'Michael Jackson's Journey From Motown To Off The Wall': Spike Lee Wants Him Back
A completely successful attempt to re-position Michael Jackson as a profoundly self-aware artist, as opposed to the freakish and tragic celebrity that he became, Spike Lee’s Michael Jackson’s Journey From Motown To Off The Wall is both thrilling and instructional.
The documentary, which will air on Showtime on Friday, begins with the Jackson 5’s rise to fame in the late 1960s and carries on through until the release of Jackson’s solo album Off The Wall in 1979. The early hits — “I Want You Back,” “ABC” — remain extraordinary bursts of talent, with Michael’s impossibly powerful voice leading it. “This kid, at age nine, meant serious, serious business,” says Motown Records founder Berry Gordy — and Berry Gordy knows business.
This becomes the theme of director Lee’s film: The idea that Jackson, from an early age, had a sense of himself as both an artist and a commercial force. There are interviews with people who helped shape the sound, as the Jackson 5 gave way to the Jacksons, which in turn led to Michael’s solo career. The production team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who collaborated on Jackson hits like “Enjoy Yourself,” add to the testimony of Gordy and Quincy Jones (the latter the co-producer of Off The Wall) in describing Jackson’s recording-studio methods and work ethic.
Questlove has become the go-to guy for pop-music perspective in music documentaries for a reason he proves once again here: He brings a musician’s knowledge of why a piece of music is special (his analysis here of “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” is a mini-music class) as well as a fan’s appreciation for what that music meant to millions of ordinary people — how Jackson’s music during this era not only defined the time, but made the world a better place simply by its existence.
Lee shows us quite a bit of footage from the Jacksons’ “Triumph Tour” shows at the Los Angeles Forum in 1981. I was there, and can confirm the director’s enthusiasm for these remarkable shows, which were not only displays of Michael’s ceaseless energy and creativity, but also performances that dramatized, onstage, the fact that Michael had outgrown his brothers — he was ready to step out on his own, gloriously.
The documentary stops just at the point Jackson was beginning to record Thriller, and does so for a reason. In Lee’s view, the immense popularity of Thriller overshadowed Off The Wall, and Lee wants to rehabilitate the latter’s reputation. But beyond that, Lee knows that, with Thriller, Jackson’s rise to the preeminent perch in popular music was also the period that would begin a decline into self-consciousness, self-doubt, eccentricity, fear, and ultimately withdrawal from the world that inspired so much of Jackson’s best work.
Better to stop where Spike Lee does, and revel once again in the magnificence of Michael Jackson at the apex of his will to greatness.
Michael Jackson’s Journey From Motown To Off The Wall airs Friday at 9 p.m. on Showtime.
