In a time where moving visuals dominate news, social media and communication, the leviathan influence of the pop music video is well-worn. Beyonce and Jay Z can take over the Louvre and preserve themselves as part of the classical art establishment. Adele can demolish viewing records after months of silence.

Before them all, though, before streaming and YouTube and vloggers, was Michael Jackson, whose influence on pop culture is seemingly ever more pertinent even nine years after his untimely death.

As the National Gallery opens Michael Jackson: On The Wall, an exhibition dedicated to artists’ unceasing portrayal of Jackson and his image, it feels appropriate to reflect on his greatest video achievement. Not Thriller, which acted as a catalyst for a pop music revolution, but Black or White, a preposterously expensive project that resulted in a PR campaign that would come to define music marketing forever and delivered the most controversial moment of Jackson’s career. Here’s how it was made.

‘I did not intend to be a white guy who's rapping on there’

During the late Eighties, Jackson underwent a kind of pop gap year. He had embarked on an enormous, record-breaking tour – his first – in 1987, playing 123 concerts across 15 countries, and channelled his horizon-expanding experiences into a frenzy of songwriting while he recuperated at home. “His social commentary kicked up a notch or two,” his producer Matt Forger remembered to Mike Smallcombe, the author of Making Michael. Jackson had, in short, woken up. Dangerous, released in 1991, remains Jackson’s most socially provocative record yet - even if, due to Jackson’s vitiligo, or skin bleaching, it took decades for its sentiment to be widely acknowledged.

Black or White was one of the first songs written for Dangerous and Jackson had done so in his favourite writing spot: in the “Giving Tree”, which overlooked a lake at Neverland, where he lived. In the summer of 1990, Jackson worked with producer Bill Bottrell to transform the chorus melody he had written into the infectious, guitar-rich hit that became Black or White. Both, however, struggled with filling gaps in the song before deciding upon splicing it up with a rap two thirds in – something that has become ubiquitous in contemporary pop, but was an innovation at the time.

Jackson tried to bring in hit rappers of the era such as LL Cool J, but none were available. Frustrated with the time it was taking to finish the song, Bottrell took matters into his own hands. “One day I wrote the rap,” he told Smallcombe. “I woke up in the morning and, before my first cup of coffee, I began writing down what I was hearing, because the song had been in my head for about eight months by that time and it was an obsession to try and fill that last gap.”

Bottrell never intended to perform the rap, but Michael, he told Noisey, “just loved it”. “I'm, you know, a songwriter and record producer," he said. "I'm not a rapper, and I did not intend to be a white guy who's rapping on there." Nevertheless, Bottrell’s verse stayed on the record, albeit under the pseudonym “LTB”, a reference to Leave It to Beaver, a famously anodyne Fifties sitcom based in American suburbia.  

‘Michael wanted to put just about everything in the whole universe in this thing’

The video followed in September. Building on the extended narrative that made Thriller boundary-breaking, Black or White’s video had clearly different chapters across its 11-minute run. First, we see a child (played by Jackson’s friend Macaulay Culkin, six months after his Home Alone breakthrough) blast his cantankerous father into space with the vibrations of his electric guitar alone. When his dad lands in what is suggested to be African bushland, the viewer is greeted by tribal dancers before Jackson appears among them, embarking upon an international celebration of diversity by dancing with people from around the world.

Together, they personify the message of Black or White: that race does not define a person. In the middle, Jackson makes a pointed comment on Klu Klux Klan torch ceremonies, singing: “I ain't scared of no sheets; I ain't scared of nobody", before being reunited with Culkin and his friends to rap about race. Jackson then ascends the Statue of Liberty and overlooking notable world landmarks such as Big Ben, the Pyramids and the Eiffel Tower.

The video reaches its climax as beautiful faces of different races – including Tyra Banks and actors Glen Chin and Jeffrey Anderson-Gunter – morph into one another to sing the song’s outro. At the time, this was a revolutionary technique in filmmaking, only used in big-budget box office hits Willow and Terminator 2. Pacific Data Images was the company responsible, and “pushed [the process] one step further than what has ever been done before,” for Jackson. According to Jamie Dixon, “Michael wanted to put just about everything in the whole universe in this thing”.

When the music stops, the video carries on: Jackson transfigures from a black panther into an alleyway, where he dances provocatively and commits acts of vandalism – a car’s windows are smashed, a bin is thrown through a window – before turning back into the wild cat and leaving the scene.  

It's not entirely clear who dreamt up the concept: academics have theorised that the Culkin character represented the crippling loneliness Jackson felt at the peak of his fame and his fantasy of becoming a cartoon character when the boy transforms into Bart Simpson by the film's close. The late film critic, Roger Ebert, also believed the video was purely Jackson's creation: “The whole experience for me was that Michael Jackson is so caught inside his own fantasies that he really has no idea how his images of sex and urban vandalism play for a normal American audience.”

Jackson hired Propaganda Films – the leading pop video studio in the US – to make all of the videos for Dangerous, although Jackson insisted the creators call them “short films”. And they, in turn, contacted Pacific Data Images. “One of the inspirations was a music video from the Eighties called Cry by Godley and Creme,” PDI's visual effects supervisor Jamie Dixon told Cartoon Brew in 2016.  “They basically had a bunch of faces that changed but they did it the hard way. They got the cameras to line up and they kept the features as lined up as best as possible but they were still doing dissolves between them.” PDI spoke to Lol Creme about the making of Cry, and then built on their technique.

The filming schedule could have matched that of an indie feature film – which would arguably have had a smaller budget: Black or White cost $4 million (the equivalent of $9.2 million today) to make. And the proportions of scale explain why: a few seconds of Jackson dancing with Native Americans took five days to rehearse. An section of freeway was mocked up in Sun Valley so he could dance in the middle of it, and 50 stunt drivers hired to drive around him. Culver Studios sound stage was hired out for the recreation of the Red Square. The creators of The Simpsons animated the video’s closing credits: of Homer telling Bart, who is wearing a Michael Jackson T-shirt, to turn the television off. The impression we're left with is that this was inside The Simpsons the whole time. 

The other person who needed to be paid was the director. Jackson wanted to collaborate with the man behind Thriller’s video, John Landis, on the video. But Landis was still awaiting payment for the 1984 single. Jackson, however, was persistent, doorstepping Landis and begging him. Landis finally agreed, but on the condition that he was paid weekly. “By the time I did Black Or White he was mad.” Landis remembered in 2011. “The guy that I worked on Thriller was a genius and he was 20 years old, but it was like working with a gifted 10-year-old. The guy who I worked on with Black Or White was crazy. Michael had gone mad.”

Dixon shot the morphing scene on set of the video, “clinically” lining up actors' eyelines to make the transitions as effective as possible, and devising a simple dance routine to help with the morphing. It wasn't, however, simple enough. “I remember I specifically went up and I was standing with 19-year-old Tyra Banks, and I said, ‘Okay, when you do this move, when you come back and you do this nod, you have to be lower’” Dixon recalled. “And she said, ‘How low can I go?’ And of course the whole set was, like, ‘Woooo’.” 

“I shot the live-action, and I said, ‘I want all these faces to morph,’ Landis recalled in 2015. “And they not only did it, they did it on desktop computers. I remember thinking, ‘Holy s---!’”

Behind-the-scenes footage of the filming shows Jackson as smiling, professional and gradually tetchy as a well-trained child actor – which, in some ways, he was. But the star was involved with every aspect of the video’s creation, and was prone to making last-minute changes. When one of the assistants walked on set wearing a medical support for his arm, Landis said, “Michael saw it and was like, ‘What's that?!’, and the guy told him and he asks if he can have it and the guy says... Sure...? Michael came over to me and asks, ‘John, can I wear this?’” Landis's wife was the costume director on the shoot, and gave her approval, saying: “Michael will wear it and they'll start wearing them as a fashion item” – and duly, they did.

Jackson remained so meticulous after the cameras stopped rolling. The video was still being edited the night before it aired – some three months after shooting began.

‘Michael became obsessed with the King of Pop name’

After pouring so much creative energy, time and money into the video’s creation, Jackson and his team were insistent on making sure it was seen. Black or White’s video was released three days after the single was – a relatively surprising release in itself, Black or White had been added to 96 per cent of the US’s top 40 radio stations within 24 hours.

Years before international broadcasting corporations had come up with simulcasting, Jackson aired a music video in 27 countries at the same time on November 14, 1991. Within the US, Black or White played on MTV, BET, VH1 and Fox while Top of the Pops aired it to British audiences. A global audience – black, white and beyond – of 500 million viewers watched the same footage at the same time. It remains the largest number of music video viewers ever.

It was also, however, an enormous audience to offend. And Jackson did. The four-minute section of the star gyrating, tapping his crotch, zipping up his flies and running amok at the end of the video shocked viewers; especially those whose children were watching. Parents complained to the networks in droves, and Entertainment Weekly dedicated their cover to “Michael Jackson’s Video Nightmare”.

Of course, as the history of banned pop culture will attest, it was far from it. Rather, studio bosses were gleeful with the extra coverage the controversy had whipped up. The video was re-edited, remaining elusive on MTV even now – the uncut version will only be shown between 1-4am on MTV 2.

As for Jackson (who originally wanted that segment to be more explicit), he was preoccupied with another PR campaign: one that would ensure he would be immortalised as the King of Pop. Before the video’s release, the networks were advised to refer to to Jackson as “the King of Pop” at least twice a week for the next fortnight. As his manager Sandy Gallin recalled in Making Michael: “Michael loved the King of Pop name, just loved it. He became obsessed with it. I found myself negotiating with several people about how many times they would mention the name King of Pop on all sorts of platforms. It was of prime importance to Michael.” The strategy worked: the King of Pop stuck.

 

Black or White's success ricocheted around those who helped to create it. PDI became known as “the morphing house” as a result of the video, and were later bought by DreamWorks for their CGI talents. Bottrill was approached to make an entire album of L.T.B songs, something that mercifully never happened. The producer still tries to maintain the illusion sometimes – about a decade ago, Bottrill even went so far as to set up a fake email address for the rapping alias as a “ruse” to trick a journalist, but later came clean about his involvement in the song. Landis didn't work with Jackson again, not out of animosity, but because he was horrified by “what he had done to himself” with plastic surgery by 2007, when Jackson approached him again. 

It’s remarkable how many parts of the Black or White story feel oddly familiar today, in a landscape where YouTube viewing records define a pop career and stars play with their identities with each new album.

But the naffly glossy sheen of the song’s video belies a more incendiary message at a time when racial violence is dividing America and seeping into the music its artists are making. Jackson perfected dance moves to the point where he embodied them, but academics have made connections between them and minstrelsy. The same was done just weeks ago, when Donald Glover released his headline-making video for This is America. Three decades on, Jackson’s lyrics: “I am tired of this devil / I am tired of this stuff / I am tired of this business” feel no less weary.