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.
High school was a strange time for me. I had just started to listen to hip-hop, a fairly natural progression from the soul and R&B I fell in love with in elementary school. One day, a friend played Michael Jackson over the loud speakers at lunch, a throwback to our salad days of awkward pre-teen dancing. It was some stupid theme day and the school had given a few of us access to the loud speakers. Somehow, I procured a plastic fedora, and jointed my friend Adam in an impromptu lunch table dance to “Billie Jean”. One benefit of growing up in the age of Web 2.0 is that there’s video of it.
To clarify, I’m not the borderline-graceful dancer in the centre of the shot – that’s Adam. No, I’m the guy next to him, doing an awkward dance on a lunch table with goofy plastic fedora on. But for about a minute, I felt like the shit, or as Kanye puts it, the feeling of: “Ayo I’m sittin’ on top of the- It’s more than a feeling ain’t it?”
That immersion in music is essential to understanding MJ’s global appeal. It’s why Adam hopped on the table the minute that bass line leaped through the loudspeakers. It’s what made me jump atop a table and attempt to dance in the middle of the assigned lunch period at the start of the second verse.
I went to a party last weekend and the topic of MJ’s death inevitably came up. I arranged a YouTube playlist of Thriller tracks and people gradually gathered around the computer and started dancing. One guy even started dancing on a table, while another showed off a competent moonwalk. Michael Jackson was so insanely talented that he imbued several generations with the feeling that they were special too. Even if you couldn’t actually recreate the Motown 25 routine, even if you couldn’t hit the high notes on “P.Y.T.”, Mike made you feel like maybe you could. Rest in peace, Mike.
