The 500 - #203 - Bad - Michael Jackson

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

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Album: #203
Album Title: Bad
Artist: Michael Jackson

Genre: Pop, Funk, Soul, Hard Rock, R&B
Recorded: Westlake Studios, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

Released: August, 1987
My age at release: 22
How familiar was I with it before this week: Very

Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #194, moving up 10 spots
Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Man In The Mirror

Four years ago, as we navigated the unpredictable Coronavirus pandemic, my wife and I discovered the Disney+ program WandaVision. The nine-part mini-series was the first television program released in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and set after the events in the 2019 film Avengers: Endgame.

One might expect this to be typical superhero fare. After all, it featured Wanda Maximoff (aka: Scarlet Witch) and the android Vision, two characters well established in the MCU. However, it was the promotional trailer release that piqued our interest and convinced us to subscribe to the newly available Disney streaming service. This short video, shot in black and white, featured the song Twilight Time from 1950's vocal group The Platters. The vid depicted our former heroes in a situational comedy setting eerily reminiscent of I Love Lucy episodes (1951-1958).

Screen Capture for the Official Trailer to WandaVision.

Ten minutes into the first episode and we were hooked. The show was part sit-com, part mystery -- think I Love Lucy meets The Twilight Zone (1959 - 1964). We had so many questions:

• Why are these 2020 characters living and hiding their superpowers, in the idyllic world of 1950s Westview, New Jersey?
• Why is the show leaning on the campy and cliche television tropes from that era?
• Why was Vision alive? Thanos had killed him in Avengers: Endgame, right?
• Who is the mysterious person whose hand is shown in a television studio in the final credits, watching the final credits?

  

  Final Credit screen capture featuring a mysterious onlooker.

Our delightful bewilderment continued when the second episode featured the same characters appearing in a fictional world that had all the trappings of a ‘60s era sitcom -- clearly reminiscent of the Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1967),...including promotional material.

WandaVision shot (left) compared with the Dick Van Dyke Show promo.

It soon became evident that WandaVision was going to be a mysterious and nostalgic trip through the decades, depicted through the tropes and cliches from situation comedies in each. Wisely, the Disney channel released the episodes weekly rather than dropping the entire series for viewers to binge watch. Consequently, there was plenty of time for online speculation and for fan predictions and theories to percolate.

Wanda's changes through the episodes/decades.

At the same time, January to March, 2021, I was teaching remotely. I had started the year with a delightful group of Grade 7 students in person. However, as our province, Ontario, entered the second wave of the pandemic, we reluctantly returned to online learning. Always on the hunt to engage students and build community, I thought about ways the WandaVision premise could connect to our learning. Then, I was struck by a plan.

• What if each student was assigned a random decade and found a song that others might enjoy.... a "Bop"?
• The student could then, privately, send me a presentation slide which would feature the song as an embedded YouTube video.
• Included on the slide would be three bullet points of research -- about the song, the artist, the album or the themes in the lyrics.
• I would present the slide (in order to keep the student identity private) and would play the song throughout the week in our virtual learning environment.
• At the end of the week, we would use a Google Form to vote each song from the chosen decade as a Bop or Flop. The top two songs, or any song receiving 60 per cent Bop status, would remain in our class playlist.
• We would then reveal the students who chose each song and created the accompanying slide presentation.
• I began by sharing three songs from the ‘40s in order to provide an example to guide them.

  

  One of my example slides - Stardust by Artie Shaw -- it was voted a Bop.

The activity was a hit. My students were excited to have their songs shared and hear the music chosen by classmates from the ‘50s through to the 2000s. With six decades over six weeks, this turned out to be a wonderful way of bonding the class during a time of dreary isolation -- short, bleak winter days coupled with another pandemic lockdown. It also connected to multiple curriculum expectations -- visual literacy, writing, research and history.

The success of this collaborative WandaVision music project in 2021 prompted me to make it part of my regular program and, for the fourth year in a row, it has been received enthusiastically. The eclectic playlist we create throughout the unit never fails to delight me. Songs ranging from Mr. Sandman by The Chordettes (‘50s) to I'm A Believer from The Monkees (‘60s) to Earth, Wind and Fire's September (‘70s) bring diverse sounds to our work periods. With literally thousands of popular songs from which to choose, each year takes on a slightly different tone. One artist, however, has consistently made the cut every year -- The King of Pop , Michael Jackson.

The King of Pop - Michael Jackson.

One year, a student locked into ‘70s Michael, performing with his brothers, The Jackson Five, on the soft rock ballad I'll Be There. Another discovered the disco/funk audio splendor of Rock With You from 1979's Off the Wall (#68 on The 500). Another class found Jackson's work from the ‘80s with the hard rock dance track Beat It, and the title track from this week's record, Bad.

Cover for the single, Bad, from Michael Jackson

Bad, the single, exploded into the pop culture zeitgeist on August 31, 1987, when the 18-minute video premiered on a primetime CBS special called The Magic Returns: Michael Jackson. Directed by Martin Scorsese, the short film was, in part, inspired by scenes from the musical West Side Story. Shot in a Brooklyn subway station, the protagonist Darryl (portrayed by Jackson) is a young man returning to his old, tough neighbourhood after being away at a private school on a scholarship. Darryl is greeted by his former street gang, which included actor Wesley Snipes in one of his first roles. At first, the reunion is friendly, but becomes awkward when Darryl's street credibility is challenged. In an attempt to show the group that he is still "bad", Darryl considers robbing an elderly man before having second thoughts. The dance sequence that follows, featuring the song Bad, has become iconic, as has the leather outfit Jackson wore as Darryl.

A screen capture from the Scorsese directed short film, Bad.

It is, like many things from the ‘80s, a piece of pop culture history that has aged imperfectly. When we watched the video in class there were a few chuckles and a lot of questions. However, by week's end, the song was voted a Bop and became part of that year's playlist rotation.

That's the thing about Jackson, he fearlessly took risks. It was a message I deliver often in our Grade 7 classroom, "swing for the fences with your artistic endeavours".  If you are brave enough to push your creativity to new limits it is worthy of respect, even when it doesn't work out. This was not, I reminded them, dissimilar to the risk they took by picking a song during our WandaVision music challenge. They knew it might be a Flop -- and that's okay.

Admittedly, Jackson had more hits than misses in his career. In 1991, the album Bad became the second best-selling record of all time, eclipsed only by Jackson's previous record, 1982's Thriller (#20 on The 500). Bad had only had nine tracks on it, and seven of them were singles, with five songs hitting #1 on Billboard charts. The first single from the album, I Just Can't Stop Loving You, was a chart-topper in June, 1987. The final song released as a single, Liberian Girl, wasn't promoted until July, 1989 -- 25 months later. For anyone who lived through "Michaelmania", it felt like he was an constant artistic force.

Single cover for Liberian Girl - released in the U.K. in 1989.

I plan on sharing the WandaVision Music Experience with my students again in the next school year. Although pandemic lockdowns and virtual learning seem to be a strange thing of the past, the unit still builds community through the coldest and bleakest days of winter. I am always surprised by the interesting choices that students make and I am keen to see if Jackson's streak continues in 2025.

Listen to the Music - Part 2

In my last post, I introduced my approach to music in my classroom and the “eight song bracket challenge” my students and I explore throughout the year. In this writing, I would like to share the story of an unexpected opportunity that resulted in an authentic conversation and a positive outcome.

Recently, the students wanted to look at eight songs by Michael Jackson and have them square off in the challenge.  For fun, I decided to share “Eat it”,  the ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic video lampooning Jackson’s “Beat it”. It was wonderfully well received and I squeezed in a quick lesson on parody, particularly focusing on the notion that the individual being satirized would be more flattered than offended. I currently have a group of boys who have a fascination with “pranking”. They are, as one might expect, still learning that a gag may not always be harmless, or be received as it was intended.

A few weeks later, we watched the “Bad” video - which is actually an 18 minute short film directed by Martin Scorcese. It generated lots of talk. There were some obvious commentary about how it hadn’t aged well, but we also discussed street violence, crime and poverty. We even brushed up against  the idea that we all wear different masks for different people in order to feel safe or belong.

It was around this time that I remembered that ‘Weird Al’ had a parody video called “Fat”. When the video was released, in 1987, I was working as a bartender at a pizza joint. There was an upbeat cook who would parrot lines from the video, peppering them comically into his daily kitchen banter. Consequently, I only remembered the song as being tremendously funny and hysterically quotable.

Thirty years later, I reflected on things differently. The song, although clever, could easily be seen as staggeringly cruel to people who were obese. I realized that endorsing it as “great comedy” would not be appropriate and I debated moving on. However, I also reflected on a mantra from the world of improvisational comedy.

“There are no mistakes, only opportunities”.

I decided to turn the wheel of my pedagogical car into this skid, and embrace this situation head-on. I showed my students the video without giving them any preamble. We then looked over the lyrics. Then we debriefed.

I began by asking the students to gather at the front of the class to show a continuum. We have done “opinion continuums” before, so they were familiar with the process.  

At one extreme was a space for students who felt the song and video was “totally fine, just good fun and not a big deal”, and at the other end was a space for students who felt the song was “inappropriate, clearly body-shaming people who were overweight”.

Interestingly, 94.7% of the class (19 out of the 20 students who chose to participate) gathered on the “totally fine/good fun” side, with 12 putting themselves near the most extreme end. The message was clear. Overall, the students did not think this was a big deal.

We then had a discussion.

• Students openly shared their opinions about their position. Several suggested that "people were fat by choice" and that "it is okay to make fun of fat people because they are funny."
• I floated the idea that other factors could contribute to obesity, including
• Poor food options in childhood due to poverty.
• Mental health issues, like depression leading to overeating.
• Physical health issues, like issues with the endocrine system.
• I asked them if their opinion would be different if we had a student in the class who was obese?
• I asked them if their opinion would change if it was, equally cleverly written, but called “Black” or “Gay”?

There were some great ideas shared and the conversation was lively. My students, who are nearing Grade 6, are starting to become more aware of social charged topics. Their world of black & white truths are starting to bleed into an intricate mix of grays. Being part of this process with them is as wonderful and important as it is complex and delicate.

We returned to the opinion continuum after the discussion. This time we self-evaluated our choices before and after the chat by completing a Google Form anonymously. The results are here. As you can see, most students moved toward the opposite end with 26.4% recognizing it as some degree of insensitive, 31.6% in the middle and the remaining 42% still seeing it as a lesser degree of “just fine/good fun”.

Some final thoughts and questions

• I am constantly amazed at the great things that can come out of a simple idea.
• I sincerely feel that this activity made my students kinder, more thoughtful & considerate about the feelings of others.
• There are some who might argue that I am using my position of authority unfairly. That, perhaps, I am trying to create "soft liberals". Students who will become overly concerned with Political Correctness & stereotyping while learning to be afraid of free speech.  I’d like to tackle that in Part 3 of this blog series - but that might be too big a nut to crack in a forum like this.