If Bad Is Good, Michael Jackson Was the Baddest

I grew up in the 1980s, when Michael Jackson was king, though I never paid much attention to the contemporary music scene, and it wasn't until the early '90s that I got to be really familiar with some of Jackson's biggest solo pop hits. I have to give credit to Weird Al Yankovic - and in turn my brother Benjamin, who force-fed me the master spoofer's parodies until I developed a taste for them - for deepening my appreciation of Michael Jackson. I think the first song I ever heard of his was Eat It, which came on during a ride at an amusement park; the song was halfway over before we realized something was amiss with the words. Eat It, such a hilarious send-up of nagging mothers everywhere, remains one of my favorite Al tunes.

When Benjamin's Al-mania was in full swing, we watched a television special putting His Weirdness's parodies back-to-back with the original videos that inspired them. I'm pretty sure that's the first time I saw the video for Bad, which led to Fat, a song whose lyrics might be considered the natural consequence of too much Eat It-style forced eating. I'm not sure why food and Michael Jackson seem to go together in Yankovic's mind, but then he seems to have an excessive fondness for that subject in general. While I'm not a big fan of fat jokes, as a frame-for-frame parody of the Bad video, Fat, with the Incredibly Expanding Al and the zany sound effects, is brilliant.

From the first snap of his wrist in that dark subway station to the final defiant close-up, this is a visually arresting video. I can see why Al chose to parody both Beat It and Bad, as they are two of the most impressive testaments to Michael's talent, and both involve this gentle soul trying to come off like a total punk. He looks pretty convincing in his black, silver-spangled get-up, strutting around with a flock of equally tough-looking followers, but just as it's hard to be too intimidated by graceful gang members crooning "When you're a Jet, you're a jet all the way" in West Side Story, these perfectly coordinated dancers are a little too sprightly to appear genuinely menacing. I imagine that's part of the point; they're a bunch of posers who want us all to think they're bad. And then they all go home and have tea with their grandmothers.

The choreography in the video is exceptional, and so much of Jackson's genius at this point in his career was about his moves that it's difficult to separate the video from the song itself. This isn't a single you want to listen to only; you want the video on your television so you can play it on repeat, trying all afternoon to replicate the dance steps. There's nothing all that brilliant about the lyrics in and of themselves. It starts off with that classically odd opener, "Your butt is mine," and continues with the trash talk and the repeated assertions of "I'm bad". If you have to say it so many times, something tells me it's probably not true. Still, if "bad is good", as asserted by Zack, the ridiculously 80s-ish visitor to the fairy world in 1992's animated tree-hugging flick FernGully, then at the time this video was made in the late '80s, it's fairly safe to say that Michael Jackson was the baddest guy around.

My appreciation for Michael Jackson runs deepest when I think of him as a humanitarian. Bad doesn't showcase that side of him. But it does display what an exceptional dancer he was, and I get the sense that he had a lot of fun making this video. I hope he did. It sure is fun to watch.