If you liked Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” you must also love West Side Story—or at least owe it a debt of gratitude for its inspiring Jackson to some of his most compelling, creative work.

Think back to the Beat It music video—a street gang fantasy centered on Jackson emerging from his loneliness then entering the social world fraught with dangerous competition yet bringing the catchiest brotherhood homily ever. Showing his capabilities and masculine camaraderie epitomizes the basic imaginative stimulation that West Side Story has always exerted on audiences.          Young viewers especially recognize the story of urban teen romance and warfare, the essential challenges of city life: mixing with others, discovering one’s vulnerabilities and desires; recognizing how your personal yearnings fare in a world you didn’t make but that you must try to make work for you.

Michael squeezed those meanings out his fantasy response to West Side Story, a movie which, in addition to popularizing a Broadway success, added the fragrance of youthful experience to its plot. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet isn’t the only mythology at its core; it also concerns the ecstatic and tragic possibilities and of city life—something every show tune and rock-n-roll loving kid knows deep down but that only a few—Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson and the most ingenuous rappers—have expressed without shame. Most of us hold it inside until releasing it at exposure to West Side Story, Born to Run’s “Jungleland” or “Beat It.”

But it’s only in Beat It, where Michael Jackson signifies his artistic intercourse with West Side Story in the masturbatory depths of social isolation, that this acculturating experience (part of mainstream assimilation and integration) becomes more than passive and is turned into an exuberant public ritual. The Beat It music video warns against violent aggression, yet its physical excitement comes from the high spirits of homo-social challenge and exchange—fighting that turns into dancing, the two becoming inseparable pop hybrid.

Michael’s understanding of the love-hate connection symbolized in a corps de ballet shows his personal-political regard for Jerome Robbins’ celebrated choreography, feeling its liberating grace and force. Generations of moviegoers have always gotten that buzz from the film—it’s a basic response that immediately rouses them to cultural sophistication: they appreciate dance as masculine, not effete and understand the athletic strength and imagination of dance in personal terms.

In Beat It, Michael transforms Robbins’ choreography from the Broadway elite to the street. Tightening the movements into pop-and-lock and robotic intricacy expressed his personal variation of dance and fighting possibilities. The song heralds non-violence while the music video seethes with physical force. Its agitated beat and in-my-room Eddie Van Halen guitar solo represents the frustrated desire for sexual release, Beat It’s realization of terpsichorean gang war visualizes a wary sense of social integration. The song’s extraordinary popularity in 1983 became cultural victory—surpassing even “Billie Jean (a greater track) and securing Jackson’s music video onslaught on MTV’s racially restricted cable programming.

This fulfillment includes Jackson’s challenge to the Hollywood mainstream that had rebuffed him. Beat It’s pop-soul success was a bittersweet triumph of pop, soul and even hip-hop determination. Just as Kanye West and Jay-Z’a “Otis” uses a riff to rev up the success ethic, Michael emphasizes the “beat”—what would become hip-hop’s fundamental rhythmic pulse. (This is also the slyest use of the word since The Beatles switched entomology to physics.) It is with hip-hop bravado that Michael used Beat It to claim his kinship with the Broadway and Hollywood musical’s dance titans.

Robbins was just one of Michael’s adopted mentors, along with Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Bob Fosse. But it was Robbins’s West Side Story movements that took Jackson beyond the solo mastery he learned from Astaire-Kelly-Fosse. As Beat It  demonstrates, Michael acknowledged the communal aspects of dance as did film director Walter Hill in the colorful, rhythmic opening of the 1979 gang movie The Warriors (a virtual reprise of West Side Story’s flamboyant street fantasy). The dancer’s endeavor to turn mundane motion expressive and beautiful motivated Beat It. Unable to join the Hollywood film industry, he recreated its effects in a medium he made his own.

The famous Beat It image of Michael on his tiptoes (imitated by Springsteen on the inner sleeve of Born in the USA) has a ballet dancer’s virtuosity. It’s the same triumph that Michael took from Robbins’ choreography where the energy of the street is translated aesthetically into the force and extension of street ballet. It isn’t effete or absurd, generations have responded to it without ever having seen La Sylphide or The Nutcracker.

The song “Beat It” was inspired by the West Side Story scene where Bernardo (George Chikiris) of the Puerto Rican gang The Sharks gets blocked by Biff (Russ Tamblyn) and members of the white gang The Sharks. That moment of urban racism became a paradigm for Jackson’s understanding of the racist restriction that he has experienced—such as his shut out by the Hollywood mainstream. Jackson answers the anger and hostility of racial exclusion with a pacifist urge—a transformation of the Jets’ threatening taunt that Bernardo “beat it!”—into a musical command that brilliantly lifts him out of lonely isolation into the communal liberation of social dancing.

The warring gangs in Beat It are swept up in Michael’s wave-like moves, his brotherly sway.  In Beat It, MJ becomes the intermediary between hostile groups—an artistic mediator who brings the gangs together. These racially-mixed gangs represent ethnic rivalries as well as sexual antagonists but Jackson unites them through the power of dance in a final proscenium image. Nothing in Bob Giraldi’s direction of Beat It is as spectacular as Robert Wise’s contrapuntal “Tonight Quintet;” instead, its seismic impact surpassed the cultural effect of any individual Astaire, Kelly or Fosse film.

Read more on Michael Jackson in Armond White’s Keep Moving: The Michael Jackson Chronicles available at www.resistanceworks.blogspot.com

For all West Side Story articles, please go to:
To the Curb
Dance as Narrative (and More)
Street Signs
Utopian Variations
A Landmark Soundtrack
Robbins’ Road to Hollywood