I haven’t really wrote about my feelings on Michael Jackson yet, so here goes. Hopefully this will be the last post about MJ — this blog’s getting a bit repetitive.
I was born the year that ‘We Are the World’ came out, so I never got to experience Michael at his peak. I was too young to remember when Bad came out, so my first memory of him is when ‘Black and White’ was released in 1991. I was a huge fan of The Simpsons at the time and I remember the episode that Michael guest-starred. I wasn’t sure if it was really him or not. I think the ‘Black and White’ video debuted the same night. I remember the first time I saw the video — I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Especially the morphing at the end and Macauley’s rapping (Home Alone was my favourite movie at the time. Hey, I was six). After seeing the video, Michael to me was officially the coolest performer ever. After that, I tried to watch any performance of his I could. I wasn’t a crazy huge fan of his, but he was definitely somebody that I loved and looked up to at the time. My mom bought me the Dangerous cd when it came out and I played it constantly. She hated it. Which is strange because she, too, had grown up with Michael (not too many performers out there I can say that about). I remember looking through her old record collection and she had Thriller and Off the Wall and a lot of the old Jacksons records. Unfortunately, by the time I found them she no longer had a record player, so I never got to listen to them.
My interest in Michael started to fade after 1993. I guess I was pretty sheltered as a kid, so I never really read the tabloids or anything. I remember watching Michael’s interview with Oprah, I guess that was in 1993. I didn’t really know anything about the child molestation accusations, so he still seemed pretty normal to me. I watched him do the half-time show at the Superbowl the same year — it was incredible. Then he married Lisa Marie Presley, and I don’t think it was a big deal to me. It was just kind of like “Oh, she’s Elvis’s daughter. That’s nice.” I remember seeing them kiss on MTV — that was kind of weird. Then HIStory came out and my interest in Michael was revived for a while. I read about him floating his statue down the river in London and thought it was the coolest thing ever. I wished I could float a statue of myself down a river. I must have watched the ‘Scream’ video 500 times and played the song constantly. It combined my two favourite performers — Michael and Janet. Though, I don’t think I actually realized that they were related until ‘Scream’ came out. Janet was my first concert in 1994. She was awesome. So good that I saw her again in 2002. I think I loved Janet more than I loved Michael. I loved the ‘Ghosts’ video that came out a couple of years later — it was required viewing at Halloween. But after that, Michael never did anything so I lost interest pretty quickly.
The next time I got interested in Michael wasn’t because of his music, it was more because of the newspaper headlines. I wasn’t really impressed by his Invincible album, so all I saw of Michael were the outrageous stories I’d see on TV. The baby dangling, the ‘Tommy Mottola is the devil’ tyrade, the raid of Neverland in 2003. It was at this point that I really paid attention to the stories, I think. I mean, Michael was a hero to me when I was a kid and the allegations just seemed so ridiculous. Every day there were new headlines, from his nose falling off to showing up in court in his pajamas. I think it was at this point that my feelings about Michael switched from ‘greatest performer of all time’ to ‘Wacko Jacko’.
I really wanted Michael to make a comeback, but it never seemed like he was up to it. There were rumours of a residency in Las Vegas, new recordings with Akon and Will.I.Am, but nothing really came to fruition. I was disappointed with the song leaks that I had heard — ‘One More Chance’ sucked, ‘Hold My Hand’ sucked even more. But then came this grandiose annoouncement of the London dates. 10 dates. 30 dates. 50 dates. It just kept getting more and more absurd. Though he looked to be pretty fit and healthy at the press conference, to me the idea of Michael Jackson being well enough to do 50 dates was beyond ludicrous.
And now, here we are. Like I said before, I’m not necessarily surprised that Michael died. But it’s weird. Michael, the performer that I remember from when I was a kid, is a completely different person from the Michael of the last ten years. I guess I should say that I’m not surprised that the Michael of the last ten years is dead. But I’m absolutely shocked that Michael, the performer I remember, is dead. This is a story we’ll be hearing about for at least the next year. This is a guy with plenty of skeletons in his closet and the media won’t rest until all of them are exposed. Plus, there’s the custody of his kids that will be battled over and his financial situation that will have to be sorted out.
