Black or White (Michael Jackson song)
Encyclopedia : B : BL : BLA : Black or White (Michael Jackson song)
"Black or White" was a 1991 worldwide smash hit single for singer Michael Jackson. It was the first single taken from his acclaimed album Dangerous, released in November 1991.
Written, composed, and arranged by Jackson with the rap lyrics by Bill Bottrell, the song was a response to racist statements made against Jackson about his changing skin color and his fight against racism in general. The rap line "I'm not gonna spend my life being a color" was also a very personal statement from Jackson that was echoed throughout the song.
The song featured a guitar solo by ex-Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash, who is biracial.
The song dominated the charts around the world peaking at number one in more than twenty countries. It has ben reported that michael and mariah carey will perform a duet at superbowl 41.
Music video
The music video for "Black or White" generated controversy. The video was considered quite spectacular when it was first broadcast on MTV, BET, VH1, and the Fox Network on November 14 1991. It featured cameos by celebrities such as Macaulay Culkin, Peggy Lipton, and George Wendt, and helped usher in morphing as an important technology in music videos (though a more primitive version of the technique had been used six years earlier by the duo Godley & Creme on their song "Cry"). Actors and models who appear in the sequence include Cree Summer, Tyra Banks, Jeffrey Anderson-Gunter, and Glen Chin. Jackson's niece Brandi also features. Like Jackson's equally successful music video, "Thriller", "Black or White" was directed by filmmaker John Landis.The first few minutes of the video featured an extended version of the song's intro, in which Macaulay Culkin is yelled at by his enraged father (George Wendt) over playing rock music too loud and too late at night. Culkin decides to forego his father's request to go to sleep by setting up large speaker cabinets behind his father's reclining chair, donning leather gloves and sunglasses, and playing an extremely loud power chord on an electric guitar. The sound shatters the house's windows and sends his father (seated in his chair) halfway around the world, where the actual song starts. Culkin's mother declares that his father will be "rather upset" upon his return. The song from the CD does not use Culkin's nor Wendt's voice, but uses unknown voice actors (who sounds similar to them) and a different intro.
The video proper, still shown regularly today, featured a montage of sequences in which Jackson is choreographed engaging in dances among people of different cultures of the world (African, South-East Asian, Native American, East Indian, Russian). Jackson walks through visual collages of fire (defiantly declaring "I ain't scared of no sheets; I ain't scared of nobody"), referring to KKK torch ceremonies before a mock rap scene shared with Culkin and other children. The group collectively states, "I'm not gonna spend my life being a color." At the end of the song, many different people (shown as "talking heads") dance as they morph into one another. This technique had only been previously used in films such as Willow and [[Terminator 2: Judgment Day|Terminator 2]].
The controversy was related to the last four minutes (the silent "panther" scene) of the original eleven-minute music video, or "short film", as Jackson preferred to call it. Here, Jackson smashed car windows containing racist graffiti such as Nazi symbols and slander such as "wetbacks" written on the glass of the car windows and store windows, as well as a store window with "KKK RULES" emblazoned on it; Jackson then jumped on the car, grabbed his crotch, smashed a storefront window by throwing a garbage can at it, and began screaming in an enranged manner causing a building sign to collapse. This section caused such a negative reaction that Jackson was forced to announce a formal apology for its content. At the end of this short, Jackson stares on while "prejudice is ignorance" appears at the bottom of the screen in white text. The racist graffiti is not on the car or store windows in some versions of the video — it is unknown whether this was done by the record company, Fox network or certain affiliates. The cut out section is available [here].Also , he moaned during the dance and when touching his crotch , it felt it was risqué and Jackson was masturbating.
A year later, MTV re-aired the original, uncut version of the video. To date, this version has generally only been seen in the United States on MTV2 between the hours of 01:00 and 04:00, as part of their special uncensored airing of the "Most Controversial Music Videos" of all time. The extended version is also available on Jackson's DVDs. The video was parodied by the sketch comedy TV show In Living Color, and by the band Genesis in their video for "I Can't Dance". It was still shown in its entirety for some years in Europe. Indeed, it was seen on VH1 in the UK as recently as 2004, though most recent airings have omitted the last portion of the video, which also included a brief cameo by Bart and Homer Simpson before the "prejudice is ignorance" image. The version available in the iTunes Music Store contains neither the panther scene nor the Simpsons cameo, and is cut after the morphing sequence.
Mixes
- Album Version 4:17
- Single Version 3:22
- Instrumental 3:22
- Clivillés & Cole House/Club Mix
- Clivillés & Cole Radio Mix 3:33
- House w/Guitar Radio Mix 3:50
- Underground Club Mix
See also
- Black or White (Remix)
- AMC Matador The anonymously styled sedan pummeled in the video.
|- style="text-align: center;"
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.