LIVE WIRE BAD/DANGEROUS/INVINCIBLE
MICHAEL JACKSON’S EPIC YEARS
LIVE WIRE: BAD/DANGEROUS/INVINCIBLE Michael Jackson was on the set of The Wiz, working with Quincy Jones, when he reached out to the producer to produce his first solo project for the Epic label. Rather than recording an album that sonically represented Destiny, the hit album that he released with his brothers in 1978, Jackson went outside of the family to work with Jones, whose penchant for walking the line between lush-Jazz inflected R&B and sophisticated Pop on albums like the classic Body Heat (1974) and Sounds...and Stuff Like That! would re-introduce Jackson as a mature, independent artist. Bad/Dangerous/Invincible will explore how Jackson not only re established himself as a brilliant solo artist, but also raised the bar for pop music, first, with a series of sonically and visually groundbreaking albums-- Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987), and later established himself, as arguably the first global pop artist. In the process, Jackson pushed the boundaries of gender, sexuality and what constitutes “pop” music, by drawing on rich archives of popular performance and Afro-diasporic practices, forcing us to rethink the routes and roots of American pop music. Throughout his three-decade tenure with Epic, Jackson negotiated his increasing stature as a global icon, who was trained and nurtured very early in his career on the Chitlin’ Circuit-- the network of Black social spaces that many Black artists were relegated to in the generation that precedes Jackson’s ascendance. Thus some of the clips discussed this evening, like “Remember the Time,” “Bad” and “They Don’t Care About Us,”
also mark Jackson’s ambivalent relationship with the Black
community
-- not an ambivalence with Blackness as some might
suggest, because the Art remained distinctly Black.
Mark Anthony Neal June 2016
LIVE WIRE: BAD/DANGEROUS/INVINCIBLE Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African and
African-American
Studies
at
Duke
University, where he teaches courses in Black Cultural Studies, including signature classes on Michael Jackson and The History of Hip-Hop, co-taught
with
Grammy
Award
winning
Producer 9th Wonder. Neal is the author of five books including Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and The Post-Soul Aesthetic and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities. Neal is also host of the weekly video podcast Left of Black, which is the signature program of the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship, which Neal directs at Duke. Follow him on Twitter: @NewBlackMan
Tanisha C. Ford is an assistant professor of Women,
Gender,
Sexuality
Studies
at
the
University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has written extensively on black popular culture, music and entertainment, fashion and body politics, social movements, and black feminism. Ford is the author of Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (UNC Press, 2015). Liberated Threads recently won the OAH Liberty Legacy Award for Best Book on Civil Rights Movement History. Her public writing and cultural commentary have been featured in diverse media outlets and publications including The Root, The New Yorker, NPR: Code Switch, Fuse, News One, New York City’s HOT 97, The Feminist Wire, Vibe Vixen, Feministing, and New Black Man. Her research has been supported by institutions including the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Center for Black Music Research.
LIVE WIRE: MICHAEL JACKSON’S EPIC YEARS Irvin
Mayfield,
Jr.,
is a Grammy and
Billboard Award-winning artist with 25 albums to his credit. Mayfield is the founding Artistic Director of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra and currently serves as Jazz Artist in Residence for the Apollo Theater; he served as Artistic Director of Jazz for the Minnesota Orchestra from 2009-2015. In 2009, he entered into a historic partnership with the Royal Sonesta Hotel and created Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse, which brought “Jazz back to Bourbon Street” in the historic French Quarter. Mayfield was nominated to the National Council on the Arts by President George W. Bush and was subsequently appointed to the post by President Barack Obama in 2010; he served through 2014. He also received The Chancellor’s Award from the University of New Orleans (the highest ranking award given to a professor) in 2010 and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Dillard University in 2011. He and NOJO recently opened the first space built for Jazz in the city that created the music – The Peoples Health New Orleans Jazz Market. His latest book, New Orleans Jazz Playhouse, was released in April 2015.
Emily J. Lordi is an assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of two books: Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American
Literature
(2013)
and
Donny
Hathaway Live, which is forthcoming this October. She has published articles and book chapters on topics ranging from literary modernism to soul aesthetics, funk, and contemporary poetry. Her music and book reviews appear on such sites as New Black Man (in Exile), The Fader, Pitchfork, The Root, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
LIVE WIRE LISTENING STATION Scan the QR code to hear selections from Mark Anthony Neal’s playlist on Spotify You Can't Win (1978) The Wiz: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, MCA/Motown She's Out of My Life (1979) Off the Wall, Epic Records The Jacksons - Can You Feel It (1980) Triumph, Epic Records Billie Jean (1982) Thriller, Epic Records Bad (1987) Bad, Epic Records Leave Me Alone (1987) Bad, Epic Records Black or White (1991) Dangerous, Epic Records Remember the Time (1991) Dangerous, Epic Records Scream (1995) HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I., Epic Records They Don't Care About Us (1995) HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I., Epic Records Ghosts (1997) Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix Epic Records/Sony/MJJ Productions You Rock My World (2001) Invincible, Epic Records/Sony
LIVE WIRE 2016 - 2017 SEASON
Season Opener Tuesday, October 11 , 2016 Legendary: A Conversation with Melba Moore, Leslie Uggams, and Dionne Warwick Time: 6:30pm Saturday, February 4, 2017 The Gospel Caravan Time: 6:30pm Thursday, March 23, 2017 Ella! A Centennial Celebration Time: 6:30pm Thursday, May 4, 2017 WOW– Women of the World Festival Presented in association with Southbank Centre, London Artist. Activist. Time: 6:30pm Thursday, June 15, 2017 Black Men/Soul Music II: Soul Revolution Time: 6:30pm
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ABOUT THE APOLLO THEATER The Apollo is a national treasure that has had significant impact on the development of American culture and its popularity around the world. Since introducing the first Amateur Night contests in 1934, the Apollo Theater has played a major role in cultivating artists and in the emergence of innovative musical genres including jazz, swing, bebop, R&B, gospel, blues, soul, and hiphop. Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Sammy Davis, Jr., James Brown, Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, Gladys Knight, Luther Vandross, D’Angelo, Lauryn Hill, and countless others began their road to stardom on the Apollo’s stage. Based on its cultural significance and architecture, the Apollo Theater received state and city landmark designation in 1983 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. www.apollotheater.org
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@ApolloEdHarlem
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