By the time I started listening to music, roughly 20 years ago, Michael Jackson was already past his prime. He was still a major star and a darling of MTV, but he had already begun his transition from the ‘King of Pop’ to ‘Wacko Jacko’. Within a few years would come the first charges of child molestation. Not long thereafter he seemed to fall off the music radar altogether and became better known for his bizarre antics; the marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, dangling his baby child out of the window, the move to Bahrain.
Plastic surgery so warped his appearance that it became difficult to even look at his face. He looked grotesque and inhuman. His death almost seems a relief as the long lacuna of his career was difficult to bear for his fans who so loved the man’s music.
The Michael Jackson his fans choose to remember–the man whose dancing and singing once dazzled the world- died long ago.
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Being born in 1979, I feel privileged that some of my very first memories of music were listening to my parents’ vinyl copy of Thriller when I was about five years old.
Posted 30 Jun 2009 at 6:29 pm ¶Born in ’69 – I was a big fan of the Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson through the Thriller Album. Then his antics and his music both became indefensible. I am glad he died for two reasons: his laudible legacy of art and humanitarianism is finally released from the grip of his reputation, and his own pain as a disturbed man, we hope, has ended in death.
Posted 09 Jul 2009 at 1:31 am ¶Post a Comment