2 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality

The only thing more awkward than the passage from childhood to adulthood is the idea of one in the first place. There’s a good deal of evidence for this, but none more convincing than the endless stream of editorials and op-ed pieces marking the death of Michael Jackson in 2009.

As one might expect, references to Peter Pan accessorised journalists’ lists of idiosyncrasies. The litany is well-known: the Neverland ranch, Ferris wheels, Bubbles the pet chimp, the Elephant Man’s bones, a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, the plastic surgeries, and doubtless, the sleepovers. The common view easily slotted these peculiarities into a blueprint it had long held: of a childhood corrupted and the desperate attempts to resurrect it that follow.

The narrative is an old one, but never before had it been played out so publicly. Held up as the archetype of the child ruined by premature contact with the adult world, Jackson became the protagonist in a familiar cautionary tale where there’s too much, too young.

Such a notion bears a heavy load of presumptions however, not least of which is the picture it presents of adulthood as a poisonous elixir if consumed all at once. Indeed, the chorus of child stardom as a destiny to dysfunction is well rehearsed and we’re all too familiar with its cast. It’s just that rarely do we ask if this version of events makes any sense.

To pose this question is first to query who or what the agents of premature socialisation might be. In Jackson’s case, these are not atypical: nightclub dancers, agents, the accountancy of box office takings, an abusive father, ceaseless touring and recording. In other words, the ABCS of modern life: sex, violence, money, and work.

It’s normal to assume that Jackson’s story, and those of his celebrity peers, are aberrations. But they’re not. They are merely variations on a theme. Sure, not every kid has their own hyperbaric chamber, but all childhoods dwell within the gaze of adult memory.

This is no trivial afterthought. It implies children are never identical to the adults who retrospectively invent childhood. The drawbridge is always pulled up; the border is policed with the zeal of the religious convert. Hackneyed metaphors accumulate, but the point is always the same: memory discovers innocence.

They Called It Puppy Love

The claim is a bit murky: the idea of innocence is preserved each time it’s said to have been lost. But Michael Jackson’s early performances with the Jackson 5 muddy the waters further. The role of the child star is usually, as Jane O’Connor’s rare study of the issue suggests, allegorical.⁸ Embodied in Macaulay Culkin’s trademark eye-bulging astonishment or the mannered puppetry of Shirley Temple’s fluttering eyelashes, indulgence in children who ape tropes of cuteness is pervasive. And ten year-old Jackson, doing his miniature James Brown act across American Bandstand’s or Ed Sullivan’s stages, fits the bill. But he also transcends his youth.

In this regard, it’s instructive to compare Jackson to his contemporary, Donny Osmond. Dressed in ill-fitting suit and tie, hair slick and perfectly parted, in his earliest appearances on the Andy Williams show in the mid- 1960s the five year-old Osmond has a mien somewhere on the spectrum between used car salesman and lounge singer. Of course, the disguise is imperfect. His size and stilted, inchoate mannerisms, along with his brittle and thin voice, give him away.

Osmond’s aw-shucks act wouldn’t work though if it weren’t for a three-hundred-year historical development – taking in a peculiar wardrobe; a distinct literature, art, and music – of children’s culture. But it also rests with Osmond’s obliviousness to his own difference to the adults around him. Excessively heedless of audience laughs elicited by his grownup charade or the naïve answers he supplies to Williams’ questions, the allusion is that he’s blind to his own peculiarity.

The effect can be pitiful. On his first television appearance a tiny Osmond sings a swoony, jazzy version of “You Are My Sunshine”. Fingers snapping, wrists swaying, toes tapping, hips provocatively thrusting forward, a tragically unfunny comedy gives the song the sort of swinging, sultry melody Frank Sinatra would if only he’d sung nursery rhymes. This is facile parody contingent upon the anomaly of the child’s body.

The contrast with Jackson’s performances on variety show stages at ten (the age at which the Jackson 5 signed to Motown) is stark. Jackson is asserted, confident, and precocious. His early vocal and dance style modelled on James Brown and Jackie Wilson, he parades a masculine sexual boldness too studied to betray its posturing. There’s not even a fleeting reticence. While Osmond is seemingly at the threshold of a forgotten lyric or falling out of tune, Jackson invites no doubts.

But maturity isn’t limited to Jackson’s demeanour. On the earliest Jackson 5 hits – “Who’s Loving You” or “I Want You Back” – he exudes passion unexpected of someone so small. This is especially true of his voice. Though patently velvety and youthful, it nonetheless belies, by most accounts, a rich vibrato and strength not usually achieved by people of his age. His boy-soprano (later becoming a high tenor) was, given its remarkable deftness and power, already at the margins of adulthood.

This is a line that, in one sense, Osmond never crossed. Lacking Jackson’s brilliance, he failed to transcend child stardom, his career peaking at the halfway house of the teen heartthrob. By contrast, so assertive is Jackson even in his earliest performances, so mature the musical language he speaks, that he is often asked to submit to an overstated comedy whose punchline is his youth.

According to Jacqueline Warwick’s incisive assessment, this is the motive for prefacing early Jackson 5 performances of “Who’s Loving You” with an infantile monologue about finding love in a sandbox, finger-painting and milk and cookies.⁹ The song itself, written by Smokey Robinson, is a fervent expression of melancholy and regret in the form of a standard soul ballad. Its slack rhythm leaves room for Jackson to dazzle with improvised oohs and aahs and these only add to the song’s sense of urgency and desperation. Indeed, the spectacle prompted by the small Jackson is almost bewildering, and it makes a twofold petition to the audience: to both revel in his practised brilliance and to register his immaturity.

These are seemingly contradictory demands. But the young Jackson proved adept at disrupting binaries. This is often remarked where Jackson’s race and gender are in question. But it’s equally true of the opposition of childhood and adulthood. And this wasn’t merely incidental to the Jackson 5’s success, it was crucial to deflating any menace the Black masculinity of their soul music implied for white America. It’s well-known that Motown’s Berry Gordy quite deliberately employed Jackson’s youth to dissociate the group from the Black Liberation Movement and widespread political radicalism among the increasingly assertive roster of the label’s artists. Jackson’s later deracination and desexualisation would go on to offer the same easy consumption.

And the Rest is Rust and Stardust

All things must end, so the saying goes. But the carnival of child stars fallen on hard times, from Drew Barrymore’s cocaine use at thirteen and Macaulay Culkin or Justin Bieber’s drug arrests to the panoply of rumours that orbited Jackson, is noteworthy for all manner of reasons. The most apparent though also happens to be the least mentioned: given the thousands of child entertainers working at any given moment, such cases could only refer to a tiny minority.

There’s already a contradiction here between perception and reality and it implies we’re in the presence of a voracious appetite, one fed by the presumption that any exposure to the adult world is noxious to children. The popular schadenfreude that greets child stars as they age isn’t, as might then be imagined, solely invited by their offence to childhood innocence.

Of course, the work involved in producing fantasy childhoods implies a trespass over the boundaries of the child’s segregated world. Early success, O’Connor points out, threatens a protestant work ethic demanding a lifetime of earnest toil.¹⁰ The children’s cunning and guile offends, their knowingness disturbs. Besides, to stage wonder and vulnerability is to undermine the very principles of innocence.

But to stop here is to miss the point. Child stars only reinforce and confirm the boundaries of a “normal” childhood. And this is only apparently a contradictory claim. To view the child star as corrupted is not only to exclude them from the category of childhood, but – and herein lies the rub – reaffirm if not elevate the ideal of innocence itself. This is all to say that child stars offer a fantasy twice over: first as the farce of affected purity and vulnerability; second as the tragedy of its corruption.

Ruby Tears There Came

However much Jackson’s apparent long-term psychic disintegration might inform its subject shall be left to tawdry biographies. In any case, it says more about its audience that it does about him. Enraptured by tales of excess and accounts of eccentricities, audiences are incited to take up a gaze upon the star as morally dubious, aesthetically pathetic. But this merely reveals alarm over the excesses of contemporary culture itself: addiction, obesity, eating disorders, media saturation. It turns out anxiety for the child deflects a more general sense of heteronomy.¹¹

If the appeal for children to be quarantined from commercial exploitation entails revelling in the child star’s public corruption, never has the depraved collapse of innocence been more ravenously consumed than during Britney Spears’ very infamous and very public psychic breakdown in 2007. This was at a time of gradually declining album sales, two terminated marriages, and a string of scandals following the peak of her fame in the early 2000s.

The scenes were widely viewed. Spears is filmed by paparazzi in a Los Angeles gas station immediately after leaving an Antiguan rehab centre after just one day. In full view of cameras, Spears entered a hair salon, and when stylists refused to do it for her, sheared off her hair. She then moved on, still under the light of cameras, to be tattooed in a neighbouring parlour, and when finished, sat crying in her car for fifteen minutes while dozens of photographers jostled for vantage points. When asked by one of the hair salon employees why she was doing it, Spears reportedly responded through tears: “I don’t want anyone touching me. I’m tired of everyone touching me”. It wasn’t clear if she meant this figuratively or literally.

Whatever the case, fixation upon Britney’s breakdown didn’t merely amount to what’s become everyday celebrity scandal rubbernecking. Of course destruction of these living totems has a cruelly democratic pleasure to it. But the public displacement of her studied posture of bubbly yet vulnerable flirtatiousness with a look of fear and vacancy implied something more. The veneer of an ever-ambiguous innocence, never betraying the extent of its staging, had terminally broken.

The Way You Make Me Feel

Ten years earlier, at the age of sixteen, Spears released …Baby, One More Time. Not only was it one of the bestselling albums in pop history, it made her the youngest artist to sell one million singles in the US. The lead single and the album’s biggest hit “Baby, One More Time”, in fact written for TLC, sets the mood with straight ahead late 1990s RnB. Repeating three-note piano melody, moderate tempo 4/4 beat, a funky bass line, and wah-wah guitars backup Britney’s light, croaky voice. A peon offered to desperate desire for lost love, Britney’s at once nasal and raspy vocal suits its plaintive agony perfectly: “my loneliness is killing meeeeee… Hit me baby one more time”. Boom!

The song is a thumping bit of fun and it commanded a teen-pop ascendancy accompanying a temporary period of American economic growth. More often than not though, fans and critics alike were as interested in images of Spears as they were the music itself. The schoolgirl costume worn in the video to “Baby, One More Time” came in for particular scrutiny in this regard.

A pleated skirt is cut short, socks climb up thighs, an oxford shirt is tied up revealing an infamous midriff along with its centrepiece “open air substitute vulva”, or at least this is how one critic referred to her belly button.¹² Escorted by dancers, Spears strolls down the halls of a high school, eyes locked upon the camera as she pleads with her former lover. “Tell me baby cause I need to know”, she sings while she and her dancers lunge towards the camera, bras exposed. Thus did Spears enter pop’s consciousness: body first. Crass sexual imagery or confident self-assertion? In fact, it was both.

This is to say that Spears’ exposed body fit a then ascendant pattern of empowered femininity, at once playful and narcissistic. The Spice Girls had set the rules of this Girl Power act a few years earlier, but Spears played it better. Whenever the camera found its gaze lured to her breasts, midriff, or legs – and it did so continually – she appeared neither to take notice nor care. At any rate, at stake was a commodified and sexualised feminine body but one not framed by an external, male demand. Or, at least, expressions of empowerment were indistinguishable from masculine desire.

This adds up to what Rosalind Gill has called the “self-policing narcissistic gaze” of liberal post-feminism, and it’s particularly evident in the wardrobe for the “Baby, One More Time” video.¹³ Besides the nun-spurning provocation of its tailoring, Spears’ schoolgirl uniform insists the audience register her infantilism. It turns out a self-assertive passivity is contradictory only superficially.

The point was underscored by a notorious Rolling Stone photo shoot around the release of Baby, One More Time. Pictured in black bra and polka dot underwear, Spears lies on pink satin sheets, a Teletubby toy in one hand, phone in the other. Her smile is distinctly coquettish, it’s the look of someone caught in some undisclosed act. In case the point wasn’t apparent, a banner headline reading “Barely Legal” guaranteed clarity. When queried about her brazen pubescent sexuality in the accompanying interview, a bewildered Spears responded: “all I did was tie up my shirt”.

The precise blend of innocence and knowingness is left obscure. Sure, the eternal state of desirability of the young girl is inseparable from the suspicion of the fragility and impending decay of innocence. This is true for Shirley Temple as much as it is for Lolita.¹⁴ But in subtly implying virtue’s ever-imminent transgression, Spears was unrivalled.

Beyond the general pose of blankness, her commitment to virginity was especially important as a veil against knowingness. In early June 2000 Spears’ management announced she had been offered $7.5 million for her virginity by an anonymous businessman. Shortly thereafter they released a statement declaring her disgust at the offer and re-affirming her commitment to abstaining from pre-marital sex.

Both suggested and subsequently dismissed, this is an oscillation around sex that came to pass again in 2001 when, following a widely reported three-night sojourn in a Rio de Janeiro hotel with boyfriend Justin Timberlake, Spears insisted they’d merely been “relaxing” and the time had been coitus-free. Not only did the speculation aroused by both scandals keep Spears’ sexuality in the news, but through the promise of virginity, heterosexuality and marriage were thus reaffirmed.

Clearly, gossip concerning Spears’ modesty made for good bookkeeping, especially when tallied in terms of album sales among conservative Americans. But public commitment to virginity didn’t merely appeal to a Christian audience, there are still other markets whose demands were also being met. Attachment to virginity dis-identified Spears with the pornographic scenes she had been staging from a young age, to borrow from one psychoanalytic diagnosis.¹⁵

A pendulum swings here; from chastity to sin and back again. It can be found at the level of Spears’ voice as much as her image. Not only does the singer tend to juxtapose nasal vowels with more guttural RnB groans. But one analysis suggests that due to an early speech impediment she reveals more tongue than is common – a gesture upon which the camera fixates in some of her early videos.¹⁶ Like so, the vacillation between virgin and whore plays out once again: a juvenile lisp is posed with an erotic tongue sliding over red painted lips.

Like a Fiend Hid in a Cloud

It bears pointing out that Britney’s progression towards apparent dysfunction was not nearly so stark as the leap from “Baby, One More Time” in 1999 to her rather drastic haircut in 2007 might imply. A series of episodes were scattered along the way. An exceptionally tight PVC suit worn for the video to “Oops!... I Did It Again” came in for a great deal of judgement in 2000; even more so the skimpy outfits and the python that accessorised them for 2001 follow-up Britney. There was a public smooch with Madonna and Christina Aguilera at the 2003 MTV Video Awards; a quickly annulled marriage in 2004 and a second marriage later that year; an infant chauffeured without a seatbelt in 2005 and a divorce in 2006. It’s a long story.

Still, if her evident breakdown offers something like it’s conclusion this is because it not only finally confirmed that she’d always stood on the wrong side of knowingness, but in doing so, freed her audience from the discomfort of assessing whether she could legitimately be desired any longer. The adjective evacuated, she was now simply: “legal”.

Obviously to respond sexually to children is disallowed. But for one thing, attributes associated with children – purity or vulnerability – also happen to be ideals of beauty. For another, there’s a tendency to view sex in terms of a conquest of the less powerful. There’s a lot of equivocation to wade through and this is where paedophiles come in.

This was practically inevitable. Without them there’s no agreeable explanation for the attractions the vacant innocence of childhood has, to follow a line of argument put down by James Kincaid.¹⁷ How else might we explain the privilege paedophiles are given over all other dangers to the child?

But if their trespasses against innocence act as an assurance for the appropriateness of all other profiles this is only one of the roles paedophiles play. It often goes remarked that contemporary paranoia of “stranger danger” is misplaced. Indeed, most notorious crimes of child abuse don’t occur at the hands of shady rogues, but men with power.

Less often remarked are what Kincaid calls guilt-free “violent pornographic fantasies” implied by the pervasiveness of stories of child abuse.¹⁸ Besides, nowhere is the paedophile gaze more ordinarily adopted than in the ever-vigilant patrolling of the child’s sexual precarity.

In a well-known analysis, Michel Foucault traced the policing of child sexuality to Victorian culture.¹⁹ A then new conception of the child as a sex-free zone entailed an expansive and vigilant regime of surveillance and discipline of the child’s body. In this task a battalion of parents, nurses, servants, and teachers were enlisted, all attuned to the slightest manifestation of the child’s sex.

It’s a beguiling and contradictory idea: children are both asexual and yet sustain an eros so powerful as to be awakened at even the slightest prompting. At any rate, as an anxiety this only increased the sexual significance of the child, now posed as a threat to be carefully managed according to “normal” stages of development.

As a side note, it’s worth observing that a view of children gone “off the rails”, as one TV documentary on Spears was titled, is another way of saying that they have not observed the developmental course laid out for them.

Such an archetype of carefully managed innocence does not repress sexuality, however, it invents it. In the process, as Jacqueline Rose implies, it holds off challenges to heteronormativity from children’s actual sexuality – often perverse, bisexual, and polymorphous.²⁰ Still, there remain other prospects.

I a Child, and Though a Lamb

The Jackson 5’s success spawned a minor industry of child soul and funk groups in the 1970s. But these generally lack Jackson’s talent and vocal power and so, in the main, relinquish the ambiguity between childhood and adulthood that runs through his earliest recordings.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on Angela Simpson’s 1971 self-titled LP of soul ballads written by the six year-old’s mother – also a poet – over which Simpson raps uplifting narratives: “I see little laughter and lots of frowns… I look for a brighter day / When I become something on this Earth and help show the way”. Her voice wobbling and meek, Simpson recalls a sickly-saccharine beat poet. Something of an aural equivalent to an Anne Geddes photography, her starry optimism insists upon both her purity and her vulnerability. Apparently incapable of grasping the tragic, youth becomes a vessel for mostly vacuous proselytising.

Even more cloying is Astrud Gilberto’s 1967 cover version of The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice”, sung with her six year-old son Marcello. The song plays out a particularly hackneyed reduction of the child to a passive receptacle of adult desire, with Gilberto achingly encouraging little Marcello along as he makes his way through the song’s lyrics.

If Simpson and Gilberto are annoyingly oversweet, Jr. and His Soulettes are tragically comic. In this case a father pens coarse garage funk befitting a blaxploitation soundtrack for his troupe of offspring, much of which presumably exceeds the children’s interests (one of the tunes is called “Pimp”) or descends into rebukes of their mother who had recently left him: “mama love tequila / she stays drunk all the time…”.

Embodiment of innocence by the soft timbre and limited range of most children’s voices is not limited to parents with pop pretensions. Free jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp’s monument to the 1971 prison rebellion, Attica Blues, is a self-consciously revolutionary album made in the tradition of the Black Liberation Movement. Indeed, a couple of years earlier Shepp compared his tenor saxophone to the AK47 as a weapon against US imperialism.

Yet the album’s closing song “Quiet Dawn”, sung by Shepp collaborator Carl Massey’s eight year-old daughter Washeeda, reiterates all the tropes of innocence that have permeated the appearance of children on more commercially oriented music. A brassy, commanding tune, the song hinges upon Massey’s limited vocal range, her under-articulated pronunciations, and her faltering voice. “Quiet Dawn” is a proposal of hope and rebirth in the wake of the New York state police murder of thirty-three participants in the Attica prison rebellion. But what Shulamith Firestone calls “a phraseology of cute”, damning its recipients to cheek pinching and passivity, is on full display on the song.²¹

This objectification of the child is all the more out of tune with Shepp’s reputation as a notoriously open-minded and experimental teacher who, by all accounts, rarely resorted to pedantry. Even more incongruous, the album was first performed at a benefit concert for the Black Panther Party, notable for its own progressive attitudes to children, exemplified in the childcare it offered to the concert’s attendees.

The Damned Don’t Cry

In fact, from the early 1970s, the Black Panthers increasingly took up children’s issues as a central concern. Not only were the well-known “Breakfast for Children Programs” in the Bay Area important in linking reproductive labour to a broader political struggle, but early experiments in education, such as “Community Schools”, were run on democratic principles of disallowing harsh verbal or physical discipline and using student-run committees to determine responses to infractions.²²

Out of this tradition comes the remarkable 1968 album Ghetto Reality. Produced by Nancy Dupree, a Panther Party activist and elementary school music teacher in Buffalo, New York, the album is all too rare in making childhood its subject and children its agents. Ultimately fired for her refusal to wear high-heeled shoes and her “general insubordination”, Dupree had always ignored the assigned music curriculum of standard folk songs and hymns, instead introducing her pupils to Nina Simone, Odetta, and Miriam Makeba, and encouraging them to write their own songs.

The album, a collaboration between Dupree and some of her pupils, came about when she spent a whole flight she’d happened to share with Folkways Records founder Moses Asch persuading him to release recordings of songs she had composed along with her young music students.

The songs are unique in that they don’t reproduce adult imaginaries of childhood but seem to be expressions of the students’ own anxieties, desires, and pleasures, often to strikingly beautiful effect.

This is particularly so in the group’s arresting and exposed thundering hymn “James Brown”. The children are accompanied only by piano on this gospel ode to the godfather of soul penned the day after some of them had seen him in concert. Peppered by impressions of the singer’s own adlibs (“Uh!”), James Brown takes the place usually reserved for Jesus in the songs’ lyrics: “his hair was slick and shiny/now he sports his afro / he’s thinking Black! / Lord, oh Lord I’m proud”.

The child’s-eye-view is equally arresting on the blessing-counting spiritual “What Do I Have”: “I have feet and I can dance / I’m so beautiful that when I dance / I put you in a trance”. Dupree’s own voice only appears on their folky soul ballad for Martin Luther King, and it contains the most unnerving moment on the album: continually, the children repeat after her, “they murdered him”. This is not a declaration, it’s a firm and unsettling accusation.

As Dupree seemed to understand, music is infantilised when we ascribe to it a special form for children. The assumption that children require simple, tonal sounds not only presumes that music to be more natural, it also places children at the origin of a linear developmental trajectory. One that not only positions the child as subordinate to the ostensibly more developed adult, but also as a merely passive consumer of culture rather than as its author.

Dupree wasn’t the only one to challenge the standard developmental framing of children’s music and culture. In 1972 free jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, drummer Han Bennink and pianist Fred van Hove recorded an improvisation with fifteen young children. Free Jazz und Kinder, at the Berlin Akademie der Künste.

These recordings are certainly of a piece with the influential series of early 1970s releases by this seminal trio. They’re best described as the confrontation of three distinct musical dispositions: Bennink’s ceaselessly abrupt transformations of rhythm plough into Brötzmann’s sax “screams”, and both are underplayed by the harmonic majesty of van Hove’s piano. On Free Jazz und Kinder, this triad collides with fifteen children and a room full of instruments.

The recordings were actually part of a series of concerts performed by the group in elementary schools which were designed to challenge the exclusion of avant-gardist techniques and non-Western traditions in music education. And they certainly do.

In place of a more comprehensive account, “pandemonium” will suffice as a crude index of the nature of the performance. Brötzmann’s sax can be made out irregularly, there is an occasional metallic bang, blaring high-pitched reed instruments, and a good deal of children’s voices instructing one another. The album’s high points come when Bennink and van Hove really get going. The thick textures they create foreground the children’s erratic, improvised noise-making.

It’s worth remarking that there’s a firm ethos underlying the album. Not dissimilar to Dupree, the adult musicians appear to hold a respect for the children’s autonomy. One occasionally makes out a dialogue between the children and Brötzmann on the album and indeed, the album sits ambiguously between the realms of performance and pedagogy. Or perhaps, it’s better to say it undermines the distinction altogether. The children are very serious, if relatively inexperienced, fellow jazz improvisers, and not merely pupils.

In fact, Brötzmann, still in touch with some of those children today, shared a widespread sentiment amongst his fellow musicians at the time, “I hate school and I hate teachers”. But this begs the question: what role might children have in the revolt such a statement implies?