1.

Truth be told, I came to know Motown through the Jackson Five. And I came to love the Jackson Five without knowing it.

By the time I was old enough to start caring about music, the Jacksons had long since split. Michael, a magical and ubiquitous presence on television growing up, had, for all I knew, descended from another planet, or rose up out of the grave, or existed only within the small screen. Saturdays, in our San Jose home, my sister and I would watch the video for “Beat It” on Solid Gold and be in awe, like the other millions of kids who grew up in the 80s. I don’t remember having an especially deep attachment towards Michael Jackson, the way that later, in school, you’d carefully select your favorite rappers, or bands, who’d help construct your identity. After all, loving Thriller didn’t distinguish you from anyone. Which must have been what a friend of my mom’s, Bharati Auntie was thinking, when she bought for my fifth birthday, a “Billie Jean” outfitted Michael doll, replete with the trademark high waters, his socks and glove glittering silver: What did kids like after all? Michael Jackson.

But all that’s to say I was born a little too late for the Jackson 5. The 80s were the entr’acte to Michael Jackson’s unfolding public tragedy. He had become a commodity, plasticized into a six-inch doll, projected onto Epcot Center’s screen as Captain EO, pixilated in an arcade screen in Moonwalker. I knew nothing of his back story, nothing about Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and Jackie, or their tyrannical father Papa Joe Jackson; nothing about the entire tradition of Black music from which Michael emerged, the Motown label for which he and his brothers dropped hit after hit in the late 60s and early 70s; nothing about who Michael was before his face went under the surgeon’s scalpel time and again, cut up and reconstructed into something less and less recognizable from the boy caught in a black and white audition tape sent to Hitsville U.S.A., feet sliding like quicksilver, like a miniature James Brown.

2.

I first remember hearing the Jackson Five, cut up and reconstructed in Naughty by Nature’s “O.P.P.” This was 1991, the beginning of sixth grade, a few years after my family moved from San Jose to Rochester, a Northern suburb of Detroit. Thanks to an older family friend who gave my sister and me a schooling in Run D.M.C.’s Raising Hell before we left, I was pretty invested in Hip Hop at that point, saving up my irregular allowances to buy Word Up and maxi-singles at Harmony House every month or so. At our middle school dances, the predominantly white class at Van Hoosen were more interested in Guns ‘n’ Roses at that point, which was no small point of contention. But “O.P.P.” was different. “O.P.P.” had just about everyone approximating, however awkwardly, the steps we’d seen on TV – the running man, the roger rabbit, the high step, the cabbage patch, the kid ‘n’ play – and those of us who couldn’t dance, would at least, shout back:

Yeah you know me!
Yeah you know me!
Every (um)… last (mumble)…

The strength of “O.P.P.” rested at least partially on its break, the opening bar of the Jackson Five’s “A.B.C,” with its plinking piano and syncopated bass. Sure, there was emcee Treach’s call-and-response. And sure, there was the mysterious acronym itself, which was the subject of several brilliant lunch-time discussions (“It means other’s people’s property.” “Naw, man. It means other people’s pussy”). But the beat is what reeled us in. It was familiar even if I couldn’t identify it at the time, and much more melodious than a lot of the hip hop tracks of the day. Case in point: the other songs I remember loving that school year were N.W.A.’s “Appetite for Destruction,” fueled by a brooding bass pattern which, even without the lyrics, seemed seedy, urgent, and dangerous; House of Pain’s unrelentingly frenetic and bouncy “Jump Around,” with its looped howl courtesy of Prince; the Flint-based MC Breed’s “Ain’t No Future in Yo Frontin,” a slinky, proto G-funk track that sampled the Ohio Player’s “Funky Worm”; and finally, Public Enemy’s slow grinding and fiercely political, “By the Time I Get to Arizona.” All of those tracks were infectious in their own way, but something about “O.P.P.,” on the other hand, actually crossed over to the unconverted. It was simple, essentially see-sawing between the same chord in two octaves. And it felt innocent. A precocious Michael Jackson, who actually sounded older and more confident than the Michael of the present, punctuated that feeling:

Come on come on come on let me show you what it’s all about

3.

It took me a while to learn the origins of that beat. My classmate Katie Monaghan played me her Jackson Five tape one day, which is when I learned that before “O.P.P.” came “A.B.C.” In retrospect, I wonder how many of those suburban Detroit kids were recognizing a song they grew up with when they heard Naughty by Nature? Scholar Josh Kun uses the term “audiotopia” to describe the way in which music acts like a “utopia for the listener, that music experienced not only as sound that goes into our ears, and vibrates through our bones, but as a space that we can enter into, encounter, move around in, inhabit, be safe in.” I’ve thought about how my own early attraction to Hip Hop came out of the racialized space it provided me as an Indian-American, not totally comfortable in white culture nor living in the inner city streets, which the emcees described; the gendered space it gave me as a puny, prepubescent brown kid; or the space it provided me as a suburban American, to view, voyeuristically, the lives of those cities. In what ways was “O.P.P.” producing a space of “cultural encounter” and also, via its sample, a space of “historical encounter,” for those of us breaking it down on our middle school cafeteria-turned-dance floor?

Let me risk gross simplification for the sake of argument. If, for my classmates, listening to Marvin Gaye, the Jackson Five, the Miracles, the Supremes, scratched at memories of their parents’ record collection, then the fragment of “A.B.C.” that Naughty by Nature’s track was built on might have, however subconsciously, scratched at those same memories. In other words, the audiotopia these kids imagined through the music might have been characterized by the nostalgia of childhood (doubly signified, by memories of their own childhood, and in some ways, the childhood voice of Michael Jackson). There’s no question in my mind that Hip Hop, and the practice of sampling, have those affective powers. But that doesn’t fully explain why I’ve come to feel a kind of nostalgia for the Jackson Five or any number of other Motown acts, when I didn’t grow up with that music, nor did my parents ever have the good fortune of owning a Motown records. (And to be fair, if the sheer number of suburban Salvation Army shops I hopelessly rummaged through for soul LPs is any indication, then I don’t think all of my classmates’ parents owned any Motown either.)

Part of it is how the songs of Motown still circulate. You hear the Temptations in a movie like My Girl and Bronx Tale, the Four Tops in Cooley High, the Jackson Five in Crooklyn, all films about growing up in the 60s. For the Boomers who made those films, Motown became shorthand for childhood, the early stuff (“My Girl”) for the better days, the later stuff (“A Ball of Confusion”) for the era’s tumult.

To my ears, Motown signifies nostalgia, itself, for an America I never knew and for a Detroit that is equally foreign; a Detroit, in which Hastings Street was not yet a freeway, the Hudson’s building still stood on Woodward, in which capital had not totally been drained out and opportunity in the city wasn’t totally eroded. But just as the traces of past musical forms are found in the music of the present, the remnants of that America embodied in Motown, are still found in the empty lots and vacated buildings of Detroit, in the stories and nostalgia-tinted pasts that those who lived through them remember, and those who weren’t around, still believe they can hear in the music.