Michael Jackson: Master of media, cultural mash-up

Michael Jackson excelled at many things: dance, promotion, song, fashion, showmanship. But the real meaning of his career transcends even these things.

Jackson was a bridge to today's world of instant global imaging. He midwived the contemporary "mash-up" culture, in which images, sounds, and objects from almost anywhere are clipped and recombined to make powerful, startling new things. Most important, his art mashed up the races and challenged social relations in music and world culture.

The 13-minute "Thriller" video of 1983 marked the real departure. Inspired by the 1981 flick An American Werewolf in London, Jackson enlisted director John Landis to make him a zombie and a werecat, leading other undead in a nightmare dance both stylish and creepy. The video made Jackson the first global multiplatform pop star, as famous for his moving image as for his music. Arguably the most famous person of his time, he supercharged the video era and helped create a new means of selling and spreading culture.

Jackson established the role of the modern cultural mash-up artist. He saw himself as the inheritor of great artists of the past. He cultivated close friendships with many boyhood heroes, including Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Elizabeth Taylor, and Fred Astaire (to whom he dedicated his 1988 memoir Moon Walk), and he appropriated symbols, moves, and even characters from their work.

His Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band-style jacket was a constant reference to the Beatles' breakthrough album of 1967, itself a cultural mash-up. His gangster persona in the "Smooth Criminal" video of 1988 combines Astaire, Cab Calloway, Bill Robinson, and the folk-hero gangsters of the John Dillinger era. In this brand-new culture, anything - a dance move by the Nicholas Brothers, a Beatles album, a refrain from Cameroonian singer Manu Dibango - could be blown apart and reassembled anew.

The ultimate target of this mash-up was race itself. Even his plastic surgeries and skin treatments - pigmentation disorder or no - split the differences among races, skin of shifting shades, European, African, and Asian hair and features. And it kept changing. His was not one look - it was a process.