The hat tilted low, the single white glove, the way Michael Jackson freezes mid-move: he got all of it from a guy who started going bald at 17 and wore the hat to cover it, and the gloves because he hated his own hands.
That guy was Bob Fosse. The hat and gloves were only two of his fixes. He was pigeon-toed too, so his feet pointed inward instead of turning out the way a trained dancer's are supposed to, and instead of fighting it he turned his knees in and made that a move. Three things he was self-conscious about, all turned into a style.
The clip going around is from a 1974 movie, The Little Prince. Fosse plays the Snake. He came up with the dance himself, bought his own hat and gloves, even picked the camera angles. In the clip he's all in black under the desert sun, sliding across the sand, wrists flicking, before he stops dead. And he was no nobody: he had already beaten The Godfather to the Best Director Oscar for Cabaret. Pull up "Billie Jean" right after, and you're looking at the same man: the hat low over the eyes, the gloved hand, the trick where he holds completely still and then hits a pose that lands ten times harder because of the pause right before it.
Jackson knew exactly where it came from. In 1983 he took Fosse out to lunch, told him straight up how much his dancing had shaped his own, and tried to get him to work on the Thriller video. Fosse said no. He died four years later, in 1987.
Fosse didn't invent any of this from scratch either. He took it from the rundown stages and burlesque clubs where he started dancing as a kid, and from his own idol, Fred Astaire, the same way Jackson would later take it from him. The look that defined the King of Pop began with one man trying to cover up the parts of himself he couldn't stand.
the best part about this tweet is watching people rightfully defend money machine by 100 gecs and also never unmute the video to realize the song was replaced
People keep saying they're gonna drop SF6 unless there's a real meta shifting patch. But yall been saying that shit for 2 years now, how much longer do we have to wait for yall to leave?!