Actors - Black or White

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"Black or White" was a 1991 hit single for singer Michael Jackson.

Written, composed, and arranged by Jackson with the rap lyrics by Bill Bottrell, the song was a response to racist statements made against Jackson about his changing skin color and his fight against racism in general. The rap line "I'm not gonna spend my life being a color" was also a very personal statement from Jackson that was echoed throughout the song.

The song featured a guitar solo by ex Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash.

Music video

The music video for "Black or White" generated controversy. The video was considered quite spectacular when it was first broadcast on MTV, BET, VH1, and the Fox Network on November 14 1991. It featured cameos by celebrities such as Macaulay Culkin and George Wendt, and helped usher in morphing as an important technology in music videos (though a more primitive version of the technique had been used six years earlier by the duo Godley & Creme on their song "Cry"). Actors and models who appear in the sequence includes Cree Summer, Tyra Banks, Jeffrey Anderson-Gunter, and Glen Chin. Jackson's niece Brandi also features. Like Jackson's equally successful music video, "Thriller", "Black or White" was directed by filmmaker John Landis.

After a comical introduction in which Macaulay Culkin blasts his father (played by George Wendt) into outer space with a guitar and amplifier, the first several minutes of the video featured a montage of sequences in which Jackson is choreographed engaging in dances among people of different cultures of the world (African, South-East Asian, Native American, East Indian, Russian). Jackson walks through visual collages of fire (defiantly declaring "I ain't scared of no sheets; I ain't scared of nobody") before a scene shared with Culkin and other children. The group collectively states, "I'm not gonna spend my life being a color." At the end of the song, many different people (shown as "talking heads") dance as they morph into one another. This technique had only been previously used in films such as "Willow" and "Terminator 2".

The controversy was related to the last four minutes (the silent "panther" scene), of the original eleven-minute music video, or "short film" as Jackson preferred to call it. Here Jackson smashed car and storefront windows, grabbed his crotch, unzipped his fly and turned into a panther. This section caused such a negative reaction that Jackson was forced to announce a formal apology for its content. A revised version included paintings and graffiti around Jackson showing racist logos and themes, (such as a KKK sign which Jackson smashes) and remarks regarding African-Americans.

A year later, MTV re-aired the original, uncut version of the video. To date, this version has generally only been seen in the United States on MTV2 between the hours of 01:00 and 04:00, as part of their special uncensored airing of the "Most Controversial Music Videos" of all time. The extended version is also available on Jackson's DVDs. The video was parodied by the sketch comedy TV show In Living Color, and by the band Genesis in their video for "I Can't Dance". It was still shown in its entirety for some years in Europe. Indeed, it was seen on VH1 in the U.K. as recently as 2004, though most recent airings have omitted the last portion of the video, which also included a brief cameo by Bart and Homer Simpson. The version available in the iTunes Music Store contains neither the panther scene nor the Simpsons cameo, and is cut after the morphing sequence.

Category:1991 singles Category:Michael Jackson singles Category:Michael Jackson songs Category:Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles

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