{insert indecipherable vocalisation here}

“PYT (Pretty Young Thing)“, Michael Jackson. There was a time, not long ago, when I used to listen to this song over and over again on the train, to the exclusion of most others. Lots of other songs from Thriller are overplayed, so I’m making up for it with this one. Dunno if I could ever wear this one out, though; it’s real neat. Justin Timberlake wishes he were this neat. Also: for something so crisp and crunchy, it’s not as ferocious as the bigger songs from Thriller, in which Michael started his descent into a strangely muted, almost autistic kind of fury.

I’ll throw in a little bonus here: Michael’s excellent home demo of “Billie Jean“, included on the Special Edition of Thriller. A couple of weeks ago I was at an academic conference about popular music, and one of the hottest papers was called “Saying the Unsayable: the non-verbal vocalisations of Michael Jackson”, in which the presenter argued that Jackson’s yelps and grunts channel those non-conforming layers of his persona — those apparent “crises” of race, gender and sexuality — that are constantly glossed over in the more readily identifiable aspects of his artistry. In this light, it’s really interesting to hear Michael’s moments of glossolalia in those bits of the song where he hasn’t yet written the lyrics. They fit completely with the sighs and screams that remain in the final version of the song. But because the song hasn’t fully cohered in the demo, Michael’s voice seems even more permeable, crawling from a place before words. This would be a good time to go over the definition of the psychoanalytic term, chora:

The earliest stage in your psychosexual development (0-6 months), according to Julia Kristeva. In this pre-lingual stage of development, you were dominated by a chaotic mix of perceptions, feelings, and needs. You did not distinguish your own self from that of your mother or even the world around you. Rather, you spent your time taking into yourself everything that you experienced as pleasurable without any acknowledgment of boundaries.

Be careful what you do. This is Ben from Antipopper, signing off.