Blame It on the Boogie
Steve Knopper of Rolling Stone has written a book entitled “The Genius of Michael Jackson.” It’s extraordinary to think of what the world of music and entertainment was before Michael. When the film The Wiz was released in 1977, movie distribution was still remarkably segregated. Theater chains in white neighborhoods wouldn’t play the picture.Except for Motown and disco, radio stations were still almost exclusively either black or white, with black records promoted only to black radio stations. DJ Steve Dahl’s disco demolition riot at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979 had not only done in disco, but also, incidentally, the ability for black musical artists to cross over to white radio. The topic is probably as little-explored today as it was then, but in 1982, two years into Reagan, and a year before MJ’s “Thriller” album upended the world, only two singles by African-Americans cracked Billboard’s top ten the entire calendar year-- “Truly,” by Lionel Richie, and “Ebony and Ivory,” which of course is actually a duet between a black man and a white one, Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney. Back in the disco-crazy year of ’79, 40 percent of songs to reach the top three were by African-Americans. Michael’s “Off the Wall” that year put four songs in the top ten. By this examination of the time between “Wall” and “Thriller,” Jackson almost single-handedly kept radio integrated, and then of course, he became the primary cause of music video production exploding in the years that followed.
Chris Rock has said that he sees the entirety of black history in Hollywood as the time before the Jackson 5 and the time after. He jokes that he won’t appear in a movie set prior to the Jackson brothers’ emergence. My favorite anecdote from Knopper’s book: As the Jacksons were recording the song “Blame It on the Boogie,” Michael flings off his headphones and runs abruptly out of the studio. His producer fears that a blast of volume has come through the phones. In the hallway, Michael is dancing. “I have to get this out of my system. I can’t hold still and sing.”
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Des Moines is the center of it this weekend. Iowa State, Northern Iowa, and Iowa are all in the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, competing in far-off states, but for the first time, the city plays host to a regional of the tournament, and what a draw of teams they have been given-- Kentucky, Kansas, Indiana, Connecticut, to name four of eight. Those four schools each have at least three national championships, and between them, they have 20. Tickets for one of the sessions (two games only) is running more than $350, and that’s on the sticker, not the scalping price. None of the total money taken in for any of the games, and it will run into the tens of millions, will go to the players.
posted by CM @ 6:30 PM
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