I am sitting here, stunned. Michael jackson, a mere year older than me, died this afternoon. While I would not count myself as a fanatic, I was always in awe at the man's immense talents. When I was a kid, one of my first 45's was "ABC." When I graduated from college, the first Top 40 stations I worked for was one of those "Hot Hits" stations that would repeat the top ten in about a three hour period. WQBQ started in 1982, and the Top Ten included "Billie Jean" and "Beat It," with the recurrents including "The Girl Is Mine" and others. It was likely that you'd hear 2 or more Michael Jackson songs an hour. Yet the public seemed to not tire of them, and "Thriller" remains one of the largest selling albums in history. I still have the CD in my collection, an album that has been in my music probably two or three times. And when I worked as a club DJ in Dover, Delaware, the albums "Thriller" and "Bad" still made people dance.
While his public antics, trials and health issues had long overshadowed his recorded work, I can't begin to estimate what Michael Jackson did to influence music and pop culture. I can still vividly remember watching an elementry school band slog their way through the usual marching band stuff and pop oldies that every young kid has to play, but then the band leader made an announcement that the kids had a special song that they wanted to play. A steady drumbeat began and dozens of little feet began to ecstatically tap and play "Billie Jean." Despite the somewhat studious nature of their playing prior to this, you could see their faces light up as they leaned into their instruments and put all their hearts into playing this, the coolest of songs for these kids to be playing. For these elementary school kids, Jackson was their gateway into loving music.
Michael Jackson may have been overwhlmed by the court cases and the plastic surgeries, but for me it is those kids in the school band that will be my measure of what Jackson accomplished. It will be the night I watched him doing the moonwalk on TV for the first time. It will be the fans who rallied to the Sunset Blvd Tower Records to see the "HisStory" statue when the box set was released. And even if he spoonfed and obligated newspapers to call him "The King Of Pop," he managed to make himself into the stuff of his dreams.
Had hers been the only celebrety passing today, Farrah Fawcett would still have been newsworthy, but add Michael Jackson's sudden death, and Farrah was almost overshadowed. Yet it is hard for me not to notice, because as a gay man not yet out of his teens, the infamous "Farrah" poster was one of only two women to be pinned on my teenaged wall. (The other was Linda Rondstat.) And while news reports had been making us aware that her battle with cancer was on the brink of taking her from us, the announcement of her passing still felt like a tug at the heart. I always have an issue with people who discribe a battle with Cancer as "Couragous," as cancer is an illness and not a challenge you choose. You would never consider describing anyone with cancer as "cowardly." Her fight with her Cancer was one she took on with dignity and determination. She looked at what she was doing as an opportunity to show women what dealing with cancer was, realistically. It was honest, it was heartbreaking. What she did in 1976 was charm us as a glamourius Charlie's Angel. What she did in 2009 was win us with her warmth and honesty, even if her 'glamour' had long passed, but her charm never went away.
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