II. Michael Jackson: From Soul to the King of Pop
Passport
Teaser
Thriller and Black or White: two films, one director, eight years apart. The story of how a song stopped ending where the sound ends.
About the project
THE ICON is a literary project by Iskandar Kadyrov, written as creative nonfiction and cultural essay. Seven stories about seven people from different fields of culture — music, cinema, art, architecture and fashion. Each hero is seen not through a full biography but through two moments in which their ability to recognize, create or change a cultural language becomes especially clear. This is neither an encyclopedia nor a ranking of greatness. It is seven authorial studies of the mechanism by which a human image becomes a cultural sign.
They are an image that needs no translation.
Hashtags
#TheIcon #BeyondTranslation #MichaelJackson #IskandarKadyrov #LiteraryUniverse #ArchitectureOfMeanings #LiteraryHauteCouture #CreativeNonfiction #CulturalCode
- Literary project: THE ICON
- Author: Iskandar Kadyrov
- Age rating: 18+
- Story: II. “Michael Jackson: From Soul to the King of Pop”
- Format: Seven heroes · Seven stories · Seven cultural codes
- Genre: Creative nonfiction, cultural essay, literary portrait
- Project slogan: BEYOND TRANSLATION
- Concept: An image that becomes a cultural code and goes on living beyond its time, its language and its author
Teaser
Thriller and Black or White: two films, one director, eight years apart. The story of how a song stopped ending where the sound ends.
About the project
THE ICON is a literary project by Iskandar Kadyrov, written as creative nonfiction and cultural essay. Seven stories about seven people from different fields of culture — music, cinema, art, architecture and fashion. Each hero is seen not through a full biography but through two moments in which their ability to recognize, create or change a cultural language becomes especially clear. This is neither an encyclopedia nor a ranking of greatness. It is seven authorial studies of the mechanism by which a human image becomes a cultural sign.
They are an image that needs no translation.
Hashtags
#TheIcon #BeyondTranslation #MichaelJackson #IskandarKadyrov #LiteraryUniverse #ArchitectureOfMeanings #LiteraryHauteCouture #CreativeNonfiction #CulturalCode
II. “Michael Jackson: From Soul to the King of Pop”
I — BLACK OR WHITE
November 14, 1991. On a single evening, screens in more than twenty-five countries show the same thing: an eleven-minute film that no one had seen the day before.
The director is John Landis, the same man who made Thriller for Michael Jackson. The music is Black or White, the lead single from Dangerous, Michael’s fourth album as an adult solo artist. Michael wrote and produced the song together with Bill Bottrell. As Landis later recalled, he had wanted to make something small and simple, while Michael pictured something like Gone with the Wind with special effects. The film cost roughly four million dollars; the choreography was by Michael and Vincent Paterson.
The premiere airs on MTV, BET, VH1 and Fox, and for Fox it is a record rating at that point. The audience is estimated at five hundred million viewers — according to Guinness World Records, the largest television audience for a music video premiere in history.
The film does not begin with music. A boy, played by Macaulay Culkin, plugs a guitar into a gigantic amplifier, and his father, played by George Wendt — the man who demanded quiet — is blasted through the roof of the house and lands in Africa. There Michael dances with Zulu hunters, then with Thai dancers, Native Americans, an Indian classical dancer and, against a backdrop of Russian architecture, with men dancing the hopak.
Then faces begin to flow into one another: men and women of different ethnicities, among them seventeen-year-old Tyra Banks, seamlessly morph into each other. Until then the technology had been used only in feature films. The director himself appears in the frame and shouts “Cut!”, laying bare the film set. The final minutes of the film provoke a dispute, and the video is re-edited for broadcast.
In less than a month the single will top the US Billboard Hot 100 — faster than any song since the Beatles’ Get Back in 1969 — stay there for seven weeks and reach number one in twenty countries.
Michael takes a pop song and turns it into an event that has to be seen, not only heard.
But this mechanism was not born in 1991. To see how, we have to go back eight years.
II — THRILLER
In late November 1982, Thriller is released — Michael Jackson’s sixth album, recorded with producer Quincy Jones between April and November at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles. Michael wants an album on which every song is a hit. Seven singles will follow, and all seven will reach the American top ten — a record for a single album; Billie Jean and Beat It will go to number one.
On March 25, 1983, at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in Pasadena, a television special celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Motown Records is taped; it will air on NBC on May 16. As the story goes, Michael at first does not want to take part: he has his own album and his own road. He is persuaded by Motown’s founder, Berry Gordy, and Michael’s condition is that he sing Billie Jean, a song with no connection to Motown — the only such song of the entire evening.
First the Jackson 5 walk on stage. The brothers are together, and their medley of hits opens with I Want You Back — the soul where it all began.
Then Michael is left alone. A black fedora, a black sequined jacket, a glove. Midway through the song, a walk that looks like steps backward but carries him forward: the moonwalk. The audience sees it for the first time. The New York Times will call the routine astonishing, and tens of millions of viewers are sitting in front of their screens.
What follows is arithmetic: after the broadcast, Thriller sells roughly a million copies a week. But Michael goes beyond the song. In July 1983 the album is knocked off the top of the chart, and the team decides to release Thriller as a single — with a video to go with it.
On December 2, 1983, MTV airs the first world premiere of a video in the channel’s history. Fourteen minutes: directed by John Landis, written by Landis and Jackson, with Ola Ray as his partner and horror master Vincent Price as narrator. Zombies rise from the ground and dance with Michael. The red jacket and the zombie dance will become part of pop culture for good.
By early 1984 more than thirty million copies have been sold, and Thriller becomes the best-selling album in history. In total it spends thirty-seven weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, from February 1983 to April 1984. In 2009 the video will become the first music video inducted into the United States National Film Registry.
The video stops being an appendix to the song. It becomes an independent form of mass culture.
III — SEEN. READ. REMEMBERED.
Between Thriller and Black or White lie eight years and one director. But what matters is not the dates. It is the operation.
In 1983 Michael shows that a music video can be a film. In 1991, that such a film can put, by some estimates, half a billion viewers in front of their screens in dozens of countries at once. And between the two lies the evening of Motown 25, where on a single stage stand the soul he began with and the walk with which everything else began.
Once, that is success. Twice, with the same director and eight years apart, it is already a method.
He did not simply perform music. He created an image that could not be separated from it: you could hear him, but first you had to see him.
SEEN. READ. REMEMBERED.
November 14, 1991. On a single evening, screens in more than twenty-five countries show the same thing: an eleven-minute film that no one had seen the day before.
The director is John Landis, the same man who made Thriller for Michael Jackson. The music is Black or White, the lead single from Dangerous, Michael’s fourth album as an adult solo artist. Michael wrote and produced the song together with Bill Bottrell. As Landis later recalled, he had wanted to make something small and simple, while Michael pictured something like Gone with the Wind with special effects. The film cost roughly four million dollars; the choreography was by Michael and Vincent Paterson.
The premiere airs on MTV, BET, VH1 and Fox, and for Fox it is a record rating at that point. The audience is estimated at five hundred million viewers — according to Guinness World Records, the largest television audience for a music video premiere in history.
The film does not begin with music. A boy, played by Macaulay Culkin, plugs a guitar into a gigantic amplifier, and his father, played by George Wendt — the man who demanded quiet — is blasted through the roof of the house and lands in Africa. There Michael dances with Zulu hunters, then with Thai dancers, Native Americans, an Indian classical dancer and, against a backdrop of Russian architecture, with men dancing the hopak.
Then faces begin to flow into one another: men and women of different ethnicities, among them seventeen-year-old Tyra Banks, seamlessly morph into each other. Until then the technology had been used only in feature films. The director himself appears in the frame and shouts “Cut!”, laying bare the film set. The final minutes of the film provoke a dispute, and the video is re-edited for broadcast.
In less than a month the single will top the US Billboard Hot 100 — faster than any song since the Beatles’ Get Back in 1969 — stay there for seven weeks and reach number one in twenty countries.
Michael takes a pop song and turns it into an event that has to be seen, not only heard.
But this mechanism was not born in 1991. To see how, we have to go back eight years.
II — THRILLER
In late November 1982, Thriller is released — Michael Jackson’s sixth album, recorded with producer Quincy Jones between April and November at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles. Michael wants an album on which every song is a hit. Seven singles will follow, and all seven will reach the American top ten — a record for a single album; Billie Jean and Beat It will go to number one.
On March 25, 1983, at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in Pasadena, a television special celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Motown Records is taped; it will air on NBC on May 16. As the story goes, Michael at first does not want to take part: he has his own album and his own road. He is persuaded by Motown’s founder, Berry Gordy, and Michael’s condition is that he sing Billie Jean, a song with no connection to Motown — the only such song of the entire evening.
First the Jackson 5 walk on stage. The brothers are together, and their medley of hits opens with I Want You Back — the soul where it all began.
Then Michael is left alone. A black fedora, a black sequined jacket, a glove. Midway through the song, a walk that looks like steps backward but carries him forward: the moonwalk. The audience sees it for the first time. The New York Times will call the routine astonishing, and tens of millions of viewers are sitting in front of their screens.
What follows is arithmetic: after the broadcast, Thriller sells roughly a million copies a week. But Michael goes beyond the song. In July 1983 the album is knocked off the top of the chart, and the team decides to release Thriller as a single — with a video to go with it.
On December 2, 1983, MTV airs the first world premiere of a video in the channel’s history. Fourteen minutes: directed by John Landis, written by Landis and Jackson, with Ola Ray as his partner and horror master Vincent Price as narrator. Zombies rise from the ground and dance with Michael. The red jacket and the zombie dance will become part of pop culture for good.
By early 1984 more than thirty million copies have been sold, and Thriller becomes the best-selling album in history. In total it spends thirty-seven weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, from February 1983 to April 1984. In 2009 the video will become the first music video inducted into the United States National Film Registry.
The video stops being an appendix to the song. It becomes an independent form of mass culture.
III — SEEN. READ. REMEMBERED.
Between Thriller and Black or White lie eight years and one director. But what matters is not the dates. It is the operation.
In 1983 Michael shows that a music video can be a film. In 1991, that such a film can put, by some estimates, half a billion viewers in front of their screens in dozens of countries at once. And between the two lies the evening of Motown 25, where on a single stage stand the soul he began with and the walk with which everything else began.
Once, that is success. Twice, with the same director and eight years apart, it is already a method.
He did not simply perform music. He created an image that could not be separated from it: you could hear him, but first you had to see him.
SEEN. READ. REMEMBERED.
2026 © Iskandar Kadyrov • All rights reserved • RU / EN (18+)
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