Michael Jackson on the HIStory World Tour, 1996-7

Lift your head up high
And scream out to the world
I know I am someone
And let the truth unfurl

– Michael Jackson, ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’

In Performing Rites, rock critic Simon Frith asks: “What is the relationship between the voice as a carrier of sounds, the singing voice, making ‘gestures’, and the voice as a carrier of words, the speaking voice, making ‘utterances’?”

For Frith, the voice is more than just another musical instrument – not just because it’s capable of language, but also because it’s produced by the body itself, so it represents the physical presence of the singer in a way other instruments do only indirectly.

This physicality ties the singer’s performance tightly to his or her persona. Frith argues: “a pop star is like a film star, taking on many parts but retaining an essential ‘personality’ that is common to all of them and is the basis of their popular appeal. For the pop star the ‘real me’ is a promise that lies in the way we hear the voice”.

In that case, it’s difficult ever to hear the ‘real Michael Jackson’. His pop music is thematically orthodox, composed chiefly of macho dance numbers, romantic love songs and sappy ballads. Yet, his public persona is much more ambiguous and disturbing. Was he a habitual child abuser or a boy who never grew up? A surgically created Caucasian, or proud African-American? A loving family man, or an asexual deviant who created his kids in test-tubes and dangled his younger son from a hotel balcony? A persecuted tabloid victim manipulated by a callous entourage of ‘enablers’, or a canny businessman who never missed an opportunity for self-promotion?

It’s not my aim in this article to provide any definitive answers to these questions. In the light of his notorious interview with Martin Bashir, his accusations of racism against Sony boss Tommy Mottola, and his child sexual abuse court case, it seems unlikely that even Michael Jackson could make sense of his own contradictions. Instead, let’s investigate the Jackson phenomenon by examining one of its key attributes: Jackson’s idiosyncratic non-verbal vocalisations.

This may seem like a frivolous enterprise, or even like the worst excesses of fandom. After all, despite believing himself the Artist of the Millennium, Michael Jackson died as a sad, washed-up ’80s star whose wacky personal life had usurped his musical talent. However, the non-verbal vocalisations are one of the best-known but least-investigated aspects of Jackson’s music. They provide another way of appreciating songs so iconic they’ve become clichés.

But Jackson’s wordless cries are also interesting because they open up potential readings of pop music beyond ideas like ‘songs as text’ or ‘music as feeling’. This unproductive dichotomy has led to something of an impasse in music research.

Of course songs are texts: they contain cues which can be ‘read’ by listeners (and watchers of music videos), and analysed by researchers. However, these texts exist within and between cultural contexts; their meanings largely rely on inferences and connotations. Some academic musicologists try to peel pop songs apart, reducing them to verses, phrases, video frames, even syllables. They might find symbolic or narrative meaning within lyrics, or map a song’s words onto its cadences and melodies, but they are at a loss to engage the wider repertoire of cultural conventions that often make music so compelling.

This tendency is particularly striking in David Brackett’s analysis of the James Brown song ‘Superbad‘. Brackett realises that “social ‘competence’”, or in his terms, intuitively being able to recognise a groove, is the key to appreciating soul music. His aim is to make explicit the “rhythmic syntax” of this groove for those (white?) listeners who lack this cultural knowledge. He divides the overall song structure, as well as individual phrases, into sections labelled by letters, transcribing key vocalisations into classical notation form.

Unfortunately, Brown’s transcribed vocalisations come across as faintly ludicrous: the melody-focused notation system is barely able to contain their exuberant glissandos and tremolos; and the ‘lyrical’ content is negligible, for example, “yaay — Hay — Hay — Hay —; huh-yaay ——”). Brackett’s ‘decoding’ technique also doesn’t read well:

“Figures a and e tend to occur in tandem at the end of the B sections … the last two statements of figure a occur at the end of section B3 and frame within them the final statements of both figure d and figure e.”

While it certainly foregrounds the syntax of soul, this mercilessly close reading doesn’t really offer much insight into how ‘Superbad’ reveals its cultural contexts and addresses its audiences; although as I’ll go on to argue, Brackett’s wider argument about “signifyin’” as a black performative practice is more intriguing.

Another strand of pop music criticism argues that music is ‘experienced’ rather than ‘read’, and tries to locate the ‘meanings’ of music in the cultural formations associated with particular styles, such as moshing in rock and metal, or raving in electronic music. This can be a valuable approach; I’ve used it myself.

It gets dangerous, however, when critical attention drifts from the affective possibilities of the music itself to the organisational or industrial structures of its audiences, whether they’re called ‘subcultures’, ‘scenes’ or ‘crowds’. This methodology also excludes the feelings in the production (that is, recording or performance) of music — how it manifests the emotions and experiences of the performers.

Michael Jackson’s non-verbal vocalisations are a way of negotiating a potential ‘middle path’ between too little and too much focus on the cultures of creating, distributing and appreciating music. I analyse the songs themselves, as well as the social and critical climate in which they were released.

Specifically, I want to show how the non-verbal vocalisations provide insights into three of the most vexed questions about Jackson – race, sexuality and gender – and discuss the spin Jackson himself puts on them in ‘Scream’, his 1994 duet with his sister Janet. Ultimately, the non-verbal vocalisations perform Jackson’s complicated identity far more successfully than his lyrics and video clips.

“yaay — Hay — Hay — Hay —; huh-yaay ——”

The non-verbal vocalisations

“An odd thing about Michael Jackson,” notes Village Voice critic Frank Kogan, “is that he has a totally spectacular voice but he doesn’t feel the need to amaze us with it. … On dance songs he makes his voice as hard and compact as the percussion, reducing himself to icy shards and chilly wails.” Other critics have referred to these “wails” as “whoops and yelps”, “grunts, squeals, hiccups, moans, and asides”. There’s the instantly recognisable, high-pitched “Hoo!” or “Ow!”, and the related “Hee-hee!” Jackson also punctuates his lyrics with gutteral grunts and sharp expulsions of breath, and creates rhythmic ‘beatbox’ effects.

What do these non-verbal vocalisations mean? It’s arguable that they are primal screams of deep anguish or pleasure, innately representative of the inner emotions that escape expression in Jackson’s lyrics and melodies. However, that argument doesn’t accord with how stylised they are, nor why Jackson uses them so much and so predictably.

On the other hand, they might be just a pastiche of trills, tics and vocal embellishments from other musical eras and styles, with no specific meaning at all. Perhaps Jackson picked them up as a child imitating his soul singer idols, and now, like bad grammar, he finds them hard to shake.

But as audiences and critics, we should consider our need to imbue non-verbal sounds with meaning. Simon Frith calls them “willed sounds”; because audiences will them to be significant. Rather than entertain the idea that we find them meaningless, we choose to interpret them “as words we do not understand, or as sounds made by someone who has chosen to be inarticulate.”

From another perspective, Australian postcolonial critic Paul Carter calls them “sounds in-between”. For Carter, sounds in-between define the space of first encounters between people without a common language – colonisers and indigenous people, or migrants and their host cultures. Yet by definition, sounds in-between are confusing and ambiguous to both parties, because they aren’t pure spectacles to be appreciated aesthetically, nor do they follow linguistic rules.

Carter’s example is the Australian indigenous vocalisation “cooee”, which, he argues, was originally a greeting. European settlers misinterpreted this meaning, coming to view “cooee” as a method of communicating over long distances, for the arbitrary reason that its tonal qualities lent themselves to amplification. Consequently, many Australians now believe that Aborigines ‘authentically’ used “cooee” to call out to others in the bush. Thus, something that begins in a desire for dialogue takes on an altogether different meaning through mutual misunderstanding.

The idea of communicating with sounds-in-between might seem somewhat futile – but only from the perspective that communication ‘fails’ if intended meanings don’t match interpreted meanings. Instead, the concept of the sound in-between intersects with Frith’s notion of willed sounds. While Frith identifies audiences as the primary meaning-makers of pop music, Carter writes that non-verbal vocalisations delineate “a space where, in future, misapprehensions and differences can begin to form the basis of a new cross-cultural argot”.

And, just as sounds in-between historically led to hybrid forms of communication like pidgin, Michael Jackson’s non-verbal vocalisations are an attempt to bridge the gap between the things he says and the things his audiences assume about him, while simultaneously acknowledging the very precariousness of assigning these meanings.

Next: “It don’t matter if you’re black or white” – what the non-verbal vocalisations reveal about race

This is an edited version of an academic paper that was first presented at the 2003 Australasian conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and later published in the musicology journal Context.