Here's a question you may find yourself asking in a while: where were you when you found out Michael died?
I was waiting for my buddy to meet me at Haight Ashbury music when my sister called me from Dolores park where she had checked on my friend Franny's iPhone after hearing from some guy who saw it on his iPhone...
It's soon enough after his really unexpected death to actually consider his art and how it affected us, before any media shitstorm really sets in and before I get into trying to describe the postmodern implications of John Mayer and Miley Cyrus twittering their condolences (right after I typed that MTV popped a little thing up in the bottom left corner reading out those exact tweets. just sayin). Too soon for all that. Right now all I can offer is respect for Michael and his legacy.
I could also make some sweeping generalization about being born into the 90s with Bad and Dangerous on CD instead of being born into the 80s with Off the Wall and Thriller on vinyl, but I won't. It's soon enough that I can just think about hanging out in the house I grew up in listening to those CD, getting to know Michael as a white woman (I was probably four), then later learning that he was a black man and then getting to know the amazing music he made with Quincy Jones.
Most channels right now are playing clips of his best videos (not only his Jackson 5-Thriller era performances but also the cray-cray spectacle of videos like Scream [w/ Janet], Black & White, Leave Me Alone, Remember the Time [video featuring Eddie Murphy and Magic Johnson], the intro to that HIStory best-of tape where they build a giant statue of him—all breathtaking and worthy of viewing in their own right), and right now only Fox News is running a lot of coverage on his trial and recent years in a more sour kind of limelight. I never forgot how "hard" songs like Billy Jean and Off the Wall "go", but I did notice his dancing for the first time in a while with all these performances making a new sort of TV "flow" in the last day or so. Seeing how smooth he moved, they way everything he wore sparkled for the cameras: strangely, that's still what really takes me by surprise, moreso than what's happened over the last day or so. Damn that was a performer that left us.
With all respect, rest in peace, Michael.
Most channels right now are playing clips of his best videos (not only his Jackson 5-Thriller era performances but also the cray-cray spectacle of videos like Scream [w/ Janet], Black & White, Leave Me Alone, Remember the Time [video featuring Eddie Murphy and Magic Johnson], the intro to that HIStory best-of tape where they build a giant statue of him—all breathtaking and worthy of viewing in their own right), and right now only Fox News is running a lot of coverage on his trial and recent years in a more sour kind of limelight. I never forgot how "hard" songs like Billy Jean and Off the Wall "go", but I did notice his dancing for the first time in a while with all these performances making a new sort of TV "flow" in the last day or so. Seeing how smooth he moved, they way everything he wore sparkled for the cameras: strangely, that's still what really takes me by surprise, moreso than what's happened over the last day or so. Damn that was a performer that left us.
With all respect, rest in peace, Michael.
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