Craig Werner: Interview

Craig Werner's 1999 book "A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America" is an invaluable survey of 20th century black music and the American history reflected, critiqued and sometimes inspired by that music. He is also a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his courses include a seminar titled "Black Music & American Cultural History." Flak spoke with Werner about the phenomenon of Michael Jackson and the intersection between great music and Top 40 radio.

As someone who teaches pop music, how do your students tend to perceive Michael Jackson?

Depends a lot on how old they are, and I've seen this work through several generations at this point. At the moment, the response to Michael Jackson is almost uniformly positive. Almost everybody who's in my undergraduate classes right now has nostalgic affection for Michael Jackson. They grew up with him when he was at peak; they love him. We're just passing out of the phase when people remember having gloves and that kind of thing. But right now, everybody's pretty disposed in his favor.

You bring up the nostalgia, and I find it interesting that he hasn't really released an album that was marketed on the merits of just original music since Dangerous. There was a whole original disc on HIStory, but that was sold equally as much as classics.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. Nobody amongst the students today remembers when Michael Jackson was a real creative force. They came into the world that he had created, in many ways. It's impossible to overstate the importance of Thriller and, I think, impossible to overstate the brilliance of Off the Wall or a lot of the stuff he did with the Jackson 5 early on. But, since then, Michael Jackson has been essentially a media phenomenon and an oldies act. Kind of an odd combination of the two.

That is really an odd combination, because if you look at the other people who were equally popular when he was at his biggest — and there's not a lot, but I think of Madonna and Prince — their whole shtick is reinvention.

Prince and Madonna reinvent themselves regularly. Prince, musically; Madonna, imagistically, in media terms. The other huge act of that period, of course, is Bruce Springsteen, who has retreated from that prominence and gone back and re-embraced his pre-mid-'80s persona. He's an unapologetic romantic rocker at this point.

The title of Dave Marsh's book about Michael Jackson is "Trapped." Michael, like Elvis, was so big that he left himself nowhere to go; he'd become all things to all people, and once you are all things to all people, what do you do for an encore? Michael's been unable to answer that in creative terms, either in video or in music. Some of the music on HIStory is decent. It's OK; it didn't change anybody's life.

Where does that leave him with his upcoming release? If anything, the music that he specialized in, that he brought to the forefront, is as popular as it's ever been. And yet, not only has his first single not performed very well, but it's to the point where he's being shunned by the kind of acts that exist in the niche that he carved out. Is he going to find a place with the new album?

I doubt it. There's a part of me that would like him to find a place. He's an amazing performer, at his best; the man can dance. He's deeply intelligent; I think that's one of the things that people underestimate about him. As a figure in the industry, it's unprecedented the amount of power that Michael Jackson has as a financial force. I mean, he owns the Beatles; no mean accomplishment there. And in an industry that has regularly stolen from black people, the fact that Michael Jackson exerts the kind of power he has now is non-trivial.

But, at the same time, I think he has reached an impasse because I think that he gauges success in terms of commercial appeal and commercial expansion. His success as a capitalist, in a sense, is his downfall as an artist, because all capital can do is expand its reach, and Michael Jackson cannot expand his reach over what he had in the mid-'80s. It is impossible to do that. And so you're better off staying vital, redefining yourself for a core audience in the mode of Prince, who continues to challenge his audience, or Springsteen, who continues to help his audience find its place to stand in a hostile culture.

Madonna, in a lot of ways, is probably more equivalent to Michael. I think her music has been better; her music has changed more, and she's incredibly adept at altering her image. My 14-year-old does nothing but listen to Madonna, day in and day out. A very smart 14-year-old has the walls of her room covered with art pieces she makes off Madonna lyrics. I don't think there are many people doing that with Michael Jackson these days. I think Michael has fallen out of the smart-teenager loop.

You mentioned Elvis before, and the impossibility of Michael going beyond what he's done so far, expanding his reach. Isn't that the natural breakdown; is a 30-year career in pop music just untenable?

Well, there aren't many models for it. Mick Jagger hasn't handled it very well. (Laughs.) I don't think Paul McCartney's handled it particularly well. Neil Young handled it better. But the problem is there is only a very small set of artists who are, in any meaningful way, Michael Jackson's peers. You have to have been at the top of the world in a way that Elvis and the people we've mentioned from the '80s were; but even then, no one really pushed Michael very hard. In commercial success, for a few minutes, Peter Frampton or Fleetwood Mac, I guess, in the late '70s. But there aren't very many points of reference for Michael. Elvis is probably the only meaningful one for how big Michael Jackson was.

So at that point, you're making it up on your own. … Not many (defined their era) as unambiguously as Michael Jackson defined the 1980s. So, at that point, you're really faced with defining your own path in a quite radical way, and I would argue that to define that path and to survive that challenge, you have to stay in real contact with communities, not just audiences, and Michael has not done that. He's sequestered himself ….

Michael, I think, has become uprooted. And Elvis became uprooted. The tragedy of Elvis, for me, is that in 1969-70, he came to the real world for just a few minutes. He went back to Memphis, did some great music in Memphis, and then vanished into the ozone again. I'd love to see Michael working with other strong creative figures. Quincy Jones doesn't count on this anymore. Michael has to do it all himself. He's got no collaborators, he's got nobody to call him, he's got nobody to push him when his own imagination fails, and he's not grounded in any community anymore.

The way that you have talked about black music in your book suggests that everything you just said is every reason that he shouldn't be able to make music, or at least make meaningful music. Is there really anything he can be doing at this point besides just following this wave of nostalgia as far as it will take him and then collapsing?

Well, that's the worry, of course. Yeah, there's something he can do. It's to remember that the foundation of the soul music that he came out of and the rock music that he drew on and the disco music that he plugged in with so beautifully in the late 1970s — all of those are based, at their best, on active call and response. It's not individual genius that's driving this music; it's people collectively processing the world together, saying something about this world that's meaningful to the other people in it, and you're listening to them as well as leading them. Could he do it? Yeah. I mean, as an individual, he's got the talent. He's got the genius. Will he do it? I'm not hopeful. He's been sucked into a media world where it's about success, it's about stardom, it's about sales. He can't top himself in those terms. Hope he doesn't try.

The things you're talking about as far as community and call and response — it sounds fairly idyllic, and I'm wondering if you hear any evidence of that in the Top 40 charts anyway. Is that an area where such principles live and play, or is that where people go once they've done the hard work of being in a community, and then just peter out?

The best stuff on the Top 40 charts is always plugged in. India.Arie is absolutely into that call and response. No Doubt, Green Day ... there's a lot of vital music that continues to be made. The problem is, does it continue to be made once people are stars? That's a different issue. You see this in hip-hop all the time. You see hip-hop acts coming up which are community-based, and their foundation is absolutely in local communities. Once they hit the big time, and once they're measuring success in terms of, "Can we go platinum?" then you've got a problem. Is it a failure when your album only goes gold? Well, in hip-hop, the answer is "yes" right now for anyone's who's on BET or MTV, and that's a disaster, because the vitality of the music is much deeper than that.

(Pauses.) There's always some stuff that I like on the Top 40; I always hear it from my daughters. (Pauses.) Afroman! Afroman is terrific. I love Afroman. That stuff blows me away. When we first heard him this summer, he was a local artist on T-Bone Records out of Hattiesburg, Miss., who just happened to just happened to have the right thing to say to a community at the right time. Love it. My favorite hip-hop album of the year by a mile.

And there's a lot of the soul, the neo-soul, going on. But does that translate into big-time commercial success? I dunno. Probably not. The industry, ever since the '70s, has been about massive numbers of sales, not about the call and response. But the wellsprings, the local springs, continue to feed in good stuff to be co-opted.

So the picture you paint of pop music is that there's a burst of creativity that comes from when the band emerges, comes out of the roots of the community, and then it has nothing to do but either fizzle creatively or fall out of the public eye. Has anyone been able to navigate that?

Eddie Vedder's trying, and I respect him. REM's tried, and REM's struggled heroically with it. I didn't particularly like the last album, unfortunately. A lot of hip-hop artists have tried …. Who's done this well? (Pauses.) Man, it's a tough one. Jay-Z has done it tolerably in hip-hop. Jay-Z's doing better stuff today than he did a couple of years ago; he's, in a sense, recovered some of where he's from. I kind of trust Outkast …. But, again, these aren't the majors, although Jay-Z, I guess, is a mega-seller. It's not the contemporary R&B acts.

If you have to continue to sell albums, you've got to maintain your fan base, you can't upset them; you've got to try to expand it, which becomes a matter of becoming more generic, less grounded in specific experience.

What is there going to be say should Invincible do really well? Jackson has pretty clearly cut himself off from standard human community, not to mention his roots. What is there going to be to say should he have megastar success with his newest album?

"Right on, brother." (Laughs.) It's hard to say. Without having heard it, it's speculative, entirely. I will listen to it with an open mind and with goodwill. If he clicks in again, what it speaks to is his genius. That there are people who can create in seclusion from the world. I think of it more as a poet's mode, more as a composer's mode. Miles Davis went into exile for the better part of a decade before he re-emerged at the end. Could Michael do that? He could. I hope he does. I'm not expecting it.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)