Let’s go… Slaho!

Growing up I have always been a rocker. Ok, OK I fell into the New Wave craze for a bit in the ’80’s but one has to admit that music was fun, right? Yeah, well… So, as I was saying I’ve always been into rock music. If one were to look at my record collection (before a third of it was stolen, but that’s another story for another day), they’d see compilations of work of some of my favorite rock artists. I own every U2 album/cd. I also own every Genesis CD, along with every Peter Gabriel CD and all but Phil Collins last release (that’s on my to buy list). I owned every Police release as well as every Sting release. Led Zeppelin? I got the whole collection. The Beatles… every one and then some (though all but three of their CD’s were in that stolen list). Included in my collection… almost all of Floyd, all of INXS, early Collective Soul and Pearl Jam, even all of Creed. In other words I’ve been collecting music from rock acts as old as the ’60’s and as current as about 5 years ago. I LOVE Rock music and almost exclusively listen to it.

Having said that I do have an appreciation for a good song outside my preferred genre. Artists I wouldn’t otherwise listen to from time to time come out with a catchy tune that I just can’t resist. They are few and far between, but you just can’t help but find yourself humming to them. Outkast’s Hey Ya, for instance. I love that song. A few more years back, Groove is in the Heart by Dee-Lite. That song had a great hook. And like these there have been plenty of others, but they are in the minority. There really are very few acts not in the rock genre that have really made me want to follow them. There are two that seem to be the exception. One is Prince. His funk and groove to me has always been infectious, and one can’t deny that when he wants to he could wail with the best of the rock guitarists (even though most rock fans would not want to admit to this… but then again I saw him doing Best of you by the Foo Fighters at the Super Bowl a couple of years back, and he was shredding that guitar!!). The other, as you could probably guess by the title of this blog is Michael Jackson.

It isn’t often that I show up to a record store on the day that a new CD is released. I’ve done it with only three acts actually. I’ve done that with U2 a number of times. I also did it with Genesis with We Can’t Dance. And I’ve also done it with Michael Jackson… twice, actually. I was there to buy Dangerous the day it was released, as well as HIStory. I was soooo looking forward to hearing both those CDs the day they came out, and to me, they didn’t disappoint. Separate the music from the caricature that was Michael and one couldn’t deny that his music was awesome. To this day I still own Thriller on vinyl. I just couldn’t part with it, even though I no longer have an LP player. I still have Bad on cassette, even though it’s somewhat damaged. His music transcended genre. You could see this by simply looking at the people he worked with, from R & B king of production Quincy Jones, to Beatle Paul McCartney (more than once), to Eddie Van Halen and Stevie Stevens (Billy Idol’s guitarist), to a number of the greatest rap artists including Biggie Smalls. Hey he even worked with Shaq! Ok not everyone’s perfect. But man, everything he recorded was gold. Some albums sell millions on hype alone. But none sell over 30 MILLION on hype. That’s what Thriller did. That was the first album to have 7 top 10 singles, a feat only duplicated only one since then (by Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, for those wondering). And his next album, Bad, id the only release ever to have 6 number 1 hits… from the SAME ALBUM. Some acts don’t have 6 number ones in their entire career! He created great songs, made with not just a great beat, but many of which had great lyrics (Man in the Mirror comes to mind).

And the only thing that could top his music in the eyes of some was his music videos. They were fun to watch and full of life, and filled with Michael Jackson’s great dance moves. I personally wasn’t too fond of his crotch grabbing (was he checking to make sure “it” wasn’t falling off along with his nose and skin color?), but between those hands full of pants, he had some of the most creative dance moves to have been caught on camera. To this day there are people still imitating Michael and his dance moves… the dance scene at the end of Beat It, the spins in Billie Jean, the long sequence in Smooth Criminal, and of course probably his most famous video, Thriller. They say he created the Moonwalk (I’m not so sure… I could swear I had seen it before said day at the Grammy’s), but even if he didn’t, the man definitely perfected it. He truly was King of what he did, and that was entertain in the Pop world of music. Nobody was his equal.

Of course, it can be said that no one was his equal when it came to quirks. The man was STRANGE! I’m not sure that most of the stuff that people said about him was true, but some of it had to be. And the strangest thing to me was his need to remain a child. Some people said that he was, as he grew older, trying to look more feminine, that he was trying to look like his sisters. I think he was simply trying to stay twelve or even younger. He needed to keep a prepubescent voice. It seems like he never went through puberty in that sense. This is what I perceived anyway. It didn’t seem like he wanted to sound like a girl to me, he wanted to stay sounding like the Michael Jackson that first became famous… when he was 5! As far as his appearance went, I got nothing on that. All the plastic surgery, how his nose changed, as well as the rest of his face.. I have nothing in my head that can grasp why he would do that. I’m sure people have theories, but they all sound like crazy stabs in the dark to me, and every one of those theories had been shot down by the man himself. This doesn’t mean of course that there wasn’t truth to those theories. I’m not sure the man was all there, and therefore couldn’t come up with reasons why he did the things he did.

I must say, I’ve always felt sorry for the guy. Since I can remember he had made it perfectly clear that he felt he had been robbed of his childhood… he even wrote a song about it and put it in his HIStory CD. He was supposedly abused by his parents, forced to be a man when he was still but a child. He didn’t get to play with other kids or hang out with kids his age. His job was to record and to perform and to make his family rich. That’s a lot of pressure on such a young child, especially when you are the central figure. All eyes were always on Michael, and he knew it. Maybe that’s why the others didn’t come out (as) messed up. Then he spent the rest of his life trying to be the child he never was. For Christ’s sake, he lived in a place called Never Land. He thought he was Peter Pan. He forgot to grow up. And it was obvious that he never left the stage in his life where he could relate to anyone but children. Heck the faces one saw him with the most when growing up were those of children like Emmanuel Lewis, and Macauly Culkin. Disturbing? Yes, but I could see why it was like that. They were living his lifestyle (as stars) while still having a semblance of a childhood.

Now as far as the accusations went that he wound up molesting kids in his care, I can’t help but think these are things that probably did wind up happening. But in my mind, I wonder, WHAT THE HELL WERE THE PARENTS OF THOSE KIDS THINKING? They left their kids in the house of a 40 plus year old man!?!?! This does not condone the behavior of this man if in fact he did was he was accused and eventually acquitted of doing. But all the signs were there of a man who was eccentric and not 100% in his right mind. If a child was molested in his hands, he should have gone to jail, but so should have that child’s parents for negligence. He didn’t trick the kids into coming over to his house. They went with the full consent of their parents who WILLINGLY let them stay for extended periods of time.

All the negative publicity that this man got I think pushed him closer to the edge than he already was, and I think drove him to some very dark places that he never fully came out of, and I think that ’s why we heard nothing from him musically for the last 8 years. But the guy was supposedly preparing for a major comeback, one that was set to begin next month in Europe. I for one would have been all about his return. I never got to see him perform live, but everyone I knew who did says that it was a spectacle to behold, and being the perfectionist that he was when on stage, I’m sure it would have been worth the money and the wait to have seen it. But, now that comeback will never happen. We can only go back now and enjoy what he left behind.

The sad thing about all this is that after some quiet from the tabloids over the last couple of years ever since his trial went into the recesses of our memories, along with all the tributes that will come up in his honor, so will the ceaseless tabloid coverage discussing his “last hours”, his “last words”, the drugs he was one, the neglect of his children, the debts he had incurred, etc. etc. etc., that will include some truth but for the most part be fabricated and sold for as long as people would be willing to buy and read it. This is really sad. The guy has been an attention magnet for practically the full 50 years of his life. It would be a shame if people would choose to continue this crap as opposed to just finally letting him be. The man may have never rested a single day in his entire life. I think that now is as good a time as any for him to finally be able to rest. In peace.

I can’t speak for everyone Michael because as I said, you were one weird dude. But I can speak for myself when I say that you will be sorely missed. I only wish I could have taken my kids one day to see you perform live. But as it is, that’ll never happen.

Rest in Peace, Michael Jackson. Hopefully now you can be young forever. And I hope you gave God a really good show when you got up there, the one you had been practicing so hard for when you were called.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 27th, 2009 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Just thinking.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.