It started last week at a crab feast. While we picked through mountains of Maryland Chesapeake Bay crabs, someone played the Michael Jackson "Best Of" CD. While sipping the cheap beer and watching the children dance around on stage, we discussed the joke Eddie Murphy told many years ago about the lyrics to "Billie Jean" and how Micheal must have thought he had fooled all of us because the video was about a mystery man who could light up the squares in the pavement of the sidewalk--nothing at all to do with a young man who might have gotten a girl pregnant.
Oh, Michael! What the hell happened?
Who didn't love MJ as a child? He was the most fantabulous entertainer of all time. His music, his ground-breaking music videos, and his electric performances entranced us. We were not distracted by the fact that he looked weird and had a high pitched voice and wore sequins even in the daytime and wore high-water pants and white socks with penny loafers and colorful leather jackets in always hot and sunny California and had that drip-drippy jheri curl and travelled with small children who were unrelated to him and never seemed to have a girlfriend and lived in an amusement park and seemingly disappeared when his sister Janet released "Control" only to re-emerge a few years later looking even weirder and whiter. We still loved him. He was the greatest.
Even when we all moved onto to other musical interests, Michael still had the power to draw us back. We all thought "Bad" was a decent enough album in hig school and "Dangerous" was a big hit among my friends in college. I don't recall that I bought "HIStory" (as a matter of fact, I don't even remember when it came out), but I might go buy it today simply because Michael released it. And that last album with Chris Tucker in the video, if I knew what it was called, I would buy that one too.
No matter what Michael has done (or hasn't), I will always be a fan. Anything he puts out is infinitely better that the music most of the other popular artists have released. I just completed a music survey and I hated almost everything they had me evaluate. MJ is one of these rare artists that never go out of style.
My recent MJ rehabilitation has a lot to do with the fact that I never accepted the conventional wisdom that he was a unrepentant freak. He is crazy, but then again every child of Joe and Katherine Jackson seem to have inherited some level of insanity (has anyone else noticed how off the wall Janet has been since she hooked up with Jermaine Dupri?). I just don't believe that this is a man who would ever intentionally harm a child. I think he did some inappropriate things with children, but like other celebrities who behave badly, he just needs some therapy, a new agent and wait the obligatory five to ten years to make a come-back. By that point his own children will be old enough to sit next to him during the mandatory Oprah interview to insist that he was just misunderstood.
While I don't buy any of the conspiracy theories that there are people out there who are out to get Michael Jackson, I think it is time that we face facts so that he can finally do the same. MJ is a victim of his own self-inflicted excesses. His troubles are representative of the fact that he surrounded himself with unscrupulous people who used him. At some point, I hope that his real friends will step up and save him, not only from the bad people, but also from himself.
In the meantime, I plan to revisit the classic Michael Jackson. It is a lot easier to remember that he was once less strange than he is today, but it gives me hope that one day he will recover. It has been said that there is a very thin line between genuis and insanity, and he is probably the most tragic embodiment of that fact. Instead of treating his life and career like the proverbial car wreck on the freeway, maybe we all should just politely look away and keep going (all the while jamming to "Billie Jean").
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