Susan Fast, Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada. Her research interests include representations of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, constructions of self and other, performance and performativity, and geopolitical violence/conflict in contemporary popular music. She is author of In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music.
In line with her academic interests of popular music and performance, Fast has chosen to write about Michael Jackson’s Dangerous for her 33 1/3 installment. Read on to discover why she gravitated toward Dangerous over some of MJ’s more popular albums, and what she thinks is missing from the oeuvre of Michael Jackson research.
What, in particular, drew you to writing about this album? Susan Fast: I’ve been wanting to write about this album for years now and whenever I’ve thought about it, I’ve imagined it as a book in the 33 1/3 series.
It’s the right vehicle for this project. Dangerous just seems to me like such a pivotal album in Michael Jackson’s career–I know most would peg Thriller as his musical pinnacle (although some would say that honor belongs to Off the Wall); Bad was the first album he toured as a solo artist, so that’s certainly an important milestone, but some feel that *Bad* was not as good an album as Thriller. I think most feel that by the time Dangerous came out, Jackson’s best work was behind him, but I disagree. What makes Dangerous so intriguing to me is that Jackson seems finally to inhabit adulthood on this record. He deals with weighty subjects, including love and lust; he gives us a darker, less childishly optimistic vision of the world; and he often seems at an emotional breaking point. He does this with less theatricality–which is not to say less musical excess–than he displays on earlier records.
One review of the record, by Jon Dolan, compared it to Nirvana’s Nevermind. Dolan wrote, “Jackson’s dread, depression and wounded-child sense of good and evil have more in common with Kurt Cobain than anyone took the time to notice.” While we’re making ambitious statements about this record—pace rock aficionados (and I count myself among you)—I’ve long toyed with the idea of Dangerous as Jackson’s Achtung Baby, in many ways a similarly brooding, vulnerable leap into the breach. It isn’t only lyrics that take Jackson down that road, but new ways of using his voice, the embracing of new musical styles, including hip hop, and a more pronounced allegiance to the sound of black music, past and present, than his earlier work. I see Dangerous as a concept album through which Jackson explores ideas of the postmodern, of love, sexuality, spirituality, and the future. To have the opportunity to explore this underrated album in a book length study is really exciting.
Who will you be reaching out to during the writing process? Why? SF: My goal is to offer a close reading of the album; to suggest a way of hearing it that links to Jackson’s public image and to the cultural moment in which the record was produced. Since there’s been so little of this kind of critical analysis of Jackson’s work, I really want to make that the focus (much in the way that Carl Wilson made a broadly-based cultural analysis in his 33 1/3 book on Celine Dion his focus; it’s my favorite book in the series). But inevitably when I’m writing, there comes a point at which I have a question that only one of the musicians, or someone else close to the process can answer. This happened last year when I was writing an article on Jackson for a special issue of the journal Popular Music and Society: Part of the essay was about his lead guitarist Jennifer Batten, and I ended up connecting with her so that I could confirm some factual information, including whether it was MJ who designed her crazy costumes (the answer is yes, he did). So that may happen here. Joe Vogel’s interviewed a lot of the people Jackson worked closely with to write his book Man in the Music and Jackson’s longtime engineer, Bruce Swedien, published a book a couple of years ago that includes a lot of interesting technical information about the recording sessions, so much of that ground has been covered.
READ MORE: http://333sound.com/2013/04/24/the-33-13-author-qa-susan-fast/
Source: 333sound / MJ-Upbeat.com / Thank you for sharing Samantha Speechless
MJ is the king. Every time i listen to his songs i feel as he is still alive. Unquestionably one of the most significant pop music stars ever been born!