ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to recenter Michael Jackson's music within the context of his videos, and provide particular attention to their cultural value. Focusing on Jackson's collaborations with director John Landis, Thriller and Black or White, Christopher Wiley redirects existing interpretations of the videos by instead placing music at the nexus of the analysis. Following these musically oriented revisionist readings, the chapter proposes that popular music scholars have a responsibility to make the music itself as important as the cultural spectacles in which they sometimes become entrenched. It also proposes that in cases such as Jackson's, academia has a social responsibility to reorient the public focus to the artistic output rather than the controversies. One of the most significant debates to have emerged in modern popular music studies has concerned the extent to which discourse should focus analytically on the aesthetic texts themselves, rather than on their sociocultural context.
