Public Enemies has incidental pleasures (its hi-def video palette is fascinatingly weird), but it’s only Depp’s sense of fun that keeps it from being a period gangster museum piece. After Michael Jackson’s death, I rewatched his video of “Smooth Criminal”—a gangster fantasia with rat-tat-tat hoofing and a touch of Guys and Dolls. It’s madly inventive, genre-bending, at once a study in urban paranoia and a tribute to the artist as outlaw-loner. Public Enemies has none of that originality and passion, and Mann can’t dance.

The MJ's came around at the right time, in the post-civil rights era, when the culture was starting to change and colorblindness became a possibility, if not exactly a reality. And when serious coin could be made in the entertainment field. Along with the media hype machine which was just kicking into overdrive. All that came together in the 80's/90's to make mega-stars and icons out of black performers, in a way which was not previously possible.

Gary,

Little Richard was a Black groundbreaker who appealed to all races, was androgynous, could dance like a motherfucker and played a mean piano.

Race wasn't an issue for Johnny Mathis, Harry Belafonte, Stevie Wonder, Frankie Lyman, Bo Diddley, Nat King Cole, Jimmy Hendrix, Sammy Davis Jr. and many others. These performers were idolized by white girls/women and favourites of white boys/men. And this doesn't include the Black groups like The Platters, The Coasters, The Drifters and on and on. All these performers would fill then seats and it certainly wasn't an all Black audience.

Of course the South in those times had officials (and a populous) that would not look kindly on these musician and there are plenty examples of harassment and actual arrests and jail by cops down there, but that nonsense was pretty well extinct by the time that Jackson showed up on the scene.

Besides, Jackson was white. Haven't you noticed?

Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte.

Of course I'm well aware of that, but I was speaking about their audience not the general public and I knew many white women (American) who desired Belafonte and would have loved to date him. So this was quite a while ago and they broke barriers, which was my point.

I can't look at the title for Away We Go without thinking of Oklahoma!