The Despot

So I've been thinking about Kriss Kross this morning. My first, and probably only real memory, of the young rap duo stems from one Monday morning when I was in seventh grade, and seemingly everybody, everybody cool at least, was wearing their overalls backwards. I had no idea what this meant, but that was because I didn't watch "In Living Color" and the Sunday night before, Kriss Kross had performed on the show, wearing their overalls backwards. I'm from a small suburban town, and so the moment that people here decide something is cool, it usually means that the rest of the world is already dangerously close to being tired of it.



The Kriss Kross fad didn't last very long. They were a one-hit wonder, and while there's nothing wrong with that, I feel like their pop ascendancy was shorter than most. It culminated in a bunch of white 12-year-olds in southeastern Massachusetts wearing their overalls backwards one Monday morning.

What made me think of Kriss Kross was the death of Michael Jackson. MTV has been running his videos all morning (well, at least since 4:30 when I got up and started watching.) I have a lot of mixed feelings about Jackson, probably all the same mixed feelings that everybody else has: Thriller is awesome/child molestation is not. But I caught two videos by him that I'd never seen before. The first was the song "Jam", which features, bringing it full circle, Kriss Kross.

The significance of this didn't hit me until I saw the video for "Liberian Girl." It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. First of all, the song is low down in the mix, so that we can catch all the little dialogue between the 400 zillion stars who cameo in the video. (From wikipedia: Paula Abdul,Rosanna Arquette,Dan Aykroyd,Mayim Bialik,Jackie Collins, David Copperfield, Richard Dreyfuss,Corey Feldman, Lou Ferrigno,Debbie Gibson,Danny Glover,Steve Guttenberg,Whoopi Goldberg, Sherman Hemsley, Amy Irving,Malcolm-Jamal Warner,Beverly Johnson, Quincy Jones, Don King,Virginia Madsen,Olivia Newton-John, Brigitte Nielsen, Lou Diamond Phillips, Ricky Schroder, Steven Spielberg, Suzanne Somers, John Travolta, Blair Underwood, Carl Weathers, Billy Dee Williams, "Weird Al" Yankovic all make appearances) You can barely hear what Jackson is singing, and he only shows up at the last seconds of the video. Check it out yourselves:

Watch enough Michael Jackson videos (and I'll admit, I hadn't seen one in probably a decade, until this morning's video wake) and you'll see, in the later ones, the ones after "Thriller", littered with stars. "Liberian Girl" is the worst example I've ever seen, but one of his last videos, for "Rock My World" has what may be the last appearance of Marlon Brando ever. So I thought about "Liberian Girl" and I thought about Kriss Kross, and I thought about Michael Jackson. One of the media outlets I was watching last night referred to Michael Jackson as the "Self-professed" king of pop. And so this morning, it all came together.

There was probably a kid you went to school with who wasn't really very popular, or even noticed most of the time. And that kid one day does something: makes a joke, makes a really cool play during a baseball game in gym class, gets cheers as he break-dances at the 7th and 8th grade dance. And then that kid, reveling in the attention, does it again. And again. And again. With diminishing returns each time. He'll never be able to catch that lightning in a bottle again. That's Michael Jackson.

Jackson was clearly an enomorously talented individual. Even the worst of his solo material is meticulously produced. But his problem, one of his problems, was that he needed you to notice it. He called himself the King of Pop, and then he needed to prove it, everytime he did anything. "Look at me. Look all the famous people who want to be in my video! They wouldn't want to do it, if I wasn't the King of Pop."

So the significance of Kriss Kross? That Monday morning, 17 years ago, when the kids in my class work their overalls backwards, signaling the death knell of Kriss Kross's cultural significance? They made their appearance in Jackson's "Jam" video AFTER that.

Kings are kings by birthright. "Self-proclaimed" kings are despots by definition. History is littered with leaders who have named themselves kings, or supreme or dear leaders, and the ends of their reigns are all marked by increasingly paranoid demonstrations of their power, to the detriment of their people, and to themselves. They need people to believe they're powerful, even more so than they need to actually BE powerful.

Michael Jackson could've continued to make great music if he wasn't so concerned with being the King of Pop. Of chasing around the biggest names to appear on his records and in his videos to prove it. His last record, "Invincible" featured a cameo by Notorious B.I.G., who had died six years before, and while that more likely speaks to the deliberate speed with which he recorded his albums, it also a haunting reminder how behind popular culture he had become. His idea of a big name rapper to open his record of the new millenium was someone who had died half a decade earlier.

Michael Jackson will hopefully be remembered more for his early, brilliant work, instead of the scandals that plagued the last third of his life. But as I watched him dance around with Kriss Kross, or get chased by Eddie Murphy dressed as a pharaoh, or awkwardly kissing Iman, or hanging out with a rapping Maculay Culkin on a stoop, all I could think was: The Dear Leader of Pop. Clinging to his title at the expense of everything else. May history be kinder to him.