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Reply #30 posted 11/08/09 5:21pm

ViintageJunkii
e

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The deleted scene with LaToya from the movie Bruno that was taken out due to Michael's passing

http://www.slashfilm.com/...ted-scene/
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Reply #31 posted 11/08/09 5:22pm

mimi07

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"we make our heroes in America only to destroy them"
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Reply #32 posted 11/08/09 5:27pm

graecophilos

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seeingvoices12 said:

I don't know if you guys have have seen or heard this or not but its new to me..

Two new songs registered on BMI titled " pressure" and "verdict" , the interesting thing is that those songs appeared to be from the several songs Mj wrote with BRYAN LOREN, I thought "pressure" was initially written with rodney jerkins.....LOL





http://repertoire.bmi.com...=523553664
[Edited 11/8/09 14:00pm]



Loren said he wrote about 20 songs with MJ (20 out of apparently 70 from Dangerous!)

but as far as I know only two are known - Superfly Sister and Satisfy You??
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Reply #33 posted 11/08/09 5:30pm

graecophilos

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ViintageJunkiie said:

mimi07 said:



what would ur reaction be if u were like 11 and someone showed how you would be when u are 50


I'm talking about the trials, the things people said about his face, the things people said about him dangling Blanket over the balcony.


he would wonder why he's white.

then he would wonder bout his obvious face jobs and the straight hair.
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Reply #34 posted 11/08/09 5:32pm

seeingvoices12

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graecophilos said:

seeingvoices12 said:

I don't know if you guys have have seen or heard this or not but its new to me..

Two new songs registered on BMI titled " pressure" and "verdict" , the interesting thing is that those songs appeared to be from the several songs Mj wrote with BRYAN LOREN, I thought "pressure" was initially written with rodney jerkins.....LOL





http://repertoire.bmi.com...=523553664
[Edited 11/8/09 14:00pm]



Loren said he wrote about 20 songs with MJ (20 out of apparently 70 from Dangerous!)

but as far as I know only two are known - Superfly Sister and Satisfy You??



Yeah....nod those two and :

She got it
work that Body
seven digits
Stay
Pressure
Verdict

total of 8 songs that we know, 12 are missing (unknown) ..lol
MICHAEL JACKSON
R.I.P
مايكل جاكسون للأبد
1958
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Reply #35 posted 11/08/09 5:33pm

bboy87

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ViintageJunkiie said:

bboy87 said:


I saw that smiling face from 1970 and thought "Damn lil man, you're gonna have it tough in a couple of years" sad He seemed so happy


*SMH* I wonder what MJ's reaction would have been in the early/late 70's if we were to show him what he'll become in 2005-2009.

Don't you be "smh"ing me, nucca! lol

but yeah, I agree razz lol
"We may deify or demonize them but not ignore them. And we call them genius, because they are the people who change the world."
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Reply #36 posted 11/08/09 5:42pm

ViintageJunkii
e

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bboy87 said:

ViintageJunkiie said:



*SMH* I wonder what MJ's reaction would have been in the early/late 70's if we were to show him what he'll become in 2005-2009.

Don't you be "smh"ing me, nucca! lol

but yeah, I agree razz lol


haha! lol
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Reply #37 posted 11/08/09 5:43pm

ViintageJunkii
e

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seeingvoices12 said:

graecophilos said:




Loren said he wrote about 20 songs with MJ (20 out of apparently 70 from Dangerous!)

but as far as I know only two are known - Superfly Sister and Satisfy You??



Yeah....nod those two and :

She got it
work that Body
seven digits
Stay
Pressure
Verdict

total of 8 songs that we know, 12 are missing (unknown) ..lol


So in short, is there a chance these songs will be released? I do remember Loren saying that he'll eventually put the songs out...Maybe "This Is It"? (no pun)
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Reply #38 posted 11/08/09 5:47pm

babybugz

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ViintageJunkiie said:

mimi07 said:



what would ur reaction be if u were like 11 and someone showed how you would be when u are 50


I'm talking about the trials, the things people said about his face, the things people said about him dangling Blanket over the balcony.

Sometimes I don't even associate Michael from the 70's to the michael now lol ,,,too bad there aren't time machines to warn him
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Reply #39 posted 11/08/09 5:51pm

seeingvoices12

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ViintageJunkiie said:

seeingvoices12 said:




Yeah....nod those two and :

She got it
work that Body
seven digits
Stay
Pressure
Verdict

total of 8 songs that we know, 12 are missing (unknown) ..lol


So in short, is there a chance these songs will be released? I do remember Loren saying that he'll eventually put the songs out...Maybe "This Is It"? (no pun)



I'm sure he wanted to share but obviously Sony told him to Shut the hell up and forget about it ...Anything unreleased by Mj is pure gold now, the cash in machine will start in the near future and you will see....


I forgot to add another one:

Man in black

so we know 9 songs , 11 are unknown. lol
MICHAEL JACKSON
R.I.P
مايكل جاكسون للأبد
1958
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Reply #40 posted 11/08/09 6:08pm

mimi07

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"we make our heroes in America only to destroy them"
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Reply #41 posted 11/08/09 6:21pm

Swa

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seeingvoices12 said:

ViintageJunkiie said:



So in short, is there a chance these songs will be released? I do remember Loren saying that he'll eventually put the songs out...Maybe "This Is It"? (no pun)



I'm sure he wanted to share but obviously Sony told him to Shut the hell up and forget about it ...Anything unreleased by Mj is pure gold now, the cash in machine will start in the near future and you will see....


I forgot to add another one:

Man in black

so we know 9 songs , 11 are unknown. lol



He did publish a few on his myspace page - http://www.myspace.com/bloren2
"I'm not human I'm a dove, I'm ur conscience. I am love"
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Reply #42 posted 11/08/09 6:23pm

Swa

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mimi07 said:

Swa said:

The tributes keep on coming.

Check out this truly innovative one:

http://www.australbricks....on-Tribute

Swa


cool do u know where they put it or did they tear it down?


It's up and on the side of a major motorway here in Sydney. Read details here: http://www.australbricks....Art-trade;

Swa
"I'm not human I'm a dove, I'm ur conscience. I am love"
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Reply #43 posted 11/08/09 6:27pm

mimi07

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Swa said:

mimi07 said:



cool do u know where they put it or did they tear it down?


It's up and on the side of a major motorway here in Sydney. Read details here: http://www.australbricks....Art-trade;

Swa

thanks
"we make our heroes in America only to destroy them"
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Reply #44 posted 11/08/09 6:32pm

mimi07

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"we make our heroes in America only to destroy them"
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Reply #45 posted 11/08/09 6:34pm

PurpleDiamond2
009

ViintageJunkiie said:

This Prince/MJ documentary is amazing! I have to agree with what they said about Neverland.

"It [Neverland] allowed him to sort of dwell in his fantasy life. If it wasn't for Neverland, he wouldn't have been able to isolate himself from the world and so many problems resulted at Neverland from Michael's isolation."


OMG THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH FOR POSTING THIS GREAT DOCUMENTARY IT WAS AWESOME! excited

but in the real though i dont think they gave Michael Jackson the justice the credit and honor he deserved and spent only 10 seconds discussing MJ and 10 minutes glorifying and praising Prince and they seemed to talk down alot on MJs success and passed him off as his being inferior to Prince as far as their music and talents go this video was bias and obviously more in favor of Prince than MJ
[Edited 11/8/09 18:35pm]
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Reply #46 posted 11/08/09 6:39pm

ViintageJunkii
e

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PurpleDiamond2009 said:

ViintageJunkiie said:

This Prince/MJ documentary is amazing! I have to agree with what they said about Neverland.

"It [Neverland] allowed him to sort of dwell in his fantasy life. If it wasn't for Neverland, he wouldn't have been able to isolate himself from the world and so many problems resulted at Neverland from Michael's isolation."


OMG THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH FOR POSTING THIS GREAT DOCUMENTARY IT WAS AWESOME! excited

but in the real though i dont think they gave Michael Jackson the justice the credit and honor he deserved and spent only 10 seconds discussing MJ and 10 minutes glorifying and praising Prince and they seemed to talk down alot on MJs success and passed him off as his being inferior to Prince as far as their music and talents go this video was bias and obviously more in favor of Prince than MJ
[Edited 11/8/09 18:35pm]


I saw that a lot also. Michael got a few bits of recognition, but the documentary seemed to be all about Prince, which I had no problem with because I love both of them.
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Reply #47 posted 11/08/09 6:45pm

BoOTyLiCioUs

mimi07 said:


eek
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Reply #48 posted 11/08/09 6:46pm

ViintageJunkii
e

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BoOTyLiCioUs said:

mimi07 said:


eek


I could totally see him singing "Liberian Girl" in that outfit. I always saw Liberian Girl video as a Remember The Time type of video
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Reply #49 posted 11/08/09 6:52pm

PurpleDiamond2
009

ViintageJunkiie said:

PurpleDiamond2009 said:



OMG THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH FOR POSTING THIS GREAT DOCUMENTARY IT WAS AWESOME! excited

but in the real though i dont think they gave Michael Jackson the justice the credit and honor he deserved and spent only 10 seconds discussing MJ and 10 minutes glorifying and praising Prince and they seemed to talk down alot on MJs success and passed him off as his being inferior to Prince as far as their music and talents go this video was bias and obviously more in favor of Prince than MJ
[Edited 11/8/09 18:35pm]


I saw that a lot also. Michael got a few bits of recognition, but the documentary seemed to be all about Prince, which I had no problem with because I love both of them.


basically this video was all about prince and i love them both too but i just expected something a little more neutral in which they talked about the two greatest superstars of the 80s and today and just spend the same amount of time on them and do a little comparing and contrasting i also noticed how they had more of Princes associates up there such as his managers his bandmates even Wendy&Lisa and only 2 people music credits trying the best they can to give MJ credit

where was Quincy Jones? where were all the other associates that were close to MJ at the time? i also feel bad for MJ that he got shot down from Prince like that because prince was just being mean sad but that still doesnt negate the fact that MJ was the greatest and he always will be no matter what anyone says
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Reply #50 posted 11/08/09 6:56pm

bboy87

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ViintageJunkiie said:

PurpleDiamond2009 said:



OMG THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH FOR POSTING THIS GREAT DOCUMENTARY IT WAS AWESOME! excited

but in the real though i dont think they gave Michael Jackson the justice the credit and honor he deserved and spent only 10 seconds discussing MJ and 10 minutes glorifying and praising Prince and they seemed to talk down alot on MJs success and passed him off as his being inferior to Prince as far as their music and talents go this video was bias and obviously more in favor of Prince than MJ
[Edited 11/8/09 18:35pm]


I saw that a lot also. Michael got a few bits of recognition, but the documentary seemed to be all about Prince, which I had no problem with because I love both of them.

I think it's because people never look into Michael's behind the scenes work. They talk about the usual and that's it

Go look at books about Michael. They'll about the same thing (with the exception of For The Record and In The Studio With Michael Jackson)

There's no books about his music and how it was done
"We may deify or demonize them but not ignore them. And we call them genius, because they are the people who change the world."
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Reply #51 posted 11/08/09 6:58pm

ViintageJunkii
e

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bboy87 said:

ViintageJunkiie said:



I saw that a lot also. Michael got a few bits of recognition, but the documentary seemed to be all about Prince, which I had no problem with because I love both of them.

I think it's because people never look into Michael's behind the scenes work. They talk about the usual and that's it

Go look at books about Michael. They'll about the same thing (with the exception of For The Record and In The Studio With Michael Jackson)

There's no books about his music and how it was done


But in all honesty, what can be said about how Michaels music was done? I wish Michael would have allowed us inside the studio when he recorded a lot of his stuff. I think it would have made great footage
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Reply #52 posted 11/08/09 7:05pm

babybugz

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bboy87 said:

ViintageJunkiie said:



I saw that a lot also. Michael got a few bits of recognition, but the documentary seemed to be all about Prince, which I had no problem with because I love both of them.

I think it's because people never look into Michael's behind the scenes work. They talk about the usual and that's it

Go look at books about Michael. They'll about the same thing (with the exception of For The Record and In The Studio With Michael Jackson)

There's no books about his music and how it was done

His personal life overshadowed it mostly
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Reply #53 posted 11/08/09 7:21pm

BoOTyLiCioUs

babybugz said:

bboy87 said:


I think it's because people never look into Michael's behind the scenes work. They talk about the usual and that's it

Go look at books about Michael. They'll about the same thing (with the exception of For The Record and In The Studio With Michael Jackson)

There's no books about his music and how it was done

His personal life overshadowed it mostly

neutral
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Reply #54 posted 11/08/09 7:24pm

PurpleDiamond2
009

babybugz said:

bboy87 said:


I think it's because people never look into Michael's behind the scenes work. They talk about the usual and that's it

Go look at books about Michael. They'll about the same thing (with the exception of For The Record and In The Studio With Michael Jackson)

There's no books about his music and how it was done

His personal life overshadowed it mostly


FANTASIC!!! excited

al right yall if you wanna see some REAL credit justice and honor given MJ check this out! excited



NO prince documentary can top that! excited
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Reply #55 posted 11/08/09 7:25pm

snowmt

good analysis of Michael's dancing prowess by professionals:

http://www.washingtonpost...04257.html


The Dancing: That Precision, Grace -- and a Wicked Groove
By Sarah Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 27, 2009

Michael Jackson and the moonwalk will be forever linked, the man inseparable from his slipperiest and subtlest move. It's no wonder that surreal step became his signature. What more perfect expression could there be of this most elusive celebrity, of the mystery that has always surrounded him? In the thundering melee of a live concert, amid a singularly strange life, Jackson would underscore his cool remove with a shift into reverse, coasting backward across the stage, step by gliding step, as if on a cushion of air. With his dancing, Jackson left behind everything mundane, messy and predictable.

"I don't know who you could really put next to him," said ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov, reached yesterday in Madrid. "To imitate somebody like Michael Jackson is impossible. Why bother? You just relax and admire."

Jackson was a perfectionist, and could relate to other perfectionists. Baryshnikov got to know him through Elizabeth Taylor, who would "drag him to see me dance," Baryshnikov said, when he was at American Ballet Theatre and later when performing in the White Oak Dance Project, his modern-dance company. They would talk about ballet -- Jackson had a lot of questions, he recalled, "like a 12-year-old" -- and he would ask about working with choreographers. He told Baryshnikov that choreographers would suggest ideas to him, but that he created his own dances. What Baryshnikov remembers most about Jackson, he said, was "not even his turns or his grabbing his crotch. Just his simple, bouncy walk across the stage, that was what was most beautiful and arresting, swinging his hips, kicking his heel forward. That's to me what he is: that superior confidence in his body as a dancer. You wanted to say, 'Wow, this guy, what a cat; he can really move in his own way.' "
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That walk was his own, but Jackson absorbed some of his other moves from his forebears. He didn't invent the moonwalk, for instance -- tap dancers stretching back at least to the 1940s thrilled audiences with what was called the backslide -- but he perfected it. He didn't invent that swift twist of a spin, or the art of punctuating a lyric or a backbeat with a punch of his pelvis. But as with every other element of his incomparable showmanship, he perfected those moves and made them his own. No pop star brought dance to the stage the way Jackson did. Not for him to draw aside and let backup dancers take the spotlight while he crooned. He was always the soloist, a Gene Kelly breaking out of a song to tell us a story with his steps.

What was that story?

If his life played out on an operatic scale, Jackson's art was at its essence exquisitely personal. As the Jackson 5's kid singer, he paid sweet tribute to James Brown, mimicking so many of his moves -- the tight, prancing, swiveling footwork and the spin that started with a craning neck and the sharp crank of the shoulders. Dancing came astonishingly easy to him, and that joy in moving, that honey-smooth musical response, was as much a part of his appeal as his girlish voice. But as his fame grew, the abandon you saw on "American Bandstand," on the early "ABC" and "I Want You Back" performances, dropped away. The dance style that Jackson honed into a corporeal autograph is one not of physical or emotional release -- it's not flashy or overblown. It's a statement of fierce, obsessive control, and in the way only the best of the best can do it, he made it look supremely easy.

Not that Jackson couldn't do flashy. In a typical number -- take "Billie Jean," for example -- he snaps and shudders with a force that could transfer up to the highest stadium rows. He also had a pantherlike grace, the square shoulders of an athlete carried serenely, with a walk like poured syrup. His understanding of costume glamour -- the jackets that nipped in at the waist, setting off those lean hips and legs -- and his embrace of the flamboyant marked him as one of the great showmen of the ages, but his moves set him apart on another level still.

He tapped into the zeitgeist with his songs, forging a reconciliation of everything -- race, sex and even age. (The boy who danced like a man became the man who somehow still lived like a boy.) But if his songs were pure pop, cemented to their disco-soul-ballad-shake-your-booty era, his dancing was timeless. You read his humanity in it. And his strength. We'll likely never know what motivated his weirder choices -- the surgeries, the home life, the child companions -- but nowhere did his inner life become more visible than in his dancing.

Did fame straitjacket him? Look at the video for "Dangerous," where he leads an army of look-alike Company Men, in their severe suits and narrow ties. He's a marvel of precision, joints popping and snapping like machinery. Somehow, it brings Irish step dancing to mind, the upper body rigidly repressed while the legs soar. Jackson added his own twist: those watch-my-crotch moves. The show nearly always centered on the crotch, even if he wasn't wearing a golden codpiece. Jackson has had an immeasurable influence on countless pop stars; among today's hitmakers, Ne-Yo and Usher come first to mind. But the essential difference is in the movement quality. Usher is more relaxed, with those rolling shoulders. He's comfortable in his own skin.

You couldn't say that about Michael Jackson. He looked easy in his youth, but later there was only a managed ease. Or maybe it's that with Jackson comfort came to mean focus, control, physical assurance. You saw it in the simplest moves, like that skimming walk. He could turn it on and turn it off, but he never let us in. Inscrutable, silent, he has always escaped us, as surely as the moonwalk pulled him away, head down, sliding backward into darkness.
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Reply #56 posted 11/08/09 7:36pm

snowmt

Another analysis in NY times:

http://www.nytimes.com/20...ssess.html

His Moves Expressed as Much as His Music

By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: June 26, 2009

Michael Jackson will be remembered as a great and widely imitated mover. Other things about him will be remembered too, but it is amazing how many of them are apparent in his dancing. The sweet boy, the angry dissident and the weirdly glamorous star are all there; and so is the androgyne who gives off conflicting male/female signals in the course of a single number. You can see what he has learned from the urban tensions of “West Side Story,” the disco craze of “Saturday Night Fever,” the jazz-based choreography of Bob Fosse and from a line of divas from Judy Garland to Diana Ross. (There’s even a little Audrey Hepburn there.)

Among the vast array offered by YouTube of clips of his performances, “Michael Jackson’s Best Dance Moves” strikes me as fairly gruesome. It is what it implies: a collage of separate moves arranged to break Mr. Jackson’s work up into tricks and special effects, all fitted to a single song. Even in his best work, Mr. Jackson relied too often on known stunts: the crotch-grabbing and moonwalking are just the most famous of these, and on too many occasions the audience seems to be waiting for him to do them.

It’s no secret that Fred Astaire — who during the 20th century was widely revered among all dance artists as its greatest dancer — singled out the young Jackson for praise. But Astaire died in 1987, and it’s hard to believe that he would have applauded the later Mr. Jackson without extensive reservations. Watch Mr. Jackson live at the Super Bowl halftime show in 1993, wearing his trademark dark glasses and ponytail with loose locks falling forward over the brow, starting out in quasi-military uniform, and you see he does everything the audience wants with skill, energy and almost no spontaneity. Even the anger seems synthetic now.

But to watch “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” (1979) is to be amazed at just how much charm the 20-year-old Mr. Jackson had, and the charm gets more infectious as the dancing proceeds. You begin by noticing the pelvis, doing its characteristic pulsation, and you recognize how close you are to the world of John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.” Fairly soon, you take in the heels, or rather the action of the insteps that keeps rhythmically lifting the heels off the floor, and then, in various ways, you see the ripple of motion between feet and those very slender hips.

But Mr. Jackson was an upper-body dancer too: there’s a marvelous moment here when he tilts back and stays there. Now go to “Billie Jean” in Motown’s 25th-anniversary celebration (1983). You can see that already everything is much more choreographed, both in the bad sense of unspontaneous and the good sense of dance structure. Most of the time his dancing is so aflame you don’t feel any lack of freshness, and he’s so alert that you hardly have time to laugh — though I think you ought, happily — at the way his busy pelvis keeps hoisting his pants up and revealing his off-white socks. (The changing expanse of socks becomes part of the rhythm.)

You don’t have time because he gives you so much to look at. There are few popular dancers today who keep drawing your attention to footwork: He was always one of them. Here in “Billie Jean” he turns the feet in and out; he raises right and left feet in alternation; he isolates the action of one leg and then the other; he goes rhythmically knock-kneed: It’s riveting. Later, when he jumps and stamps, those moves are dance effects, always part of the rhythm. And meanwhile, until late in the song, he never stops mouthing the lyrics. He’s always intense, and still occasionally vulnerable. The spring he can get out of those feet is very exciting: you can see how much impetus he gets out of them — turning in and out, they sometimes propel him backward — which is just a foretaste of what’s to follow.

Mr. Jackson was just 24 in 1983, and the androgyny was already evident. When he shows us the debonair angle at which he can wear a hat, he’s much more like Garland than anyone else; when he splays his hands and bends his knees in jazz effects, he recalls the chic archness of Hepburn in “Funny Face,” and toward the end those feet of his go right up onto point. And in between he gives us some early hints of his later macho crotch-grabbing.

Yet all this is not to mention the moment in the “Billie Jean” Motown show when he stops singing and sends the audience, justifiably, wild: the moonwalking, whereby he slides briskly backward while giving the impression of walking emphatically forward. He doesn’t overdo it — about five paces, on two separate occasions — and it’s a thrill, both times. By the end, you’re amazed at this marvelous young mass of contradictions.

There are several other Jackson clips worth rewatching. In “The Way You Make Me Feel” — a number perched right on the edge of absurdity in the way Jacko half-menaces a girl in the need to prove his sexual desire — one transfer of weight from one foot to the other is razor-sharp and breathtakingly fast, and there are other pure-dance moments that keep wiping any laughter off your face. Here and in several numbers — actually, this is still true at the Super Bowl halftime show in 1993 — Mr. Jackson is one of those rare dancers with whom you feel you’d pay just to watch him walk. He can do it with all kinds of different dynamics, and sometimes with a rushing impetus that’s irresistible.

The later Jackson didn’t lose all those dance gifts. But he diluted them, and he hid them beneath his increasing need to hide the vulnerable-boy aspect in him. It is easy to dislike many of the later videos: even as early as the late ’80s, the kind of drama he puts onto screen often looks fakey, and isn’t always rescued by his skill as a performer. But the gifts were sensational, and the way he honed them was, at first, superb. Astaire’s praise was more than deserved.
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Reply #57 posted 11/08/09 7:40pm

bboy87

avatar

ViintageJunkiie said:

bboy87 said:


I think it's because people never look into Michael's behind the scenes work. They talk about the usual and that's it

Go look at books about Michael. They'll about the same thing (with the exception of For The Record and In The Studio With Michael Jackson)

There's no books about his music and how it was done


But in all honesty, what can be said about how Michaels music was done? I wish Michael would have allowed us inside the studio when he recorded a lot of his stuff. I think it would have made great footage

A great deal. There's alot of stuff that's just coming out

Info about the unreleased Motown album in '74 (which evolved into Dancing Machine), the classical album he worked on after Off The Wall, the making of OTW, Thriller, Bad, Dangerous, and the other solo albums, the Jacksons period, the Stevie sessions in '73-74, the evolution of songs like Billie Jean, Bad, Thriller, Dangerous, Black or White, the Gamble and Huff years, the stuff he did with Bryan Loren in '89 and '90....

everything gets glossed over....
"We may deify or demonize them but not ignore them. And we call them genius, because they are the people who change the world."
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Reply #58 posted 11/08/09 8:00pm

BoOTyLiCioUs

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Reply #59 posted 11/08/09 8:04pm

snowmt

Another review on MJ and another dancing master passed in July:

http://thedancecurrentfea...son.html#0

Interviews and commentary published by The Dance Current.
Friday, August 21, 2009
First Last Thoughts on Michael Jackson and Pina Bausch
By Seika Boye

When pop icon Michael Jackson and German choreographer Pina Bausch died within five days of one another in late June, my Facebook homepage was suddenly filled with the voices of dancers. The messages were mournful, celebratory, contemplative – thankful. YouTube clips of Bausch and her work recall a master whose vision so many in contemporary dance spend a career chasing – still. Footage of Jackson takes us into the music, the dancing, again, as good as the first time – still.

Hide

As people asked “And now Pina?” following the news of Jackson’s death, the two became locked in a strange association. An unlikely duo in life, their deaths so close to one another illuminated them, together, mega icons in the world of dance, whose influence and inspiration shifted, slid and cracked our ways of moving and seeing movement. Where would we be without them? And I wondered, what, if anything, can we see looking at them together?

First a few words from Anna …

Two reviews, written in the eighties by New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff, help to encapsulate the impact of Bausch and Jackson at the heights of their careers.

About Bausch in October 1985, Kisselgoff wrote, “Like the Pied Piper, Pina Bausch is literally followed by followers – in this case, young dancers pleading to join her West German company. The impact left by the 1984 United States debut of the Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal, which is appearing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in a return engagement, has been deeply felt.”

Of Michael Jackson during his 1988 Bad tour: “… look past the occasional suggestive gesture and rotating pelvis, marvel at the backward gliding moonwalk and the isolated body parts – seemingly set into motion on their own – and you see a virtuoso dancer who uses movement for its own sake …. Yes, Michael Jackson is an avant-garde dancer, and his dances could be called abstract. Like Merce Cunningham, he shows us that movement has a value of its own and that what we read into it is provided by the theatrical context around it.”




Influence and Inspiration

To make sense of a lingering need to reflect upon Bausch and Jackson, I spoke in person with Toronto-based scholar and dance artist Darcey Callison and dance artist Ame Henderson and briefly on-line with improvising dancer Aimeé Dawn Robinson.

I began by asking whether or not Callison, Henderson and Robinson have been influenced or inspired by one or both of the recently departed.

Henderson, noting the big difference between influence and inspiration, stated, “Sure, I’ve been influenced by them both, it’s impossible not to be, but in terms of seeing mimetic influence repeated in my own work, no. Inspired? I have definitely been inspired – in terms of being given permission to do one’s own work …. Especially with Jackson, in his utter completeness of the way he worked as a performer … and, even more so than Pina, in every way he cannot be explained.”

Unlike Robinson, who was a young girl at the beginning of the eighties, listening to records, watching videos and “being inspired by Jackson’s intoxicating lack of inhibition”, Callison was then a money-strapped independent dancer. A personal TV was a luxury, one he did not have, so he missed the height of the Jackson craze. His artistic interests were also in a different field. He said of his community at the time, “In the eighties particularly, I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t trying to emulate Pina, especially independent choreographers. There weren’t any videos but she visited Toronto in the early 1980s and performed Café Müller and The Rite of Spring at the Ryerson Theatre. Her influence was huge. I didn’t see the performance, but I heard about it.”

The Rite of Spring, Bausch’s celebrated 1975 work, which Callison later accessed on film and saw live, is, he says, “inspiring in terms of being uncompromising. It’s not narrative or literal, but you know these characters … and more than that, I think it’s about a struggle to bring life into the world … It was a seminal work, like Kurt Jooss’ The Green Table. It touches something so deep. It’s so visceral; it is so much a dance.”



Dance-Theatre and The Music Video

“How people put ballets together now is very different from what people were doing in the eighties.” Callison comments, “The images that people are willing to put together on stage at the same time, the movement vocabulary that they’re willing to put inside of a ballet, you would not have seen that on stage in the eighties. Pina Bausch opened that up. People are just more interested in personal movement, theatrical movement, idiosyncratic movement.”

As Bausch revolutionized contemporary dance and brought what we know today as dance-theatre to the stage, Jackson was rocking MTV. His record sales and the popularity of his ground breaking videos for singles from his Thriller album gave programmers no choice but to play them, at a time when most of the artists being given air time were white. The videos for Thriller, Beat It and Billy Jean gave the music video new power and consequently changed the nature of the recording industry.

Though their performance spaces and genres were different, the impact of Jackson’s and Bausch’s experimentation, risk-taking and imagination makes it impossible to look at a trajectory of dance on stage and television from the mid-1970s onward without looking to them as essential to understanding the progression of dance in the last quarter of the twentieth century.



Look and Learn

Although Darcey Callison missed Michael Jackson in the eighties, he is well versed in the career and work of the pop star. About five years into his teaching career within York University’s Department of Dance, Callison encountered a student in a survey course for non-dancers who was completely self taught and had learned to dance entirely from Michael Jackson videos. Shocked and inspired, Callison realized he needed to learn more about the singer and in the process discovered that many, many, of his students had similar stories, or had at least been drawn to dance by Jackson. “I think his work is a real culminating point for dance identities, for the joy of dancing for a generation,” Callison says.

Henderson recalls being introduced to Bausch for the first time in a history course while an undergraduate student in the mid 1990s: “I was totally enraptured by her. I think it was really the beginning of a relationship I’ve had to many, many artists that is other than through seeing their work live … A lot of the references that I have are through text and images. This is interesting in terms of legacy. What are the means that we have to access the work or artists?”

The relationship to both Bausch and Jackson that the majority of fans and followers have, in Canada at least, is through film and television, photographs and text. Translating and communicating dance in person, being able to truly affect and move the viewer, is a lifetime’s challenge. Succeeding at this through dance on screen is another challenge altogether. Watching Jackson and Bausch in succession I asked, what is it?

Abandon, passion, necessity, belief – joy in performance – even when the theme may be tragic? One is literally moved to move. Robinson reflects, “We carry our memories inside of our bodies …. My happiest times as a performing dancer are those little moments when I have a flicker of the feeling of dancing to MJ in the basement.” Henderson comments: “It’s like a kinesthetic influence or exchange. It’s as if they’re dancing for their lives – always.”



Reading Repetition

Beyond the breadth of their influence, the artists share other common ground. The use of repetition and both artists’ preoccupations with expressing genuine qualities of humanity are among the motifs noted in both of their work.

Repetition was a theme discussed in the Kisselgoff articles referenced earlier. She quoted Bausch, “‘Repetition is not repetition,’ she says. ‘The same action makes you feel something completely different by the end. I repeat something and after three times, the person should react.’” And about Jackson she wrote, “Notice how many times Mr. Jackson takes your breath away with his rapid-fire flat-footed turns, his staccato gestures, his burst of movement from any part of the body and you will see that the steps and sequences are often repeated. But their rhythms and phrasing are changed along with the studded jackets; the words shower the same dances with a torrent of varying emotion while laser beams light up the imagined sky.”

Both artists also faced extreme criticism. Jackson’s sexual gestures and morphing physical appearance became more talked about than his music and Bausch was harshly criticized for muddying “pure dance” and for being inaccessible.

When I asked Callison about the trajectory between students being inspired by Jackson and students learning to appreciate Bausch he says, “I have tried very hard not to make a distinction between so called high and low art. I want students to go with what inspires them … One of my first challenges is getting students to understand that they are creating dances for the stage and not television. That is a first step in terms of trajectory.”

He continues, “I think the role of a BFA is to get students to understand that what the body communicates has ramifications.” He notes the overtly sexualized nature of video dancing today and the resistance students have to even discussing or acknowledging what these movements are saying. “Michael Jackson certainly did not make it easier. What students can learn from Bausch, if they are willing, is that there is a different impulse and way of putting things on stage. With Michael Jackson the hit is easy … Sometimes with Bausch you need to view things a second or third time. I think the window into what Bausch does comes from a sustained training in improvisation.” But, he realizes that it’s not for everyone, and he has great respect for the role of the entertainer. “I’d even love to be one in another life,” he says.











Post

In the end, how does it matter that these artists have left us? Does it change the way we view their individual works, their bodies of work?

“I think the aura of an art work exists outside of the artist – our relationship with the art work is different than our relationship to the artist,” reflects Henderson. Will we see a resurgence of their influence with the swell of interest in the wake of their deaths? “I like the word re-calibrate,” says Henderson, “How do we make something make sense? Is it possible that, with the passing of these people, that their work has a different kind of sensibility in terms of how it is understood? How do we track forward and backward in time in terms of tracing their influence? My boyfriend says the musician Steve Earle talks about preparing for a post-Dylan world. There is something about the ‘post’. What are we moving towards?”

Post-Jackson. Post-Bausch. With the height of their influence having been over twenty years ago, can we already see where they have taken us? Will new reflections following their deaths take us to new places? In mourning those who inspired us artistically, is reflecting upon where they took us in the first place the ultimate homage, or is there more to it?

I remember encountering Michael Jackson, and dancing with him via the screen. Little him and little me, I wanted to feel what he was feeling and so I moved my body in an attempt. I was addicted and dancing became my life, like so many others. Somewhere around the age of twenty, with MJ in the far recesses of my mind, in a stuffy, poorly lit classroom choreographer and teacher Anna Blewchamp dimmed the lights and pressed play on a video of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheatrer Wuppertal. I don’t recall the work, but I recall the feeling. I think it is best described as relief. Dance could say more, move more, evoke more, than I had known up to then. I very likely cried.

In an homage to his artistic mentor and inspiration, Bob Dylan himself wrote Last Thoughts on Woodie Guthrie. It begins:

When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb
When you think you’re too old, too young, too smart or too dumb
When yer laggin’ behind an’ losin’ yer pace
In a slow-motion crawl of life’s busy race


… you get the point. And Dylan’s point, I think, is that Guthrie was, is, a destination. And so too are Bausch and Jackson, still. Their deaths have caused us to look back, reflect, re-calibrate. But I suggest we take it a step further. Let’s look back again in a few months, and in a few years. Let’s look at them with fresh eyes. Let’s allow how we change to impact the way we see them and maybe the way we see them will change too. And it will be like seeing them, again, for the first time.

Toward the end of writing this article the passing of the great Merce Cunningham was announced in the news. He was very present in the interviews and in the writing. He is another destination unto himself. Maybe I’ll see you there.

Seika Boye is a freelance writer, editor, marketing/communications consultant and dance artist. She is a former department editor with The Dance Current magazine and has been affiliated with Dance Collection Danse since 2004.
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Forums > Music: Non-Prince > Discuss Everything MJ - Part 5