When you picture Smooth Criminal, you see it instantly. The white suit. The hat tilted just so. That impossible forward lean that shouldn’t be physically possible. It might be the single most Michael Jackson image there is.
Except the whole look wasn’t really his invention at all. It was a tribute to the one man he worshipped above everyone else, Fred Astaire.
Fred Astaire’s Girl Hunt Ballet (1953), the original
Watch it and the connection is obvious. The white suit, the fedora, the moody nightclub, the sharp angular jazz moves, Michael took all of it from that 1953 Astaire routine and rebuilt it decades later as Smooth Criminal. That’s not really copying, it’s a student paying tribute to his teacher as loudly as he knew how.
Michael’s Smooth Criminal, the tribute
Michael never once hid any of this. In his memoir he called Astaire his idol and talked about studying his films over and over and over. And the admiration actually ran both ways. After Michael first moonwalked on that Motown 25 special back in 1983, his phone rang. It was Fred Astaire, calling just to tell him how good he was.
Michael said that single phone call meant more to him than almost any trophy he ever won. The man he had studied his whole life had sat and watched him, and loved it. For a perfectionist who was always so brutally hard on himself, that was the real prize.
Astaire and Michael, side by side
We think of Michael now as the one everybody else copies. It’s worth remembering that he started out copying someone too, studying an old master so closely, so faithfully, that in the end he all but joined him.