It’s taking a few days to get back on schedule and back into this time zone after nearly two weeks on vacation.
Thanks to Fal for her provocative guest commentary which kept readers’ occupied here on the blog while I struggled to catch up on reading and resting there in Hawaii. Cough. Cough. It was a struggle. I managed to break the spine of a new novel and lose myself in it while on vacation: Mother of the Believers by Kamran Pasha’s, a tale of the events and conflicts surrounding the beginning years of Islam as told from the point of view of Aisha the second wife of the Prophet Muhammad. Got another hundred pages of the book to finish before I launch into a commentary. Mind you, I’m bristling with thoughts and impressions.
In the meantime, time for a trip down memory land. In light of all the feasting going on surrounding Michael Jackson and his death, I thought I’d take this time to introduce the younguns’ here on the blog to someone Jackson idolized and drew inspiration from. He was one of the two entertainers (the other being the legendary James Brown) whose singing and entertainment style had enormous impact on Jackson the star-struck boy sitting before his parent’s black and white tv.
Enter Mr. Jackie Wilson (1934-1984).
While I remember swaying to a few of his tunes when I was girl, Jackie Wilson was more a heart throb to the women in my mother’s generation. I remember the women from my neighborhood gathering in our living room to watch him on the black and white television with his processed pompador and leg tight pants singing, sweating, pulsating with sensuality. I was still too young to understand what all the sexual fuss was about at the time.
Although I gotta admit watching this video of Wilson with his falsetto tenor singing one of his signature songs “Lonely Teardrops” — a performance that dates sometime in the late 50’s or early 60s– I think I can understand now why women fanned themselves with their dress tails standing there in our living room watching Wilson perform and why they stumbled back to their dreary lives and tired husbands with faraway smiles on their faces. It takes watching Jackie Wilson perform a song like “Higher and Higher” twirling, flipping, and diving, throwing the mike around without missing a note to really see his influence upon the young Michael Jackson. Wilson knew how to entertain. Says Rolling Stone, “Jackie Wilson was one of the premier black vocalists and performers of the late ’50s and the ’60s. No other singer of his generation so perfectly combined James Brown’s rough, sexy style and Sam Cooke’s smooth, gospel-polished pop.” Wilson’s career came to an end as a result of a fall he suffered during one of his performance (a heart attack sent him over the edge) which left him in a coma and vegetative state for nine years before his death.
Sometimes it’s good to remember that great performers do not emerge ex nihilio, but that many of their innovations are not innovations at all, but are lines, steps, sounds, and unfinished thoughts of others who in their day were equally great even though now long forgotten.



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I am deeply troubled by the buffoonery of the 2009 Black Entertainment Television Award Show where “blackness” guaranteed BET’s ownership of honoring Michael J. Jackson’s life. Of course, there is an endless laundry list of technical, sexist, homophobic, and simply tone death performances that I could blog about. However, the most compelling issue for me is that we witnessed consumption at “it’s finest” where Jamie Foxx unabashedly highlighted his many upcoming projects and the beauty of his voice, where every five seconds large digital placards of sponsorship appeared before our eyes beseeching us to buy their wares, where Joe Jackson plugs the revival of his singing career, where the infamous golden arches tell our children that they should dream of working at McDonald’s when they “become big kids,” and where we the viewing public further the cannibalization process of Michael Jackson by not turning our televisions off in righteous indignation because consciously or unconsciously we enjoy the thrill of consuming flesh . . . the gossip, the speculations, the betrayals, the “sins,” and yes “if it bleeds then it leads” or in the case of the BET Award Show if it stereotypes black people then it sales.

