Written by: Paul Gleason

Mission accomplished. Susan Fast’s new monograph on Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album is an utterly compelling, utterly intelligent reassessment of Jackson’s oft-maligned record of 1991 and a challenge to anyone who thinks that they have a grasp on Jackson’s controversial art.

Controversial? Yes. One of Fast’s central points—and perhaps the one that runs the deepest—is that Jackson didn’t peak in the mid-1980s, when Thriller was at its height. Indeed, Thriller is a great collection of standout hit songs, and Bad isn’t so bad either (have you listened to “Dirty Diana” recently?). But Dangerous is the album on which Jackson begins to find his artistic relevance as being more than just the King of Pop.

According to Fast, Dangerous is a sprawling masterwork, in which Jackson reaches a place of creative maturation that forever dismantles the theory that by 1991 his best work was far behind him.

Fast has an arsenal of literary theorists to help her support her claim (Gates, Foucault), but her writing style—like the Jackson album that is her subject—is dangerous. I can’t think of a 33 1/3 book that’s written with so much verve, so much life that the deployment of tough theory and philosophy is swept away in the author’s passionate prose.

That is, Fast writes as if she has a beef against fans and critics who have condemned Dangerous and all of the music that Jackson made in its wake as the work of a demented man who’s lost the plot.

In Fast’s reading, on the other hand, Jackson had most definitely found the plot on Dangerous—perhaps for the first time.

The opening pages, which take up the harsh, industrial sounds of songs like “Jam” and “Why You Wanna Trip on Me” illustrate a transformation in Jackson’s singing style. He sounds like James Brown—clipped, sexy, and unwilling to rehash the pop melodies that ingratiated him to the white masses in the 1980s. In addition, producer Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing and, perhaps, the influence of Public Enemy and Nine Inch Nails allow anger to sweep into Jackson’s music and the deepest connection to his African-American roots that had been on none of his records up to that point.

And it’s no accident that soulful “Remember the Time” follows hot on the heels of the album’s opening four tracks, which embrace hip-hop and industrial sonics. Fast’s analysis of the song and video provide an excellent argument for Jackson’s championing of African-American and, indeed, African identity in an accessible, poppy way.

Two tunes that follow on the record—“Heal the World” and “Black or White”—have often been criticized as being saccharine. But in Fast’s analysis of them in the context of the rest of the album, they become accessible message songs that move Dangerous from a reclamation of Jackson’s African-American roots to a political deconstruction of racial and gender identity.

It’s in this section of the book that Fast most deftly plunges into what, after reading her book, I take to be the importance of Dangerous—that Jackson isn’t the “man-child” whom most people perceive him to be. Rather, Jackson is a shape shifter, a man whose physical appearance, dancing, sexuality, and music all challenge preconceived notions of the way in which life, art, and entertainment blend in an attempt to force critical thinking.

In blurring the lines that traditionally define people, Jackson, as the world’s biggest pop star, puts everything on the line in order, as he would say, to heal the world. The fact that most people still don’t get Jackson’s political mission on Dangerous and in his late music puts him in the camp of Oscar Wilde, another unfairly demonized artist, albeit from a previous era.

According to Fast—and I think she’s right—Jackson’s most complex work as been largely ignored, mainly because of its richness and because it comes from a man whom many people unfairly assume not to be a deep thinker, a man whom many people assume to be singly striving for hit records.

So a lot of folks tend to view the second half of Jackson’s solo career as being a failure, simply because it didn’t have the number one singles that populated his earlier records.

To say this, implies Fast, is to claim that capitalism drives Jackson and maybe all African-American popular artists. This claim is racist. The same claim could be made about white performers, such as David Bowie. But Bowie’s changes tend to be viewed as artistic triumphs and not commercial failures, although many of them were.

But Jackson shattered barriers just as much as Bowie. Who else would involve Slash in a metal song like “Give In to Me” and The Andraé Crouch Singers in “Keep the Faith”? On the same record?

Only Michael Jackson. Only Michael Jackson.