Filed under: Michael Jackson
I come home from my first real day off in a month. I feel like shit, like I’m catching a summer cold. I jump on line, and it’s like fucking holy god damn crap, what is it a joke? Michael Jackson found not breathing. 6 minutes later he’s confirmed dead. The end. No build up, no nothing, like a whimper. Besides revering him every time I hear him on a dance floor and EVERY ONE dances, I don’t think about him much. For me, I haven’t identified with him for years. Michael Jackson Thriller was the second tape I ever bought with my own money. He played my town of Denver in 1983, when I was eight, and I remember having a conversation in the kitchen with my mom about it being sold out, but we both wanted to go. We didn’t go. My friend had cable and I got special dispensation the week that Thriller came out on MTV to go over to his house every day to wait for the video to come on, sometimes I’d be there until 9 o’clock on a school night waiting for it to come on. He was the best dancer I ever saw. Ever. I cried when I saw a headline proclaiming the death of James Brown at Christmas a few years ago. I left the coffee shop I was in with my mother and went out into the snow and cried. I cried for a long time. I balled when Kurt Vonnegut died. I got this news and didn’t cry right away-because it’s almost a relief that he’s gone. And certainly if he was hurting people it’s good that he’s at rest now. And i can tell you by looking at photos of him from the past 10 years his swagger was gone. All of his beautiful confidence: gone. I would like to remember him when he was loving life, when it was easy for him. Is that wrong? I feel like Elvis just died. Or Marilyn Monroe.
So I didn’t cry right away. Then I watched the video of his Billie Jean performance at Motown’s 25th Anniversary, and I sobbed. He had such a youth and goodnesss and vitality to him in the 80’s. I never knew him as part of the Jackson 5. I knew him as a dancer and a singer. Human Nature was my favorite song in third grade. I remember the premieres of Beat It and billie Jean on MTV. I Didn’t listen to Off The Wall until I was a funky College student in the 90’s. And then I learned how to dance: Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough. Michael was the first pop star that I shared with my mother. That was neat, we watched that Motown thing together. When Michael comes on, people dance, that’s always what has bugged me in the last several years; People will talk endless trash, and yet they still dance their asses off when he comes on. I hope that he is remembered for his gift to music and not as a creepy old child molester. It feels like something is over, officially, almost like my childhood is over. Like for another generation when Frank or Gene died, like some for Farrah Fawcet who also died today. You just don’t expect Michael to go and die, and like a buddy said, you almost wish he woulda died when he was young and on top; before it all got so weird. He was in show business at age 5. If I’d only know the show all my life, I’d be weird too. So what do we remember Michael for? There’s people on the dance floor every single day, all nite, the remember him the way he should be remembered: with their bodies.
