> in this episode, we find out that everything isn't always as beautiful as it seems. And things happen, just happen, even if we least expect it. And all you can do is roll with it, or get rolled over by it. Either way, you wake up tomorrow and the world goes on. It's easy as A-B-C, it's easy as 1-2-3...
Sporty texted me in class that Micheal Jackson had died the other night.
My first reaction: "Well, Farrah just died. Maybe they've got their white women mixed up."
Sporty still hits me up for important things and this in terms of items of cultural significance certainly qualified. Then somebody else said their husband had sent them the same message. This was just seconds into the dinner break, so I hopped online with the trusty laptop and went to somebody who could get sued for bad info - Yahoo - for confirmation. And bang there it was.
Micheal Jackson, King of Pop, dead at 50.
Talk about out of left field. I was a little sad that it came to this. I was stunned really at the suddeness of it all.
But this leads me back to my MJ theory I've been professing for years.
Whatever do I mean? Well, my theory, I think Micheal Jackson died right around the end of recording Thriller, or somewhere thereabouts. And that in a desperate effort not to let what some saw as masterpiece be sadly handled, some people hired this guy who kinda looked like Mike to pretend to be Mike for a little while...and things got out of hand. Way out of hand.
Why would I expouse this crackpot theory, this obvious bit of horsepucky as credible? Well, people forget that in the early 80's Micheal Jackson was photographed drinking alcohol, regularly seen going to clubs, accused of fathering children out wedlock and generally viewed as acting like a young guy with fame and pocketful of money should act. Then something happened. And suddenly he was hanging out with kids and getting his face redone with the frequency of tire changes. Where did he snap is what most folks want to ask. I say, when did he keel over. I mean thinking in early 1980 terms - before cell phones, 24 hour entertainment news, internet, and lately twitter - how hard would it have been for someone to disappear for a few weeks? And with the plastic surgery story the impostor only had to look close, not exactly.
I'm just saying.
Back to the actual situation though, as sad and hard as it is for his family and his kids, if you are fan you almost feel a odd sense of relief that the weirdness is over, that it will finally go back to being about Micheal's music. Well, once the autopsy finishes and as Liza Minnelli put it "all hell breaks loose", then it can go back to being about the music.
And if you think Tupac put out posthumous albums, I understand Mike must have 100+ recorded songs that never made it onto an album from way back, and if you think those aren't about to get released...you must be from Alabama. But then, it will be about the music again. There will be no distraction of the MJ circus to make you think of anything else but the songs. So in that way, the man who helped define MTV and drive music towards being about the spectacle, might be the same person who inadvertently drives it back to being just about the music.
In the interest of full disclosure, I never really was much of Micheal Jackson fan. I liked "Dirty Diana" and a few of his songs from Off The Wall, but to me it wasn't soul moving. It was okay, and better than a lot of the music of today, but it just never really grabbed me. He was always more of a Jackson, than just Micheal to me.
And if you grew up when I grew up, that was more than enough.
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