July 3rd, 2009
Despite being decades removed from any significant commercial success, Michael Jackson was omnipresent at my elementary school. See, I went to a Jewish private school and thus attended a staggering number of Bar and Bat-Mitzvah’s (many of them catered by Pickle Barrel, ‘natch).
If you had a bar or bat mitzvah party, there were a few pre-requisites: you had to have glow sticks, terrible chicken nuggets, virgin cocktails and you would always, always, always play Michael Jackson. “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”, “Blame It On The Boogie” and most importantly, “Billie Jean”. A pop song about avoiding paternity suits, recorded by the son of a steel mill worker, was and will continue to be ubiquitous at parties attended mostly by upper middle class 13-year old Jews.
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July 2nd, 2009
Barry Schwartz is the mastermind behind Disco Vietnam, a clan that moves soundlessly through the shadows and works tirelessly to defeat the wicked 10 percent. “Totally Awesome Decisions” coming soon–total awesomeness guaranteed.
“With the same sword they knight you/they gonna good night you with/Shit, that’s only half if they like you/That ain’t even the half what they might do. Don’t believe me? Ask Michael.”
* Jay-Z
As I watched the events of last Thursday unfold I couldn’t help but be struck with an overwhelming sense of dread. People, it would seem, are simply not improving.
When you accomplish what Michael Jackson accomplished, your obituary will inevitably be split between the great things you did and the awful things people have accused you of doing that can neither be proved nor disproved. This is a good thing in some ways; it prevents the dead from being deified. It’s also a bad thing in that it puts a limit on the amount of positive things people will aspire to accomplish.
When you’re a child it’s very easy to know when people are lying. I was only 12-years-old when I watched Jackson on MTV, recounting the humiliation of having his genitals photographed by the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department, an experience he knew stood no chance of proving his innocence against accusations of child molestation, but rather could only provide some doubt as to his guilt. His voice quivering as he begged those who might doubt his innocence to reserve judgment, I remember watching this video and believing every word that came out of his mouth. The idea that this person was guilty of what he’d been accused didn’t seem to make much sense at all. It still doesn’t.
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July 2nd, 2009
Hi, I’m Jeff Weiss, you might remember me from such blogs as What Wombats Want and Generation Alf.
Everyone’s talking twenty years, so let’s talk two seconds. Specifically, those fleeting few plundered from “P.Y.T.,” and sampled on Kanye West’s “Good Life,” Disembodied chipmunk soul before the term was invented. Michael doing Kanye while Kanye was copping cheap white leather gloves and towing a Thriller lunchbox to grade school. That’s art really, synthesizing inspiration and re-configuring it into something entirely new, standing on the shoulders of titans, copping style pointers from Captain Eo. On another note, fuck you, Supreme Leader.
Two seconds. Here’s a list of the things that you can do in two seconds: catch and shoot, snort a bump, knock Charles Hamilton out the box. That’s not much—but somehow that was all Kanye needed from the King of Pop to create the most popular song of 2007. Do you remember how much you heard “Good Life,” that fall and winter? Shit was playing from every booming system, in every club, that catastrophic MTV Music Awards fail at the Palms. The shifty monoculture wasn’t dead after all—because Kanye had surmounted it, achieving that rare ubiquity that corny commentators eulogized years ago. And we’d taken MJ for granted so much that bloggers (myself included) were quick to offer encomiums to the pop sensibilities of Kanye and T-Pain, forgetting to thank the originator. We blew it. How can you credit the orchestra but ignore the composer?
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July 1st, 2009
Ben Westhoff is a regular contributor to Creative Loafing and the Village Voice. His blog, The Healthiest Man in Park Slope, has been widely lauded as the Internet’s finest portal regarding all things John Corbett.
Aside from “Thriller,” most Michael Jackson videos are terrible. “Billie Jean” is a clumsy, pretentious mess, “Dirty Diana” borrows its big-hair/concert spectacle atmosphere from the cock rock culture of its time and “Smooth Criminal” plays like it’s being fast-forwarded. “Black or White” has a guitar-playing Macaulay Culkin turning his speakers up to 11 and blowing his dad (George Wendt) out of the house, but it also has Jackson dancing with mask-clad African indigenous types, surely to the chagrin of Greg Tate. Most everything in the “You Rock My World” video rings false as well. It’s hard enough to believe that Michael Jackson and Chris Tucker hang out, for starters, and it only gets more absurd when they refuse to pay for their $4 rice bowls, Tucker makes a point of referring to MJ as a “black” person, they gawk at women and MJ plays the tough guy. It seems to have employed a focus group in its attempts to portray Michael as anything but a effete, billionaire, skin-bleaching wuss.
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July 1st, 2009
Like free lunches, Sach O holds it down like steel.
The first record I ever played out at the ripe old age of 3 was an Alvin and the Chipmunks cover of “Beat it”. I eventually moved on to the OG versions of “Billie Jean”, “PYT” and “Smooth Criminal” but that was pretty much the beginning and the end of my Michael Jackson phase. Don’t be surprised, I was born a year and some change after Thriller dropped so by the time I hit my teens, MJ was already a punch line and the musical climate was decidedly against his brand of universal megastardom. Throw in my emerging anti-pop teenage cynicism and its safe to say that MJ wasn’t exactly rocking my world…except maybe on 2001’s “Rock My World” which I actually couldn’t deny.
So call it ignorance, call it bias, call it what you want but I didn’t expect much when I bought the Jackson 5’s “Maybe Tomorrow” for a college project about possibilities of sampling. I’d decided to contrast Ghostface Killah’s “All that I got is You” with its sample source and intended to highlight the difference between Ghost’s emotional rollercoaster ride with Michael’s bubblegum funk. The only problem is “Maybe Tomorrow” was just as emotional and nuanced as Ghost’s flip. I didn’t see that one coming.
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June 30th, 2009
Trey Kerby’s fansite dedicated to the wardrobe of Ricky Rubio can be found at The Blowtorch. Ole!
“Dirty Diana” is the only Michael Jackson song that’s not about a rat that I’ve ever actively disliked. When Number Ones was released, it was the track that I’d skip. It only has three stars in my iTunes. I’ve never been able to put a finger on why, exactly, I don’t like this song. Maybe it’s that it’s pretty gimmicky, in a “let’s put some rock guitars on this pop song” way. Maybe it’s the tired subject matter. Maybe it’s the tacked on audience applause, included only to drive home that this song is about groupies. Maybe it’s the absolutely insane choice to have his sister play the groupie in the video. For whatever reason, to these cynical ears, this is the “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” of Michael Jackson song.
But lately, I’ve realized that I’ve graded “Dirty Diana” on an unfair curve. A three star Michael Jackson song is five stars for anyone else. And Latoya Jackson playing a groupie isn’t just a slightly insane and incestuous decision, but a prophetic and anticipatory reaction to the video for “You’re Gonna Get Rocked.”
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June 30th, 2009
Since 2007, The Good Doctor Zeus has operated Not A Blogger. the Internet’s premier site for Cavaliers, Wu-Tang, and Cantankerousness appreciation.
There will never be a moment in my life when I won’t have the lyrics to Michael Jackson’s “Heal The World” permanently etched into the back of my eyelids. If I’m fortunate enough to reach old age and when the inevitable slow decay of senility has robbed me of everything but my burning, uncompromising desire to hate on the world, I have a feeling that I’ll still be able to sing the bridge of the song.
And I don’t even like “Heal The World.” I generally consider the song to be the cheesiest of Jackson’s “Why Can’t We Get Along” phase of his career that accompanied the release of 1991’s Dangerous, and the
attempted personal reconciliation with his rapidly mutating appearance. The song features everything I hate about these type of songs. Its grossly over-produced, it drips with saccharine sentimentality and bears an overly optimistic viewpoint of the world which contrasts deeply with my deep-seated funcrushing pessimism. I still know the words to this song by heart.
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June 30th, 2009
Over the next two days, we’ll be unleashing exactly what the word doesn’t need: more Michael Jackson tributes. First up, Douglas Martin will be starting something.
Sometime during either 1987 or 1988, I was standing on a playground. Clad in a black shirt, one of those plastic fedoras that came with an old Halloween costume, and high-water pants that showed a pair of white socks, I turned the boombox on. The drum fill at the beginning immediately turned every head within earshot as I did a little front-kick and started strutting around the blacktop. Halfway through the first verse, everyone on the playground stood three feet away from my stage. Parents off in the distance kept an eye and a safe distance away, but the idea of a four-or-five-year-old Douglas Martin lip-syncing, “I’ll pick you up in my car,” made them chuckle aloud.
I was at full-swing by the time the chorus came up, and was unexpectedly joined by a couple of new friends eager to sing backup during the call-and-response chorus. Upon the breakdown, I stomped my feet on every downbeat, screaming, “GO ON GIRL!” as six girls around my age strutted past me, waving their makeshift fans made of wide-ruled notebook paper, all shimmying to the drums. The thing I undoubtedly miss most about my prepubescent life is that I could nail those “hee-hee’s” every single fucking time. By the last note, the enraptured playground audience gave me a round of applause. I probably would have gotten a standing ovation if they, um, weren’t already standing.
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