The 20th Century Is the Only Century

On Sammy Davis Jr., Little Richard, Jackie Wilson, Michael Jackson, &c.

1.

For eons there were only the Ancestors. They wore fedoras, called women “dames”, and lived out their lives entirely in black and white. Then the Youth came, and made things colorful, and declared: if it feels good, do it.

This is not of course the true history of the world, but it is my history. It has long seemed to me that every generation is locked in a fixed temporal frame. In my case this means that those who were flapping and going to speakeasies in the interwar are today —or “today”, since to the extent that I adhere to this frame I really have no clear indexical sense of what day or year or century we are in—: are today, I was saying, quite old, indeed Ancestral; those who went to sock-hops and watched their boyfriends die in chickie-runs are today just regular adults; those who tuned in, turned on, etc., a decade later are now and always will be, as we have established, the Youth. And those who came after that, like me, born in 1973, have never had a real historical existence at all, have always floated outside of the fixed frame of history, like preterite demons accidentally spawned after the Creation was supposed to have wrapped, condemned forever to circle the Great Archive of our past cultural output, to dwell outside it, looking in, looking back, through our screens — back at the only century that ever really took place or ever will take place.

This perception of mine is surely a direct consequence of the history of media technology and telecommunications. The 19th century, like all previous centuries, documented next to nothing; the 21st century documents everything. But the century in between was characterized both by real constraints and new potentialities at once —“Remember, it’s ‘Click — 50 cents’, ‘Click — another 50 cents’,” my dad used to say every time I made an ill-advised shot with my Kodak Disc, seeking to instill in me a sense of the wastefulness, now entirely forgotten, of overdocumentation—, which together ensured that what that century left us cannot but appear as a perfectly curated and proportionate display of human creative expression at its most excellent.

Another way of saying that it appears excellent, that it appears representative of the human essence to me, that it appears “correct” in a way that I cannot further justify, might be to say that it is part of my “operating system”, that I came into the world pre-stocked with it, like the iTunes upgrade that came willy-nilly with that one U2 album nobody wanted (thus, I suppose, really more nilly than willy). But computing metaphors are hardly appropriate here, since what we’re really talking about is the last moment in history before computing metaphors swallowed human society up, and ceased to be metaphors. So let us speak the ancient language and call it what it is: anamnesis.

2.

I recently found myself in a Sammy Davis Jr. “rabbit-hole” (typical 21st-century language, belittling what was once a noble aspiration to know our subjects with the deepest possible intimacy — why wouldn’t we immerse ourselves in the Great Archive of their gestures and feats? And who can deny that YouTube is the most fitting place, at this point, to do that?). I arrived there after listening for the millionth time to Mississippi John Hurt’s “Candy Man Blues” (1928), and recalling, somehow, that a similarly titled song had been a signature element of the repertoire of Mr. Show Business himself.

Unlike Stagger Lee in his various incarnations, this new Candyman was an entirely different creature than the one featured in our Old Testament of blues. He was confected, as it were, for the soundtrack of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1972), and his spirit belonged entirely to the world of musical theater. Sammy, who had performed for white audiences in his family’s touring variety theater since the age of four, was right at home in this schmaltz — a living paradox, as joyously and confraternally Black as James Brown when he wanted to be, he was also, I believe sincerely, a vivid illustration of American transracialism. When Sammy sang “Mr. Bojangles” for German audiences in the 1980s, these were plainly the same people you might have found at a Roger Whittaker concert the following weekend. But appearances are often deceiving. While Sammy’s variety-show transformation of this country-folk tune, perhaps best known for the very different accents in which Bob Dylan had rendered it, seems to us a clear measure of his tragic lapse into cultural irrelevance in the rock-and-roll era, at least some of the documented versions of it come across to me, now, as exercises in almost Beckettian alienation, through a species of the storytelling art that has by now gone entirely extinct, and that we don’t even know how to watch anymore.

But what I wanted to say about Sammy is this: I had never “seen” him performing “Candyman” before this past week, or at least I had never consciously seen him do so. But the only word that adequately describes my feeling when I finally got around to pulling up this treacly 1972 hit on YouTube in July, 2025, is recollection. In truth I really do not need ever to see it, in order to have had seen it. Somehow —and I really don’t understand the technical dimensions of this— I was born pre-stocked with “Candyman”, as I was with a huge number of fragments of the Imperial American popular culture that took shape in the generation or so prior to my birth. Sometimes it seems to me that my true life’s calling is to unpack all of this material, to lay it out and inspect it, and to put it into language that might help to secure some kind of future for it. I rely for convenience on external prostheses, such as YouTube, and all those other media repositories I have called the Great Archive, but only as the geometer relies on ruler and compass — to show you, sensually, what I am anyhow carrying around inside me.

“You can do anything you want to do, because you’re together,” James Brown assures Sammy in 1969, when the latter, with false modesty, avers that he could never do the Godfather of Soul’s “thing”. We glimpse this “togetherness” at its purest, perhaps, in Sammy’s 1965 performance of the Cole Porter standard, “Under My Skin” (1936), backed by African drumming — “and no messages”, he instructs his Black drummer at the beginning of the routine, before his white audience, rehashing a tired old joke about that continent’s state of telecommunication technology, such as you might have seen in a Victorian-era Punch cartoon. The ensuing performance is phenomenal, even if the comic interludes —including among other things what appears to be an impersonation of a gay guest star on Hullabaloo, and a surreal remark to the effect that the condition of having your beloved under your skin, while nice, is “a little lumpy”— can easily seem incongruous with the level of musical maestroship on display. Many artists have made comedy part of their routines for what in retrospect appear to be defensive reasons: Roy Clark for example was so frightened by the immensity of his own talent that he concealed it in a goofball persona, and only learned at long last to can the ham when he began performing flamenco in the 1970s. But Sammy is explicit about it. Regarding his own conversion to Judaism, he comments at one point that “all the comics make jokes about it, and I do it in self-defense.”

This 1965 performance, apparently at a benefit concert organized by Frank Sinatra, who practically owned the Cole Porter song Sammy selected for the event, occurs within a year of Jerry Lee Lewis’s Star Club performance in Hamburg, and of Brenda Lee’s last concerts in a properly rock-and-roll idiom, both of which I discussed in the previous installment of my Universal Musurgy. Sammy comes from a completely different legacy, but like Jerry Lee and Brenda he is a product of the 1950s, and like them, too, you can see, in his mid-1960s performances, an unmistakable explosivity — still doing his thing, but as if turned inward, and almost vicious in his protection of that inner kernel from which he had built himself up. He’s defending himself, but you can see that he knows it’s futile, that the moment of his cultural preeminence is coming to an end, and the time has by now almost passed for him to manifest his full excellence. The performance reflects its moment — there is a lovely if rapid musical reference to Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say” (1959), and indeed the drumming itself, though rendered unthreatening through comedy, places Sammy right alongside Nina Simone and Abbey Lincoln and other artists who were allowing the aesthetics of Black consciousness to come right through in their performance styles.

What I keep circling around in my column, I find, is the way so many artists who came up before the 1960s made their way forward after the moment of rupture that I increasingly believe was triggered with the British Invasion and the aspiration to high-art expressivity that that initiated in mass culture. As I’ve discussed previously, for many white rock-and-roll artists the only path that presented itself, after “kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons” took over primary responsibility for culture-shaping (this is Sinatra’s characterization of the Beatles, circa 1966), was the one that led to the circuit of low-status country-western variety shows.

For the only Black veteran of the Rat Pack, the post-1965 rupture could only lead to a different neighborhood of variety television, but one equally marked by its cultural irrelevance, where the dominant concern seems to have been safety and familiarity. The sexual and transgressive subtext of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Candy Man” is entirely gone — and now it really is just candy.

3.

Not everyone went nearly so gently. Consider this 1972 BBC interview with Little Richard, wearing what appears to be a hand-made leather crown with “The King” inscribed in white letters on the front. Someone so singular as Little Richard could not possibly have been reassigned to any second-tier circuit for honored but somewhat embarrassing elders. He could only stay exactly who he was, not from nostalgia for what he had once been, but from full commitment to the only thing he could ever be.

The interviewer, a rather low-energy little fellow, must at least be commended for his unflappability. At one point he mentions Little Richard’s fame in 1957, “when you were really on top”. “I’m on top now!” Little Richard replies. “When you were really enormous,” the interviewer clarifies. “I’m enormous now!” is the reply. So next it’s “Initially, when you were enormous,” which finally wins for the interviewer a “God bless your heart.”

It was surely hard for Little Richard that he was so enormous, that he could only be enormous. To insist on this made him seem crazy before the world, yet it was really just a plain truth. He wasn’t crazy; he was the king of rock and roll. But as I believe Kierkegaard reflects somewhere, about the man who goes around shouting that two plus two equals four, sometimes, in a world that won’t listen to the truth, speaking it can be behaviorally indistinguishable from madness. Little Richard’s climactic verbal explosion at the end of this interview, in which he absolutely wipes the floor with the absent Chuck Berry, upon being reminded that this old frenemy of his is going to headline an upcoming concert at Wembley Stadium, is one of the funniest routines I’ve ever seen — part crazed preacher, part kayfabe wrestler, and so much more besides. Plainly, only a record-company suit would ever seek to install the middle-class Berry on Little Richard’s throne — as out of place there as some alt-Dalai Lama selected by the Central Committee.

This performance is also quite vicious, and very plainly born of the same complex combination of genius and pain that also characterizes Sammy Davis’s performance for Sinatra seven years earlier. Like Sammy, Little Richard repeatedly claims in this interview to be Jewish (“Me, a little Jewish boy, black bottom, from Georgia.”) Unlike Sammy, however, the claim does not ring true at all — it sounds like the crackpot theology of the Alabama Bible college where Little Richard had enrolled in 1958, hoping to break free of the musically and sexually sinful life he had led until that point. Sammy, as we have established, was trans — transracial, transclass, transconfessional, and this power of his lent itself naturally to the survival strategy he adopted in the post-rupture landscape, of finding his late-career place in a form of variety theater rooted in the unthreatening mass entertainment that had been a family speciality since childhood.

Though Little Richard is often held to have leaned towards transness in the more conventional sense having to do with gender expression, in truth he was entirely “cis” to the extent that he could only ever remain on “this side” of himself, he could only ever be entirely who he was. And this was something that wholly evaded description: just watch, as late as 1989, when Joan Rivers attempts to coerce him into identifying with the label “gay”, to which he can only reply with confusing non-sequiturs and a plain and sincere desire to just get back to the music already. It’s not that he’s in the closet; but neither is he in the clutches of the ideological frame that has by now fully swallowed up the likes of Joan Rivers, and imposed on us the identitarian microtaxonomies that are still being refined today. Gay or straight? Jewish or Baptist? Sacred or profane? Who the hell knows! All that can be said with certainty is that he “makes your big toe shoot up in your boot”, to quote another high-point of this interview, and it’s that power that is the entire basis of his claim to sovereignty.

4.

Sometimes I think that what I’m really working towards in these columns is the completion of all that is propaedeutic to any properly framed essay on the historical origins of Michael Jackson. That will come in due time.

For most of my life I could barely even look at Michael. He was grotesque, and I lacked the language to express the nature of this grotesquerie, so I defaulted to the lazy language of the tabloids, of Wacko Jacko, of plastic-surgery disasters and whispers of pedophilia. But there is something much more complicated to be worked out here. For one thing, Michael was not simply dressing like some generic “freak”; he was dressing like Muammar Gaddafi, or any number of other non-aligned caudillos LARP-ing their way into a spectacularly costumed performance of sovereignty.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but just try to compare the total economic and political impact of Michael Jackson in the 20th century to that of any randomly chosen world-leader in the same era, and ask yourself honestly which of the two might be more justly accused of merely performing his sovereignty. I can remember the last time I was in Paris, visiting JSR, in 2023 or so. I went into a Franprix in the 19th arrondissement, a supermarket chain known for its astoundingly well curated playlists, and in truth the only place I ever insist JSR take me when I’m in France. Michael’s “Wanna Be Starting Something” was on, that part where there’s a pseudo-Swahili chorus singing something like “ma-ma-se ma-ma-sa ma-ma-ma-ko-sa”, and the African man at the cash register, who for some reason was wearing Ray-Bans, declared to me: “Ah oui, c’était le roi”. Then he lowered his shades and looked up at me with his bare eyes, and repeated: “Le. Roi.” No one ever said such a thing to me about, say, Alfredo Stroessner, who surely worked at least as hard as Michael to appear glorious with his epaulettes and his chevrons.

Michael Jackson comes from a different lineage than Little Richard. If we agree with Keith Richards that there simply can be no rock and roll at all without a genetic connection to the blues, then we can understand why Michael’s claim to a noble title has only ever been to that of “King of Pop”. In this regard he is much closer to Sammy Davis, and if you had to choose a Beatle he most resembles, it would obviously be Paul McCartney, with his roots in English music-hall — his “granny shit”, as John Lennon described it. In one revealing interview that I cannot now find, Michael is positively beaming, shortly after the release of Thriller (1982), when he tells of the admiring phone call he had received from Fred Astaire, to compliment him on his dancing. If you want to understand Michael Jackson, I think, you have to picture him watching Singin’ in the Rain, and The Ed Sullivan Show, and doing giddy little routines, beyond those his Svengali father was already forcing him to do with his brothers, alone, in front of the television, circa 1964.

We may presume that at some point early in his life Michael caught, in rerun, a glimpse of this performance by Jackie Wilson from 1958, the year of his own birth. Ed Sullivan tells us it is Jackie’s first appearance on TV, but that he is already a much beloved performer “among his own people”. The language grates, but it is a reflection of social reality: for Sullivan, a liberal newspaperman in his early career, showcasing Black performers can only be understood as a good-will gesture across a real divide, somewhat like hosting the Bolshoi Ballet at the Met. You give them flowers and shake their hands, of course, but after that they remain with their handlers.

Ed plainly loves Jackie, and finds him an ideal representative of the show’s tenor. His quasi-operatic song style would not have been out of place in 1910, smelling of freshly laundered crinoline, such as might be worn by your much-girdled sweetheart on a tour around the lake in a swan-shaped paddle-boat. There are however a few subtle hints of something else piercing through, something that shares more in the spirit of Mahalia Jackson than Al Jolson. You hear it for example at 2’15’’, with the kneeling, heaving, trance-like cri-de-coeur at the end of “To Be Loved”, and again in the gospel coda he adds, around 4’15’’, to “Lonely Teardrops”.

The same bold Africana inflection as we hear here in “To Be Loved” was a key part of Jackie’s signature number, a work of bold appropriation if there ever was one, rendering the traditional Irish ballad “Danny Boy” into something entirely his own. Here we may also discern, if not straightforwardly queer gestures, at least some declinations of gender that serve as vivid reminders of the fact that in much Black male musical artistry of the 20th century, masculinity was often self-consciously performed and subverted. Does that sound too academic? Well just watch it then, and admire his eyebrows and the blush on his cheeks, as well as the kneeling and heaving routine, echoing “To Be Loved” on The Ed Sullivan Show, that begins around 3’55’’. It will give you shivers, I promise.

Jackie was ruthlessly exploited by the suits who profited from his artistry, and would have had a sad end, like so many other great Black artists, even if he had not collapsed from a heart attack, in 1975, in the middle of a performance of “Higher and Higher” at a show MC’d by Dick Clark. Like the great Redd Foxx, who had performed his own future infarctus countless times (“I’m coming, Elizabeth!”), at first the spectators present assumed it was part of his act. He had, after all, dropped down to the floor before, and always got up again. But this time the oxygen to his brain was cut off, and he spent the next eight years in a vegetative state, as his hospice care center shook down his survivors —at least two women claimed to be his wives— for the expenses. Elvis covered some of these at first, but overdosed less than two years after.

Like Sammy and Michael, Jackie can do any “thing” he chooses to do, to speak with James Brown. But what he chooses is only lightly charged up, as if ornamented, with the forces of sex, magic, and danger that Brown himself let flow without reserve (though he too was an extremely tight and controlling bandleader, so the “freedom” of his performances is really just part of the act). Michael, to return to the figure on whom I had hoped to remain focused in this section, shares in the genetic lineage of all three of these predecessors, yet more than any of them his primary mode of expression is a controlled, cautious one. In an early Jackson 5 appearance he tells Ed Sullivan that he admires the Beatles above all, yet the ideal of control that guides his artistry is shaped by show-business paragons from a different and mostly pre-war reality, to which only Paul McCartney comes even close. It’s the legacy of variété, the glitter and the music-note and piano-key motifs, the world of dance-moves with proprietary names, the jazz hands and the bowler hats and all that stuff ultimately rendered into myth by Bob Fosse — it’s all of that, and not the the blues-to-rock lineage, that made Michael Jackson.

For all that, Michael was a member in full of the confraternity of Black male artists that straddled the divisions between these genres, and made them seem insignificant. His greatest devotion seems to have been to those of his forebears who could dance, and his most moving eulogies were those he offered at the funerals, first of Jackie Wilson, then James Brown. It is reported that when among people with whom he felt comfortable, he habitually reverted to a normal adult male voice. The closer one looks, in fact, the more one is struck by the sharp disparity between the esoteric and exoteric, the private and the public, versions of Michael Jackson. His is a rare case where the default model is of a person who is primarily or entirely spectacle, yet on closer inspection the arc of his life fits within a very familiar template, which numerous Black American artists were constrained to follow before him — of tremendous talent, a taste for glory and power, and ultimately of such ruthless exploitation and consistent public misunderstanding as to drive him into a form of self-presentation that is all too easily dismissed as insanity.

A good litmus test here might be to reflect on how you think of his marriage to Lisa Marie Presley. Was it a stunt by a sexually deviant man-child who could have no real understanding of what marriage is and who was simply hoping to deflect attention from the rumors of what was going on at Neverland? Or was it an obvious maneuver, according to the rules of dynastic succession, for one king to marry another king’s daughter? The real question here is whether Michael was adequately sensitive to the Zweikaiserproblem that his deceased father-in-law and Little Richard left for others to work out. He came from a different kingdom, as we have established —pop, namely, and not rock—, yet Michael seems ultimately to have sided with Elvis, in the hope, perhaps, of finally securing the condominium of these two realms of artistic expression that many predecessors, not least Paul McCartney, had attempted before him.

Before I move on to my conclusion, let me address an enduring complaint that I get from readers when I, a white girl from Wales, turn my writerly attention to Black American musical history. I’ve spent a good deal of my life both in and out of the US, and when I think about that country, which I admit I’ve abandoned in recent months to get some good writing done here on the Isle of Man, I often recall something JSR observed about this same question — of who may be permitted to write about what. “Look,” he wrote, “when you’ve lived outside the US long enough, it’s impossible not to see, from your distant perch, that everyone in that country has been cooked up, and is currently simmering, in the same stew.”

5.

Detailed scholarly work has appeared over the past several decades, in fields such as cognitive anthropology and ethnotaxomy, showing the significant role played by features of the natural world in structuring the social reality of many traditional cultures. I don’t want to call this totemism, since over the same period anthropologists have narrowed this particular notion to a more geographically limited and rather technical usage. But I can at least call the way plants and animals and celestial bodies have often structured social life something like an “ordering principle”, which has the special quality of being both perfectly history-bound and contingent, while at the same time feeling perfectly a priori.

It seems to me that this structuring principle must have migrated somewhere else in the emergence of modern states, with their mass media and other features that serve to remove them from the immediacy of nature. We intellectuals tend to be wary of the phantasmic dimensions of our social life, since the most obvious instances of these are the ones that come across in the form of political ideology. But it also seems to me that the phantasms of popular culture, as in a Pepsi ad featuring the Moonwalk, are far more important than at least most of the ideas and characters constituting our narrowly political imagination, at least in Western democracies, to the extent that that is still what they are, since the 20th century. I mean, Elvis Presley was simply and incontestably a permanent member of my pantheon in a way that, say, Winston Churchill only ever was with a certain amount of hesitation and reserve. This is not to say I “liked” the one and I “disliked” the other, but only that my surrounding culture, such as it was, gave me a very clear idea of the seating arrangement, so to speak, at our own Mt. Olympus — and it was the stars of our mass entertainments who plainly had the pride of place.

I hardly need point out, of course, that nothing lasts forever, and that the “a priori order” I have identified is as irrelevant to the 21st century as, say, the symbols of power under the Trapezuntine Empire. This is another way of saying that we have seen the collapse of a dynasty, with real rules of succession, and with a robust internal sense of its own legitimacy. Recently, on a trip to New York, I heard a Gen X dad ask his Gen Z college-age son what neighborhood the Beastie Boys are from. “Dad!” the kid said, as if even to wonder about this were to announce one’s utter cultural irrelevance — time to the grave, old duffer! Soon, however, we must understand, this same question will be not a point of intergenerational embarrassment, but of pure antiquarian interest, like asking what neighborhood Eddie Cantor is from (it’s the Lower East Side).

I know all this, and yet I insist: there’s nothing I can do to shift my frame. It is fixed, and at least for me has the quality of atemporality. The 20th century is the only century. I can’t even really say, other than in a strict arithmetical sense, what comes after it.

—Mary Cadwalladr, Isle of Man

Our own JSR has a long piece, on analytic philosophy, World War II, and the relationship between them, in the current issue of Liberties. Read it!

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