The Say Yes Tour
I saw Floetry’s Say Yes Tour in Philadelphia, on March 30th. They performed on a sunny warm day, inside the Met for a sold-out crowd. Teedra Moses opened, and Raheem Devaughn was the second act. Both of them gave a lot of energy but they pushed too hard to deliver sex appeal rather than the music which is where they shine. Their vocals were great and they had good energy for the performance.
Floetry was pure nostalgia. They feel a little bit like they haven’t committed to a theme for the tour, with their band half-in and out of costumes that honored their London heritage. They performed most of their first album, and it was clear that they had a great joy in performing together in the city where they got their start as recording artists. When Say Yes came on, couples reached for each other, same with Getting Late. The crowd was so into the songs that every note and word was sung from the start especially for the major singles. The engineers however, failed Marsha Ambrosius. There were times when she was singing her heart out on stage, bent over, giving full power vocals and they couldn’t manage the mix. So for all of that effort, we could hear the band more than her beautiful voice and it took away from the moment.
The Matriarch
Tina Knowles’ memoir has three parts and three very different paces. The first third of it tells the story of Civil rights era Texas and Louisiana, but also does an excellent job of capturing how racism and poverty impacted her formative years, from where she lived to who she socialized with, it was painful in parts because it was beautifully and brutally honest. The middle part picked up speed as she found her way into adulthood and eventually marriage. I wish it had given more historic context to the times, to how Black people interacted in the 70s and 80s and the cultural trends but it kept the book from being too slow. The final part felt chaotic and rushed as we got into how her life changed when her children became famous. There were time jumps, gaps, and short sentences dismissing complicated parts of her history (one line for the second divorce is a choice) and it felt choppy. I suspect that people sat down and started ripping things out of the book at the end, limiting the story to Tina’s life while balancing the need to sell books to the beehive.
Michael
The star of the show in this movie was the music engineering and sound production. The sound is timed to make you feel the emotion of the concerts, and instead of a large score they used a lot of stems from Michael Jackson’s music to carry the story across time. There were so many missed opportunities to tell the story of Michael Jackson as a producer and inventor, like the demos and production of Off the Wall that started in the family home at Hayvenhurst. John Branca and John McClain (aka the trustees for the estate and former MJ lawyers/managers) were the producers of the film. Most of the Jackson family member who were portrayed in the film (Tito, Marlon, Jackie, Jermaine, LaToya) all received a producer and/or executive producer credit. What does all of this mean? Some of the choices were not about storytelling, they were about money. The film ends abruptly after the 1988 London show.
Coleman Domingo is a brilliant actor, but he chose to play Joe Jackson as desperate for his whole life. The performance lacked dimension because of it, and the choice to make Joe Jackson an outright villain instead of adding some complexity made the story feel flat and awkward. He kept slumping over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and it leant a creepiness to the character that wasn’t needed. Joe Jackson’s imperfections were known, but he was also very human. Family is complicated, relationships are complicated, and those nuances were ignored to say that hey this was the greatest entertainer and here was an angry villain who exploited him in the name of family for money. It’s not that simple.
Similarly, the problem with Nia Long was that at no point did you ever believe she was truly embodying Katherine Jackson. There was a restraint in her approach to the character, as if she did not want to tap too deeply into her own pain and heartbreak in order to showcase the dignity that so many Black mothers display when they live in the public eye. The challenge was that without tapping into that well, without showing the slowness of grief, heartbreak, and loss, the grace that makes Katherine Jackson such a dignified person gets lost. She feels like a caricature of a woman who has actually contributed a lot to the modern American pop-music landscape. And it didn’t help that she kept dropping into her own speech patterns and cadence.
Jafaar Jackson as Michael Jackson was just okay. He focused a lot on speech patterns, on being able to sound like Michael and pull off certain dance moves. The place where the story fell apart was that Michael Jackson was one of the most confident and electrifying performers in the world every single time he took the stage. He wasn’t lost in his dancing or his steps, he was commanding the audience to follow him with the confidence of a professional committed to his craft. Think about how many concert videos show Michael just standing there, letting people cry and scream and pass out because he knew and they knew he was magic. It’s a level of confidence that explains why he was a superstar.
The failure of the movie overall was in the lack of attention to detail. The extras and background actors in their costumes didn’t match the periods most of the time. The late introduction of Don King as a fight promoter rather than the one who was traveling the south booking the Jackson 5 is a missed opportunity to explain a long history of how Black artists toured and got paid, but also how they cut their teeth as performers. All of the concert scenes were weird because the clothes on the Jackson brothers (including Michael) fit oddly, the sets didn’t match the time period, and the lip syncing was a fraction off. That’s not a failure of the actors, that’s a failure of wardrobe, of set design, and of all the engineers who edited the film and sound.
When Michael mentions receiving the music the Creator has for him so he doesn’t go down the street and give it to Prince, I instantly thought of the reference to Quincy Jones and Henry Mancini. In the same way that Quincy Jones and Mancini shaped the sound of modern television and film through scoring, MJ and Prince shaped popular culture through their sound and visuals. They all had something this film lacked which was clear focus, and a commitment to telling a good coherent story.
If you just stay on the surface and come for the music and a good time, it’s a great experience for you. It gives the same feeling as a concert and the audience will sing along with you. If you’re looking for more, stay home.
Each of these experiences showcased how subjective narratives have become in the world of pop-culture despite the number of interdependencies. Floetry’s songs don’t hit the same without Marsha Ambrosius not only executing a great vocal but the engineer ensuring we hear it. Tina Knowles’ story as a Matriarch with a legacy is as much rooted in her past as it is contingent on her having very famous children. And Michael Jackson’s story cannot be faithfully executed without examining the complexity of the people in his life that influenced him, both good and bad.
The richness and complexity of how people live is the essence of what makes each individual story so great. It’s what carries songs and stories and allows them to live in our hearts. We can see ourselves in the nuance or learn more about one another. Extracting bits and pieces for any of these experiences cut out something critical to their quality, but more than that, it undermines the effort it takes to achieve at a high level creatively, and that’s a waste.
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