All in Flashbacks

Next Article

Flashbacks

The Thriller is gone

What's most disturbing about this track is its thoughtlessness, its utter absence of feeling (the chorus of "Annie, are you okay?" is a naïve postscript after the horror scene the verses describe). The song isn't harmless camp, like the creepshow "Thriller" (which was written by Rod Temperton); it lacks even the cartoonish compassion of a run-of-the-mill heavy-metal sex-and-violence epic. Jackson is a true child of the video age – the emotional kick is everything. With "Smooth Criminal," he creates his own version of his pal Steven Spielberg's anything-for-a-thrill Indiana Jones movies. Spielberg and Jackson share a childlike imagination, a sense of wonder, that at its finest conjures E.T. and "Human Nature" but has its flip side in the brainlessly ghoulish and morbid.

Spielberg and Jackson also share a manipulativeness, an overriding awareness of an audience out there wating for its emotional strings to be pulled, a preoccupation with turning out "good entertainment." Jackson's image and popularity feed on magical moves like his gravity-defying moonwalk, or the way he lights up the sidewalk with his every step in the clip for "Billie Jean," or turns the black-and-white "Bad" video into color with a whiplash toss of his head and a snap of his fingers. In his videos, Jackson does indeed seem more than human. In the emotionally bankrupt fantasies on Bad, he seems much, much less.