till You Get Enough had a spoken intro over bass, partly to build up tension and surprise people with the swirling strings and percussion. It was also unusual because of my vocal arrangement. On that cut I sing in overdubs as a kind of a group. I wrote myself a high part, one that my solo voice couldn't carry on its own, to fit in with the music I was hearing in my head, so I let the arrangement take over from the signing. Q's fade at the end was amazing, with guitars chopping like kalimbas, the African thumb pianos. That song meant a lot to me because it was the first song I wrote as a whole.
In his description we see that Jackson conceives of his voice as a collaborative or adaptive tool, making the other performers and instruments stretch from their natural or past abilities. He combines the deep resonance of the bass with his own mumbles and trembling whispers at the beginning—vulnerability and threat all at once to create drama and mystery, exploding into the "whoo" and the swirl of strings. He overdubs his voice to become a group with himself, a collaboration with selves, at the same time making the self 'other,' heightening the already feminine aspects of his voice. He stretches his own range by fitting his voice into or in between the strains of the instruments. And in response, the other voices and sounds around him are affected, adapting and becoming something new so that the guitar moves from melody to percussion, from swirl to chopping, from rock to African kalimba, moving diasporically from present to past and back again.
In Off the Wall, Jackson's image is at the cusp of expansion that will take his play with identity even further—from gender fluidity to monster, alien, and space dweller, as Victoria Johnson, Kobena Mercer, and Jason King have suggested. We can certainly trace elements of identity play through expressionism in Off the Wall that will show up more developed in Thriller and Bad. For example, we might connect his stylistic use of overdubbing in "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" with the use of vocoder in Thriller's "Pretty Young Things," which transforms his voice into an ET mumur, or connect his use of whisper-heightened suspense in the opening of "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough," expanded on an epic scale, with the voice ventriloquized into the body of Vincent Price in "Thriller." The rebellious "Hee heee heee heee hee" of the "party people" in the opening of the Off the Wall is also linked to Thriller and to the other bands of outsiders that he portrays and embodies in songs like "Beat it" and "Bad."
So much of Jackson's performative persona has been analyzed as being about either concealment and revelation—the glove, one off, the other on, the surgeon's mask, the sunglasses, the military uniform, even the crumbling nose—all costumes that signal their artificiality and their potential for being taken off. But the model of becoming tells us more about Jackson's performances in terms of its imaginative and even erotic link to audience. In Moonwalk, Jackson himself cites a transgendered performance as marking one of his first realizations of the erotic relationship between audience and performer:
When we did the Apollo Theater in New York, I saw something that really blew me away because I didn't know things like that existed. I had seen quite a few strippers, but that night this one girl with gorgeous eyelashes and long hair came out and did her routine. She put on a great performance. All of a sudden, at the end, she took off her wig, pulled a pair of big oranges out of her bra, and revealed that she was a hard-faced guy under all that makeup. That blew me away. I was only a child and couldn't even conceive of anything like that. But I looked out at the theater audience and they were going for it, applauding wildly and cheering. I'm just a little kid, standing in the wings, watching this crazy stuff. I was blown away.
Francesca Royster is an associate professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago, where she teaches courses on women and gender studies, celebrity and popular culture, black feminist theory, and Shakespeare studies. Her book, Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon was published by Palgrave in 2003, and she is completing a second book on sexuality and performance in African American popular culture
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