The King is Dead

Music is important to my family, but not in the conventional way - I am the only person in my family who plays any instruments. But in our house, a record player and stereo has the same status as a television - my dad's sound system has its own room where the only activity done there is music listening. There are more than 7,000 records in that room. I was raised thinking record shopping is a normal, almost weekly activity. To this day, I go to record shops at least twice a month and still buy physical media.

That isn't to say that my parent's influence musically is anywhere similar - in fact, despite both being children of the 1960s, their musical tastes rarely overlap. My dad is an audiophile and has fairly broad musical interests, but tends toward the hi-fi and critically acclaimed. My mom meanwhile prefers anything with a pop beat that she can workout to and dance to. She genuinely loved "Shake Your Tail Feather" by Diddy. She has simple preferences. But she is also extremely emotional about the music she holds closest to her heart, and maybe that's why the only two times I remember my entire family truly planning to share something musically related together as a whole revolved around my mom's two favorite artists of all time: The Beatles and Michael Jackson.

My mom was one of the original Beatlemaniacs. If you know her now, a shrinking violet through and through, it's incongruous to the point of absurdity to think she once chased down the Beatles's road manager, convinced him to let her babysit his kids for tickets to the Hollywood Bowl show, and sat next to the Byrds at that legendary shows. I was born on Paul McCartney's birthday. This seems like too much of a coincidence to actually be a coincidence. And so my family tuned in every night the Beatles Anthology was on to watch together. I would imitate every member of the band's playing style and this inspired me to start playing guitar.

Around the time the Beatles were falling apart, my mom, a high schooler, saw Michael Jackson and found a new life-long love. Growing up, Michael Jackson didn't have nearly the presence in my life of the Beatles - I once spent two years straight only listening to and studying the Beatles; by comparison, I have only ever owned two Michael Jackson albums - but he was there nevertheless. Thriller was the first record I fell in love with - and it came out when I was five months old (I don't think I really sat next to the record listening to it until I was two). Anytime he performed on TV, my mom told me to watch because "he is just so talented". The feeling in her voice told me seeing Michael move and sing took her back to those days when she was a kid and Michael was just a tween phenom. The night Michael's video for Black or White debuted after the Simpsons in 1991, my family watched it together. It was an event.

And almost a week ago, Michael Jackson died. I was at a friend's birthday that night, and I found out about his death in an appropriate manner - an email from my mom. We exchanged emails and then the DJ at the bar I was at played "Thriller" and we all wondered whether it was awkward coincidence or impromptu tribute (He played "Bad" next, so it was a tribute, but "Bad" was a strange choice since the word "bad" sounds unfortunately similar to "dead" and... yeah). It was an especially surreal moment because Michael died rehearsing for the 50 shows he was supposed to do here in London starting in a few weeks.

I'm not going to be hyperbolic about his death - my mom was sad, and I was sad and I've been listening to his music here and there this week, and I felt all the jokes in the wake of his death were in awful taste; but it wasn't a life altering moment. For example, I have a friend here in England who had tickets with her mom and sister for six of the London come back shows. And you were only allowed to buy one set of tickets per household, so it was an undertaking to take down that many spots. Their lives were altered. Not mine. But I have spent an unexpected amount of time reflecting on his ultimately tragic life.

The majority of the articles written about him over the last week asked the most obvious question - how do we remember him now? Do we just remember the music or do we just remember the last strange 20 to 25 years? In my mind, nothing about his life can or should be separated. His virtuoso childhood forced him to carry himself and burdens in ways most men never have to. Thriller gave him a high water mark he - nor anyone else - would ever be able to approach, no matter how hard he chased. Life as the most famous person in the world drove him to search for a place where he could just be a kid. The rest has been told ad-infinitum as one of the most prevalent auto-punchlines of the last 20 years.

[note - I'm finishing this post now, 3 weeks later, after being extremely lazy. it's been sitting here as an enormous obstacle to adding more to this blog, so I'm just finishing it up right now].

We cannot separate one from the other. We need to remember his tremendous, unlikely combination of talents, a cocktail that made for the most potent and perfect pop talent you could imagine. The most obvious are his dancing and singing - and particularly before they became watered-down by what I would argue were a bevy of ticks and habits (crotch-grabs, howls, overly-stylized and stiffened motions; and has anyone ever explained why his voice turned out the way it did?), he had one of the most unique and recognizable styles of both. It wasn't nearly as ingenious as he gets credit for, but he still was able to absorb and translate the history of dance and song he grew up learning in Joe Jackson's training crucible and turn it into something seemingly other-worldly. And the third talent he had was something people don't speak about enough - his song-writing. I don't know to what extent his songs were fully written by him or aided by Quincy Jones or some team of artists, but we can only guess from the writing credits. And he is credited with writing Don't Stop Til You Get Enough, Wanna Be Startin' Something, Beat It, Billie Jean, Bad, The Way You Make Me Feel, and Smooth Criminal. And, in my opinion, the one talent he seemingly lacked in his writing (and really the writing of the rest of his catalogue) pointed to his true power as a pop star: zero lyrical writing ability. So many songs have nonsensical, down-right silly lyrics, but it is illustrative of what clever vocal phrasing, undeniable music, and incredible dancing (which, due to his videos and well-documented performances, are always inseparable from the music) can do to make a song powerful. Michael was always fully selling us everything he could from these songs and an entire generation and more of people bought it.

But, perhaps catalyzed by the Pepsi hair-burning incident of which there is now terrifying footage but certainly starting much before that, he spiraled into something that was otherworldly for all the wrong reasons. I don't need to write anything about the last 20 years of bizarre behavior, except to say that it's incredible that I have anything positive to say about Michael Jackson considering he has just been this strange and disturbing pop Nosferatu for almost my entire waking life. What I can say is that the last two decades are just another incredible example of the destructive power of being too talented, too successful, too famous. We've seen many examples before, but MJ is incredible because of the incredible path both sides of his life plowed through all of society in his time on earth. It's staggering to think one person could have such huge effect on humanity just because they sang some songs we like to dance to and it's not hard to understand why, in retrospect, he crumbled beneath the enormous weight of it all.

And a bit on the album that was his millstone - Thriller. The sales numbers are absurd. 110 million albums sold. Second place is Back in Black by AC/DC (which is also absurd in its own way) with 49 million copies sold. Not even halfway there. Record sales numbers are no longer significant given digital downloads and most of the world just stealing music wholesale, so this number will never be beaten even if a more popular album comes along (and just as an intellectual aside, the list of the top selling albums of all time is incredibly skewed by the history of the recording industry and shows it peaked in 90s for a number of reasons - economics, population, and most obviously technology. that's all for another post that will never be written, obviously). Thriller to me is not a great album. Revolver, London Calling, OK Computer - all written in the UK (and I am NOT a lover of British music) and all great albums. Thriller plays more like a motley collection of greatest hits. The sequencing is strange and incongruous. It features "The Girl is Mine", which more than one commentator recently has pointed out is unequivocally horrible and only notable for possibly being better than "Say, Say, Say", the other collaboration between two of the greatest pop artists in history. Then there are three okay-but-not-incredible songs: Baby Be Mine (starts exactly the same way as track 2 of Off The Wall, is catchy and would have been a small hit for, like, Blackstreet or something), Human Nature (memorable enough hook for a ballad, but it would prove to be a bad omen for Michael's increasingly saccharine ballads later in his career), and Lady in My Life (which could have been the theme song for some tv show in the 80s). Of course, there are the other five songs, which oh, just happen to be five of the greatest pop songs in history. All on one album. So, yeah, this might not be a great album (Off The Wall is better), but it's the greatest pop record ever put to wax.

Just to finish off, here's how I like to remember this guy - as the kid my mom adored when she was a teenager, a kid who was spilling talent out of every pore, had a smile the size of a dinner plate, and whose bright future sparkled in his confident eyes at the twist of every single one of his perfectly rehearsed dance moves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC-rkHXRPX4