Michael Jackson : Black or White ?

Preface by Brad Buxer

To say of Michael Jackson that he broke down barriers and categories human, social, artistic and racial is a truism, a cliché regularly put back in the running without further explanation or development. But it's time to answer it ...

What are the processes he has put in place to federate such a large and eclectic audience? How and at what cost did Gary's Black and Poor child rise to the heights of a musical current, pop, considered historically as White? What choices, strategies, affinities and historical coincidences have built and innervated its dynamics of transversality? Why has he disturbed so much by shifting the boundaries of social huts considered narrow, by embodying what our society preaches: bringing into conformity the interiority of a being, his ideals and his choices? of appearance?

The author offers us here some tracks of historical, social, cultural and musical exploration. Because they are numerous, the escalades, the falls, the chaotic marches which allow to reach such summits ... and nothing is simple, neither binary nor unequivocal in the artistic and personal course of an exceptional artist like the is Michael Jackson.