This next number one carries a lot of baggage: involving the singer, the video, the theme of the song… So much that it’s easy to forget that it’s actually quite a breezy pop tune, built around an actually quite cool riff. Compared to Michael Jackson’s big ‘80s hits – ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Bad’, ‘Smooth Criminal’ – it’s a lot more ‘pop’.
Black or White, by Michael Jackson (his 4th of seven #1s)
2 weeks, from 17th November – 1st December 1991
It’s also a very modern sounding song, moving from said pop, to rock, to rap, with a tribal drumbeat laid underneath, with effortless ease. By the middle of the decade it will be common for pop songs to incorporate a rapped verse, but this is one of the first chart-topping examples I can think of. The huge change in tone for the middle-eight sticks out like a sore thumb, but also somehow works too, and is our first glimpse into how this is more than just a nice pop song.
I ain’t scared of no sheets, I ain’t scared of nobody… Jackson spits (‘sheets’ referring to the white cloths of the KKK), and the rest of the song’s lyrics are similarly hard-hitting. Don’t tell me you agree with me, When I saw you kicking dirt in my eye… he sings, as the main riff kicks back in again. But the true classic line is kept for the rap: I’ve seen the bright getting duller, I’m not gonna spend my life bein’ a colour…
This being Michael Jackson, though, the message that it don’t matter if you’re black or white comes with a little extra baggage. Compared to the MJ that we saw in the video to his last UK #1 – 1987’s ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’ – he looks a lot less… black. His nose, too, has changed beyond recognition. It would turn out to be a combination of plastic surgery, vitiligo and skin bleaching. In releasing a song called ‘Black or White’, you have to either marvel at Jackson’s confidence, knowing that he was going to invite comment and criticism, or suspect that he was becoming divorced from reality.
Still, he was the biggest pop star on the planet, and the music video premiered to the biggest audience ever. Like many of Jackson’s videos, it’s an eleven-minute piece of cinema. It opens in a suburban kid’s bedroom (the kid being child star du jour Macauley Culkin), before taking us on a tour of the world, as MJ dances with African tribesmen, Native Americans, Thai dancers and Cossacks before ending up on top of the Statue of Liberty. Nowadays you might label it as well-intentioned but clumsy. The most affecting part of the video is the simplest: the face shifting sequence, in which white men morph into black women into Asian men into white women.
The song ends, but the video continues with a five minute long scene where Jackson morphs into a panther, then embarks on a vandalism rampage, smashing shop windows and car windscreens. He got criticism for this, and cut it from later screenings of the video. (Personally, I’d criticise it for being self-indulgent and pointless, rather than encouraging violence…) Years later he edited this section of the video so that he was smashing windows that had been spray painted with racist slogans to better explain his actions. Oh, yeah, and then the video actually ends by cutting to an episode of ‘The Simpsons’, in which Bart has just watched the video to Homer’s annoyance (handily harking back to Jackson’s alleged other #1 from earlier in the year).
It’s a complex beast, then, this single. On the one hand a breezy tune with a positive message, on the other a sign that the King of Pop might have been living up to the ‘Wacko’ nicknames. It was the lead single from ‘Dangerous’, his last truly great album (though one that still probably couldn’t quite live up to its 1980s predecessors). Despite that, the 1990s would end up being Jackson’s most successful decade of all for number one singles, with three more to come… And I’m going to spoil things by saying that ‘Black or White’ is probably the best.
The UK Number Ones Blog 
It’s catchy pop-rock. It’s not bad. I agree with you on his appearance change. I grew up watching him with his brothers on TV and was excited when I bought his 1979 album Off The Wall. That was a great album and he looked like himself. Thriller was phenomenal. By the time Bad came out, he didn’t look…normal. The previous two albums were the only two I’ve ever owned.
Yeah the changes started in the mid-80s, they say after the fireworks accident while filming that Pepsi commercial. But the difference between the ‘Bad’ era and this comeback single is startling!
After Thriller, I paid little attention. Thriller came out in my junior year and OMG that album. Off The Wall had been a great, great dancing album (except for yawner “She’s Out Of My Life” with his fake crying). Thriller just exploded in 1982. As far as I am concerned, that was the pinnacle of his career. Everything after that was in Thriller’s shadow. I never purchased another album or song of his. Nothing interested me. Then, the scandals started. I knew then that he had been severely abused.
The Pepsi incident always reminded me of Pryor’s incident.
It’s good. I like Michael better when he was a kid but I did like the Of The Wall album. I never saw the greatness in Thriller…yea I know I’m weird but that album just didn’t grab me…I’m in the minority I know.
To be honest, I’m not sure I’d sit through any of his albums. But as a singles artist he was hard to beat, from the late 70s through to about this point in time.
He did have a lot of good singles I will admit… but nothing gets me excited like Rock With You, ABC or I Want You Back.
Rock With You was played to death in my area. I’d rather hear Workin’ Day & Night.
I still have my original Off The Wall album. It was released just a few weeks before my 13th birthday.
You are weird but…we still love you. 😁
Off The Wall was a damn good album. My mother helped me buy it and she loved it.
I’m proud of being weird!
I didn’t connect with Thriller… at that time I would put another Replacement album on.
How long have you been a musician? When did you pick up your first instrument?
Probably around when I was 13 or 14. Seriously when I was 15
You come at music in a different way when you are a musician, as opposed to just being listener. You have more perspective. I wish I had the depth.
I can appreciate some things that people don’t…but the part about liking ragged singers…is not from that. I’m like that…never did like looking clean shaven and neat…it just doesn’t suit me…or the same in music lol.
Ok. Sir Ragged Max A Lot.
That fits much more
😆
Rating: 5/5
One of my favourite MJ singles. It’s a dated song musically and sonically – it’s very much of it’s time with the pop rock, new jack swing and rap elements – but even as someone born well after this song was released it still holds up. Great message, great lyric, very catchy. Really good vocal from Michael, but then again, has he ever half-assed a vocal performance or appeared to not give it his all? Even as a kid the guy was outdoing men and women twice his age. Music video is cool too.
It’s a fun video, a good pop song and as an intro to the new album it seemed like he was still in his prime. Then I bought the album and it was more patchy than I’d been used from Jacko – some great singles, but no classics, and quite a few OK’s. For me he’d gone off on a Jackswing diversion trying to remain cool, but without Quincy telling him to pull his socks up or go back to the drawing board, it just wasn’t the “every track is a hit single” of Bad. Loved The Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson from day 1, and throughout, but tbh after Thriller and Bad the only way was down, creatively and sales-wise.