Blackface minstrelsy, the nineteenth-century performance practice in which ideas and images of blackness were constructed and theatricalized by and for whites, continues to permeate contemporary popular music and its audience. Harriet J. Manning argues that this legacy is nowhere more evident than with Michael Jackson in whom minstrelsy’s gestures and tropes are embedded. During the nineteenth century, blackface minstrelsy held together a multitude of meanings and when black entertainers took to the stage this complexity was compounded: minstrelsy became an arena in which black stereotypes were at once enforced and critiqued. This body of contradiction behind the blackface mask provides an effective approach to try and understand Jackson, a cultural figure about whom more questions than answers have been generated. Symbolized by his own whiteface mask, Jackson was at once ’raced’ and raceless and this ambiguity allowed him to serve a whole host of others’ needs - a function of the mask that has run long and deep through its tortuous history. Indeed, Manning argues that minstrelsy’s assumptions and uses have been fundamental to the troubles and controversies with which Jackson was beset.

Blackface minstrelsy, the nineteenth-century performance practice in which ideas and images of blackness were constructed and theatricalized by and for whites, continues to permeate contemporary popular music and its audience. Harriet J. Manning argues that this legacy is nowhere more evident than with Michael Jackson in whom minstrelsy’s gestures and tropes are embedded. During the nineteenth century, blackface minstrelsy held together a multitude of meanings and when black entertainers took to the stage this complexity was compounded: minstrelsy became an arena in which black stereotypes were at once enforced and critiqued. This body of contradiction behind the blackface mask provides an effective approach to try and understand Jackson, a cultural figure about whom more questions than answers have been generated. Symbolized by his own whiteface mask, Jackson was at once ’raced’ and raceless and this ambiguity allowed him to serve a whole host of others’ needs - a function of the mask that has run long and deep through its tortuous history. Indeed, Manning argues that minstrelsy’s assumptions and uses have been fundamental to the troubles and controversies with which Jackson was beset.

An essential companion to Michael Jackson's music, films, and books, this work offers 21 original, academic essays on all things Jackson-from film, music, and dance to fashion, culture, and literature. Going well beyond the average celebrity biography, this comprehensive book looks at why Jackson is regarded as one of the most important musicians of our time, offering insights into every facet of his art, life, and artistic afterlife. It looks at the methods by which his work was created, presented, received, and appropriated; discusses Jackson's varied personas along with his public and private appearances, albums, conceptual art, short films, and dance; and considers his use of costume, makeup, and reinvention. To help readers understand the phenomenon that was-and is-Michael Jackson, the book focuses on Jackson's historical context through an analysis of his films, songs, and books, examining him as an artist and shedding light on the political and ideological debates that surrounded him. Not shying away from the controversial aspects of Jackson's life and legacy, it also tackles questions of sexuality and racism, gender, and class, comparing Jackson to artists ranging from J. S. Bach to Andy Warhol. Through its examination of Jackson's entire catalog, the work connects all the aspects of his art and life to exemplify-and explain-the performer's unparalleled influence in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Dangerous is Michael Jackson's coming of age album. Granted, that's a bold claim to make given that many think his best work lay behind him by the time this record was made. It offers Jackson on a threshold, at long last embracing adulthood-politically questioning, sexually charged-yet unable to convince a skeptical public who had, by this time, been wholly indoctrinated by a vicious media. Even though the record sold well, few understood or were willing to accept the depth and breadth of Jackson's vision; and then before it could be fully grasped, it was eclipsed by a shifting pop music landscape and personal scandal-the latter perhaps linked to his assertive new politics. This book tries to cut through the din of dominant narratives about Jackson, taking up the mature, nuanced artistic statement he offered on Dangerous in all its complexity. It is read here as a concept album, one that offers a compelling narrative arc of postmodern angst, love, lust, seduction, betrayal, damnation, and above all else racial politics, in ways heretofore unseen in his music. This record offered a Michael Jackson that was mystifying for a world that had accepted him as a child and as childlike and, hence, as safe; this Michael Jackson was, indeed, dangerous.

This volume provides comprehensible, strength-based perspectives on contemporary research and practice related to navigating mistakes, errors and failures across cultures. It addresses these concepts across cultural contexts and explores any or all of these three concepts from a positive psychology or positive organisational perspective, highlighting their potential as resources. The volume further discusses the consequences of errors and failures at individual, organisational and societal levels, ranging from severe personal problems to organisational and collective crises, perspectives how those can be turned into opportunities for contingent and sustainable improvement processes. The book shows that there are significant cultural differences in the understanding, interpretation and handling of errors and failures. This volume provides practical guidance for transcultural understanding of mistakes, errors and failure through new models, ideas for self-reflection, therapeutic and counselling interventions and organisational change management processes. This book is a must for researchers and practitioners working on mistakes, errors and failures across cultures and disciplines!

The untimely deaths of Amy Winehouse (2011) and Whitney Houston (2012), and the ’resurrection’ of Tupac Shakur for a performance at the Coachella music festival in April 2012, have focused the media spotlight on the relationship between popular music, fame and death. If the phrase ’sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ ever qualified a lifestyle, it has left many casualties in its wake, and with the ranks of dead musicians growing over time, so the types of death involved and the reactions to them have diversified. Conversely, as many artists who fronted the rock’n’roll revolution of the 1950s and 1960s continue to age, the idea of dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse (which gave rise, for instance, to the myth of the ’27 Club’) no longer carries the same resonance that it once might have done. This edited collection explores the reception of dead rock stars, ’rock’ being taken in the widest sense as the artists discussed belong to the genres of rock’n’roll (Elvis Presley), disco (Donna Summer), pop and pop-rock (Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse), punk and post-punk (GG Allin, Ian Curtis), rap (Tupac Shakur), folk (the Dutchman André Hazes) and ’world’ music (Fela Kuti). When music artists die, their fellow musicians, producers, fans and the media react differently, and this book brings together their intertwining modalities of reception. The commercial impact of death on record sales, copyrights, and print media is considered, and the different justifications by living artists for being involved with the dead, through covers, sampling and tributes. The cultural representation of dead singers is investigated through obituaries, biographies and biopics, observing that posthumous fame provides coping mechanisms for fans, and consumers of popular culture more generally, to deal with the knowledge of their own mortality. Examining the contrasting ways in which male and female dead singers are portrayed in the media, the book

How does structural economic change look and feel? How are such changes normalized? Who represents hope? Who are the cautionary tales? Unfinished Business argues that U.S. deindustrialization cannot be understood apart from issues of race, and specifically apart from images of, and works by and about African Americans that represent or resist normative or aberrant relationships to work and capital in transitional times. It insists that Michael Jackson's performances and coverage of his life, plays featuring Detroit, plans for the city's postindustrial revitalization, and Detroit installations The Heidelberg Project and Mobile Homestead have something valuable to teach us about three decades of structural economic transition in the U.S., particularly about the changing nature of work and capitalism between the mid 1980s and 2016. Jackson and Detroit offer examples of the racialization of deindustrialization, how it operates as a structure of feeling and as representations as well as a shift in the dominant mode of production, and how industrialization's successor mode, financialization, uses imagery both very similar to and very different from its predecessor.

From its 1939 “Nickel, Nickel” jingle to pathbreaking collaborations with Michael Jackson and Madonna to its pair of X Factor commercials in 2011 and 2012, Pepsi-Cola has played a leading role in drawing the American pop music industry into a synergetic relationship with advertising. This idea has been copied successfully by countless other brands over the years, and such commercial collaboration is commonplace today—but how did we get here? How and why have pop music aesthetics been co-opted to benefit corporate branding? What effect have Pepsi’s music marketing practices in particular had on other brands, the advertising industry, and popular music itself? Soda Goes Pop investigates these and other vital questions around the evolving relationships between popular music and corporate advertising. Joanna K. Love joins musical analysis, historical research, and cultural theory to trace parallel shifts in these industries over eight decades. In addition to scholarly and industry resources, she draws on first-hand accounts, pop culture magazines, trade press journals, and other archival materials. Pepsi’s longevity as an influential American brand, its legendary commercials, and its pioneering, relentless pursuit of alliances with American musical stars makes the brand a particularly instructive point of focus. Several of the company’s most famous ad campaigns are prime examples of the practice of redaction, whereby marketers select, censor, and restructure musical texts to fit commercial contexts in ways that revise their aesthetic meanings and serve corporate aims. Ultimately, Love demonstrates how Pepsi’s marketing has historically appropriated and altered images of pop icons and the meanings of hit songs, and how these commercials shaped relationships between the American music business, the advertising industry, and corporate brands. Soda Goes Pop is a rich resource for scholars and students of American studies, popular culture, advertising, broadcast media, and musicology. It is also an accessible and informative book for the general reader, as Love’s musical and theoretical analyses are clearly presented for non-specialist audiences and readers with varying degrees of musical knowledge.

This book investigates the reappearance of the 19th-century dream-child from the Golden Age of Children's Literature, both in the Harry Potter series and in other works that have reached unprecedented levels of popular success today. Discussing Harry Potter as a reincarnation of Lewis Carroll's Alice and J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Billone goes on to examine the recent resurrection of Alice in Tim Burton's Alice, and of Peter Pan in Michael Jackson and in James Bond. Visiting trends that have emerged since the Harry Potter series ended, the book studies revisions of the dream-child in texts and films that have inspired mass fandom in the twenty-first century: Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, E.L. James's 50 Shades of Grey and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games. The volume argues that the 21st-century desire to achieve dream-states in relationship to eternal youth results from the way that dreams provide a means of realizing the fantastic yet alarming possibility of escaping from time. This current identification with the dream-child stems from the threat of political unrest and economic and environmental collapse as well as from the simultaneous technophilia and technophobia of a culture immersed in the breathless revolution of the digital age. This book not only explores how the dream-child from the past has returned to reflect misgivings about imagined dystopian futures but also reveals how the rebirth of the dream-child opens up possibilities for new narratives where happy endings remain viable against all odds. It will appeal to scholars in a wide variety of fields including Childhood Studies, Children's/YA Literature, Cinema Studies, Cultural Studies, Cyberculture, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Gothic Studies, New Media, and Popular Culture.

The face contributes a vital, yet often overlooked, component of dance performance. Facial Choreographies: Performing the Face in Popular Dance examines what the face does in dance and what it may mean. Author Sherril Dodds focuses on popular presentational dance, which permits the face to be one of excess and spectacle, as well as disclosure or deception. The concept of facial choreography resists the idea that the expressive countenance in dance is simply by chance, and instead conceives its movement as purposeful, creative, and communicative. The book centers on three facial case studies: global celebrity Michael Jackson, whose face has occupied a site of fervent controversy; Maddie Ziegler, child star of the reality television series Dance Moms and de facto face of pop star Sia; and a community of hip hop dancers who engage in fiercely contested dance battles. Chapters are organized according to action-expressions, actively working even in times of stillness: SMILE, LOOK, FROWN, CRY, SCREAM, and LAUGH. Across each case study, the book explores pedagogies of facial composition, the purpose of codified expressions, and how dancers re-choreograph their faces as a critical unworking of what a dancing visage might represent. Facial choreographies engender opportunity for startling creativity, the articulation of identity, a cathartic expression of emotions and attitudes, and the capacity to dismantle previously held assumptions. As the dancing face tauntingly slips between visual, sensory, and kinetic registers it ensures that nothing can be taken at face value.