Having a music blog, you feel sort of obligated to write about Michael Jackson's passing today. But truth is, I can't really add any more to what we're all going to hear over and over for weeks to come.All I'll say is that I feel a little lost. I called my mom tonight and she told me about the first time she heard Michael on the radio—on the Jackson 5 single "I Want You Back"—40 years ago this fall, while driving to her freshman college classes.
She told me she was thinking, "Who's this little kid singing? I can't believe I like this—I'm a Beatles fan!"
In a lot of ways, for many folks—despite all the controversy—Jackson was and remained that kind of guilty pleasure.
Anyway, the following is from a column I wrote on Towleroad, back in February 2008. Truthfully, it's probably my favorite of the pieces I wrote there over the past two years:
"[Thiller's] centerpiece (and master stroke) is the one-two punch of 'Beat It' and 'Billie Jean'—two brilliant pop achievements that sound as cinematic today as Jackson probably initially imagined them and then brought to life with their videos. Half these emo boy bands should be grabbed by the scruff, sat down and scolded with Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo from 'Beat It' over and over again. Some of today's radio-friendly young poppets would also do well to toss out their cookie cutter ballads and use 'Human Nature' as a template, the complicated layers of which I'm realizing initially escaped me at age nine.
"Whether he grasped that it was going to happen or not, Michael Jackson caught lightning in a bottle with Thriller in the early '80s. In a time before the mountain of career-destroying weirdness consumed him, he stepped through the pop culture window opened by E.T. and Pac Man and sent millions of suburban kids off dreaming. While I wanna think, Never say never, it's pretty much safe to assume a mega-selling phenomenon like that record could never happen again."
Goodnight, Michael. I have many fond childhood memories from 1983 through '84, which Thriller soundtracked.