Michael Jackson Related Thought of the Day

Sarah J and I were talking the other night about how long we can keep this thread going. This may be the last thing I have to say, but we'll see.

At any rate, I've been a fierce (unironic) defender of Michael Jackson's music for years. That said, there isn't a single one of his albums that I think is amazing from start to finish. Even Thriller has songs I could do without. The man knew how to craft a single, no question, but his "start-to-finish-great-album" skills are greatly overestimated.

Michael Jackson-related thought of the day

Since Trend and Erik have done them already, I'm submitting my Michael Jackson-related thought.

Well, really I've had lots of them. But a few of them I spun into an essay on pop and populism for Global Comment, because I'm just a nerd like that. So here: my Michael Jackson related thought.

Which came first, really? Nixon’s “Silent Majority” and the retreat of a real solid progressive movement leading to the Reagan Revolution and faux-populism used to convince people to vote to give their money to the rich, or a fragmenting media culture that killed off the chance for a true mass bond?

It is no accident that the last real pop superstar, Michael Jackson, hit the apex of his popularity in the Reagan years. There was at least an idea of a mass consensus in this country, even though no one really could’ve defined what that consensus was, and yet while we had a white man in office slowly hacking away at the rights of people of color, women, gays and lesbians, and anyone who didn’t fit into a nuclear-family, gender-binary, reactionary ideal of an America that never really existed, our number one superstar was a man celebrated and loved not in spite of his fluid sexuality, racial ambiguity, and androgyny, but because of it.

Michael Jackson: pop superstar, appealing to men and women, old and young, and subversive as hell.

If you want to read the rest, in which I bring in LBJ, leftist elitism, Barack Obama as celebrity, and quote Ellen Willis, it's all here.

Michael Jackson-Related Thought of the Day

Many people suggest that disco died at the end of the 1970s, but this is untrue. Disco's final, dying breath happened in 1983, at the 10:15 mark in this video. After that, disco in its original form was never heard from again (mercifully).

Also, in the "is this really the first time we've used that tag?" category, I submit "disco."

Michael Jackson Related Thought of the Day

Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" is better than anything Michael Jackson ever sang.

My Michael Jackson thoughts

I've been reading and passing on MJ eulogies all morning.

But I think Trend captured below what it was like to be a child of the 80s and to grow up with Michael Jackson. My Twitter comment this morning was "I remember a world without the Internet. I don't remember a world without Michael Jackson."

And yet I'm shocked by how gobsmacked I am by this. I expect to be horrifically sad when Madonna dies--I have grown up in the shadow and image of Madonna in a much more obvious way than Michael Jackson. I have grown up a girl who flaunts all her contradictions, who despises sexual hypocrisy and who still, after all these years, loves to dance.

Last night I had coffee and then dinner with a new friend who grew up in England, and I was trying to explain to him what it was like, being American, being born in 1980 and suddenly, unexpectedly hearing that Michael Jackson is gone. I can't.

I can't explain why I didn't own any Michael Jackson music but this morning I hit iTunes for the songs that I love ("Wanna Be Startin' Something" in my headphones as I type) and am genuinely saddened.

John Nichols wrote a lovely post about Jackson's activism and cultural relevance, and Natalia Antonova wrote like Trend about the impact of Jackson's music. But this piece by Richard Kim goes to a darker place--and made me think.

I've already noted the things that I can say I've drawn from Madonna--it's a clearer image for me. Michael Jackson? Before today I would've said nothing. Yet it's obvious now, as these words spill out of me, that there has been an impact on me, on all of us. It's a complicated one. The face we are left with of Jackson is not a pretty one. It's an intensely problematic one--all the worst aspects of our society reflected back in the face of a celebrity whipping boy.

I write a lot about monsters. Michael Jackson was, in one sense, a monster. He blurred boundaries between black and white, child and adult, masculine and feminine (as Patricia Williams wrote back in 2005), and yesterday, life and death, as the reports from tabloids hit first and many of us didn't want to believe, held out hope that it was just a salacious rumor, until the LA Times confirmed it for us.

People either disavow Michael loudly as a "freak" or choose to remember the music--which is, of course, what I'm doing now, cherrypicking my favorite tunes to play back. But if we really want to remember Michael Jackson, we will look into the dark places that he went, and look at the side of ourselves that wanted to have him as our freak. That didn't want to admit that he was still a lot like us.

And yet. A little while back we did a series of music posts, proclaiming the best rock albums, best country albums, etc. We never did get around to a best pop albums list, largely because I couldn't step away from Madonna and Michael to think of anyone else. This morning, listening to these songs with a new poignancy to every high crack of that voice, I still have to salute the best pop songs any of us have ever heard. The music will live on whether we self-examine or not. And that's perhaps as it should be.

RIP - Michael Jackson

Yesterday, I spent 8 hours driving to see my parents in Ohio. When I got out of the car, I did not expect that the first thing my mother would say would be, "Was Michael Jackson on your list?" I stared at her for a second, and said, "wait - Michael Jackson died? HOW?"

Of course, lots of tributes will come in; some longer, some shorter, most more eloquent than mine. I'll just leave it at the fact that, as someone born at the very beginning of the 80s, Michael Jackson was probably the biggest cultural component of my growing up - moreso than Transformers, than Schwarzenegger movies, than pogo balls and Michael Jordan and Hulk Hogan and anything else from my childhood. Michael Jackson was huge, and great, and the memories have gone from when I was about 3 (I remember the Thriller singles hitting the radio, one by one) to the present.

There was the day, when I was 8 or 9 (and thus, a good 6 years after Thriller), I had spent the night at a friend's house, and his mom was getting ready to take me home and insisted my friend come, but the Thriller video was on. The kid was so angry, he started crying. Over Thriller. Which had been out for 6 years. And I wasn't (and am not) mad - to quote Dave Chapelle, it was "Thriller, man. Thriller."

I remember watching the episode of the Simpsons, just so I could see the debut of the "Black and White" music video. To this day, it is the only Simpsons episode I have seen from start to finish, and I played my Dangerous tape so many times as an 11 year old, it eventually wore out. By the time the allegations broke, I was old enough to be familiar with disillusionment (I was a Cleveland sports fan, after all), but that A) didn't stop the shock and disbelief at the accusations leveled against Michael, and B) stop me from saying, "but the music....".

Last year, when I worked at a Borders books temporarily, it was late on a Friday night, and we were playing the 25th anniversary release of Thriller on the store radio. The security guy called all the staff over to the video camera screen he had on the main floor, and we gathered around, everybody smiling as we saw that, in the children's section, a kid who looked to be 9 or 10 was pulling out all of his dance moves to "Billie Jean." A 9 year old kid. And what was more, he was pulling out Michael Jackson's moves - not the ones from Black and White, or Scream, but the Moonwalk, moves from "Thriller," - old school Michael Jackson. I mean, this kid probably wasn't even born in the 1990s, and he knew old-school Michael Jackson moves. And the moment "Billie Jean" came on, that kid couldn't help himself. And all the Borders staff stood around the camera, in what would have been a voyeuristic and cynical move, if we hadn't all been smiling and wondering at the power of that song, and the joy of that kid, a joy that I think it's safe to say we all kind of shared. It may be cheesy and trite, but that doesn't make it any less true. That made every staff worker's night that night.

And just two weeks ago, a friend and colleague of mine and I were sitting in Rio discussing just how amazing Michael Jackson's music was and still is, and how nobody, but nobody, ever danced like that or will ever dance like that again. The next night, I was flipping channels on MTV Brazil (where they still play videos), and caught the "Smooth Criminal" video, which (together with "Billie Jean") was always my favorite. For four minutes, I was just ear-to-ear smiling, not able to believe my luck that, not only had I caught a music video on MTV, but it was "Smooth Criminal." When somebody gets 80s nostalgia and plays all the horrible, popular songs from when I was growing up, I always cringe at every song - every song that isn't a Michael Jackson song.

I'm not quite sure his death has settled in for me yet - I feel like the loss of what is unquestionably one of my favorite parts of my childhood, and the loss of the biggest celebrity in my lifetime bar none, should feel....I don't know, grander. Right now, all I can think is, "What about his kids?" My deepest sympathies of course go out to them, and to all of his family and friends. I just hope that one day, his kids know that people remember him not for the transformation in appearance, or for the weird charges that were never proven, or for holding one of them over a balcony, but for what was most important and best about Michael Jackson, for what he gave to generations to enjoy forever: his music.