Core Response - Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson has been a timeless global megastar even after his death. Even in China, people in multiple generations are still listening to his songs and imitating his dance moves. Chinese singers who like Michael Jackson are marked as “tasteful.” The “Peter Pan figure (Mercer)” phenomenon mentioned in Mercer’s Monster Metaphors is the same across the sea. The media created this mysterious, ambiguous figure for people to consume like a commodity. “The definite sense of racial ambiguity writ large in his new image is at the same time, and by the same token, the site of a sexual ambiguity bordering on androgyny (Mercer).” However Michael Jackson’s image in China has more racial rumors than sexual discussion, which can be resulted from China’s more traditional views toward gender norms in star and media.

The music video of Thriller is perhaps more well known than the song itself and brought the song famous. It “does not so much seek to promote the record as a primary product, but rather celebrates the stardom which the LP has brought to Michael Jackson (Mercer)." The 13 minutes long video is structured like a musical short film, which was unprecedented at the time. The novelty of a mixture of thriller, horror, zombie, and musical, within a music video suits Michael Jackson’s star image of mixture and uniqueness. The fantasy of werewolf and zombie speaks to his Peter Pan figure who talks to the animals in the zoo, and it also adds to his masculine sexuality like how it works in Twilight. “Neither child nor adult, not clearly either black or white, and with an androgynous image that is neither masculine nor feminine, Jackson's star image is a "social hieroglyph," as Marx said of the commodity form (Mercer)” He also set a example of sexually ambiguous star, which is liberal, since that can never happen in culturally conservative countries like China.