Michael Jackson: Why was the best singer-dancer in the history of popular music chosen?
The late King of Pop was an accomplished and inventive dancer for more than 40 years, between 1969 and 2009.
Michael Jackson (1958-2009), in addition to being a gifted singer and songwriter, was an extraordinary dancer who began to excel on the dance floor and on stage since his childhood, when he was only eight years old and imitated the Tap movements of some black artists. until becoming - being only an infant - in the singer and main dancer of The Jackson Five, the group that he had with his four older brothers.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the boy Michael Jackson was already hinting that he was going to become the most famous pop artist and dancer of his time. Rolling Stone magazine described the young Michael in his time as a "prodigy with overwhelming musical gifts who quickly emerged as the main attraction and lead singer of the group."
After officially beginning his solo career in 1979 with the album "Off The Wall", one year after playing the role of Scarecrow in the movie "The Wizard" -new version of the musical "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) -, Michael Jackson began to explore more freely his innate talent as a dancer, as hinted at in the video clip for the song “Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough,” where elegantly dressed in a tailcoat, he recalled the funky moves that had brought him to life. made famous on the Jackson Five.
After the release of "Thriller" (1982), the album that would become the best-selling album of all time, Michael Jackson would become the most popular dancer of his time, especially thanks to the innovative choreography displayed in his concerts live and, above all, in the now mythical video clips of the songs "Beat it" and "Thriller", where the future King of Pop appeared dancing with two rival gangs of gangsters and a group of horrifying zombies, respectively.
In the 1983 television special special "Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever," produced and broadcast to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of that legendary American record label, Michael Jackson, dressed in a black sequined jacket that had been loaned to him by his mother, a silver T-shirt, black pants and loafers, a glove covered by 1200 hand-sewn rhinestones and striking white socks, would achieve definitive status of legend thanks to a legendary presentation where, performing the song “Billie Jean”, he showed for the first time to the world his famous dance pass called "Moonwalk" ("moonwalk"), a musical step that consisted of a series of steps sliding one foot after another without taking them off the ground, in such a way that the optical effect of sliding forward, while the singer was actually scrolling backward.
After that mythical musical number, which barely lasted a few seconds and in which the singer literally drove the audience crazy, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates would write that “Michael Jackson was God, but not only in terms of his size and power, but as for his mystery ... in how children listened to adults talk about him in terms of legend and tradition and in how he produced miraculous works: Michael Jackson mediated gang wars, Michael Jackson was king of the zombies, Michael Jackson stepped on the ground and the stones became light, Michael Jackson walked forward, but in reality he was moving backward. "
In his next album "Bad" (1987), the King of Pop would confirm his status and prestige as a gifted dancer with the video clips of the songs "Bad", where he again appeared dancing with gang members, but this time in the New York Subway ; "The way you make me feel" and, especially, in the song "Smooth Criminal", where Michael Jackson patented a new musical step where he defied the law of gravity by leaning 45 degrees, thanks to special shoes and optimal physical condition .
In 1988, the legendary Hollywood dancer Fred Astaire died, who before dying said that he did not want to leave this world without knowing who his successor would be, but after seeing Michael dancing, he understood that he had finally found someone to take his dance post. . "Thank you, Michael," Astaire would say to the King of Pop before he died. Until the day of his death, which occurred on June 25, 2009 when Michael Jackson was 50 years old, the singer would continue to exhibit an unmatched talent when dancing and staging the choreographies of his songs live. Although he had started dancing from a very young age imitating the great Tap artists, as he grew up he evolved to eventually patent his own style of dance, today imitated to death by thousands of followers around the world.
The specialists, referring to the innate ability of Michael Jackson as a dancer, did not hesitate to describe him as a natural talent. The specialist and researcher of Cuban musical theater Orlando Taquechel, in an interview with the newspaper "Reforma", affirmed that Michael Jackson "had a great personality and a very strong energy to move ... he is a very light dancer, very precise, with an extraordinary sense of rhythm despite not having an academic dance training ... his stage ability is such that he could be considered an excellent jazz dancer, since he integrates within his execution all the elements that characterize this type of dance, such as the isolation of body parts ”.
According to Taquechel, Michael Jackson's first dance influence “comes from James Brown, which can be clearly seen in the video made in 1968 by the Jacksons Five during their audition for the Motown label, which was characterized by representing street musical movements, slightly stylized ”. The decisive turn in the career of Michael Jackson, according to Taquechel, would take place in 1983 thanks to the song "Beat it", a popular single that upon entering the MTV video channel - created in 1981 - broke with the image of the station "characterized like rock for whites ”.
"The success of 'Beat it' was such that it opened the way for black artists and imposed the video with a plot, something like a mini-musical, heir to the musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. In this way, new choreographers appear, among them the most important in Jackson's career: Michael Peters, whose main skill was to make rock stars look like trained dancers. Thanks to Peters, Michael Jackson went from Motown-style routines to more complex choreographic work, something the artist would never abandon. The remarkable thing is that Michael Jackson was not only a gifted dancer, but a very good choreographer. This is why he appeared in the credits of many videos and live performances as a choreographer. For me, indisputably the choreographer is not only the individual who does the steps, but who contributes the ideas to develop them ”.
In this new millennium, the music magazine Rolling Stone, who was rather apathetic about Michael Jackson's musical career in the past decades, organized a vote to choose the "best musician and dancer of all time" and the undisputed winner was the King of Pop, who on this list appeared supported by artists such as Britney Spears, James Brown, Mick Jagger, Lady Gaga, Prince, Madonna and Janet Jackson. According to the publication, Michael Jackson comfortably prevailed in this vote thanks to his original and inventive choreographies and his unforgettable passage "Moonwalk" premiered in 1983.
As published by Rolling Stone magazine, “It should come as no surprise that the King of Pop won this poll by a significant margin. Michael Jackson's superhuman level of talent extended to a mysterious and utterly natural gift for dance. On top of possessing extraordinary grace, Jackson's was also wildly innovative. At the presentation of the Motown 25 special on March 25, 1983, the King of Pop debuted the legend of the 'moonwalk', a backward sliding movement that would become his signature and one of the most famous dance techniques e imitated from the 20th century ”. Video of Michael Jackson: selection of his music and the best dance steps of him in 40 years of career (1969-2009):
