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Michael Jackson and the Intention to Be Bad Michael Jackson and the Intention to Be Bad
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Frowning and Facial Signifyin(g) Frowning and Facial Signifyin(g)
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Mythologies of Mean Mugging in Breaking Mythologies of Mean Mugging in Breaking
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Mugsy, Bugsy, and Keeping It Real Mugsy, Bugsy, and Keeping It Real
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Cite
Abstract
The first part of the FROWN chapter analyzes three Michael Jackson music videos in which he plays screen characters framed as streetwise and dangerous. It employs Gates’s concept of Signifyin(g) to argue that Jackson’s frown works as a choreographic play that calls attention to African American popular music traditions and questions racist social frameworks that seek to fix a primitivist Black masculinity. The second part examines the use of the frown in breaking battles. It looks to ideas of mean mugging, the inaccurate links between breaking and gang violence, and the intertextual deployment of a cartoon character in the frowning b-boy persona. It uses the idea of a provocative frown to assert that the frown might work choreographically to signal discontent and stimulate aggression, but this sits in tension with its capacity to question and reformulate the histories and values of popular dance practice.
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