Although this was one of those DVDs that I always wanted to have, I only bought it recently; just two months after Jackson’s death, when MJ products filled the stores and shop-assistants didn’t give you a funny look when you asked for the 1992 concert recording of a sadly extinct pop icon.

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Live in Bucharest is the only officially released DVD of a Michael Jackson concert. In the early nineties, a youthful, energetic King of Pop was touring the world in support of his album Dangerous, a tour which included this legendary Bucharest concert. And so I bought the DVD to see what I had been missing.

Jackson springs onto the stage and freezes in a statue position for a couple of minutes, while fans greet him. The shots with the audience go from emotional to dramatic: some cheer for their idol, others cry, and many others faint overwhelmed by excitement. During the first couple of songs, about a third of the footage shows fans carried out of the audience area on stretchers. This isn’t the place to speculate on why that is, but one thing suggests itself: gone are the days of superstardom. Allegiance to pop-stars is much more dispersed nowadays; there are no superstars clearly towering above the rest and eligible for the title of cultural icon. Michael Jackson might have been one of the last of them.

The set-list is balanced, containing mostly hits from albums previous to Dangerous. ‘Thriller’ partly reconstitutes the horror atmosphere of the celebrated eponymous 1983 short film. A street fight is enacted during ‘Beat it’, and prior to ‘Black and White’ we are treated to a gorgeous interlude: the ending four-minute part of the original ‘Black and White’ video which has been banned from public broadcast due to its violence. The scene shows Jackson performing some of his most complicated dance figures and destroying a car and a near-by inn while he’s at it. Well, that’s clearly just make-believe, so abstraction can be made of the ‘violence’. What I couldn’t make abstraction of was the cruelty in the tender ‘She’s out of my life’, where a girl from the audience is guided to the stage to dance with the King of Pop, only to be pulled away by the same beefy security guards thirty seconds later, writing and crying.

Jackson’s unique, mesmerizing stage presence, and certainly his excellent physical and vocal shape, made for a grand show. Effects and pyrotechnics were spectacular, possibly even according to present day standards – I can’t be sure, as I don’t go to pop-concerts. However, I have some objections to the DVD. No booklet and no extras? Alright, I’ll let that go to a ten euro economy edition. But even a cheap edition ought to include some basic information about the footage, like the fact that Live in Bucharest also contains scenes from concerts in Madrid and London. Upon reading about this – on the internet and not on the DVD, as I think I should have been given the chance to –, I realized what was with the unlikely racial constitution of the audience. Apart from this, I don’t know what to make of the parts where Jackson sounds exactly as in the studio recording: is he lip-synching, or singing over the recording, or is it another instance of unmentioned heavy editing? |