The death of a legend
2009-07-02 09:50
I was never a huge fan of Michael Jackson. Inevitably his songs filtered through into my consciousness, and I definitely made a point of watching out for a couple of his more controversial music videos, but as I was growing up, he didn't really appeal to me as a musician.
There was a point at which he started being talked about more for his antics than his music. As a teenager, the gossip fuel was irresistible, and my friends and I talked about what was happening to his nose, how his skin had become so white, the conspiracy theories around the glove and the drama of the cases brought against him.
It is tragic that someone who was a consummate artist - a composer, singer, dancer and the ultimate performer - became more notorious for his behaviour than for his creative genius, but that's the way the world works. And, unfortunately, Michael Jackson provided the tabloids with more fodder than most.
My one abiding memory of Michael Jackson was that in Standard Five, I bought used text books from Carol Perkins, and every second chapter of her books was emblazoned with the legend "I love Michael Jackson" surrounded by blue ink hearts. So at least one girl of my generation was a huge fan.
Although I wasn't that into his music, when I was offered comps to his South African concert, I went along with enthusiasm. After all, this was one of the greatest music acts of our time; it would be silly to miss out.
So I went along in my Doc Martens, all five-foot-one of me standing on crumpled Coke cans to try to see the stage, to watch the show. The songs were all familiar and easy to groove to and the show was spectacular. I'm glad that in my personal memory album, I have the image of Michael Jackson breaking out of a space pod on stage.
Then, somewhere past the end of rave, when disco music was having a bit of a revival, and people who held house parties still roped in friends who knew how to DJ to spin a few tunes, Michael Jackson had something of a revival in my personal discography. Layo & Bushwacka's remix of Billie-Jean became the most danced to track of 2002 in my circle of friends.
All of a sudden, those choons were hot, and other remixes started popping up on the radio (or at least I started noticing them). Perhaps it was all the years of raving, but something had altered in my brain and at the ripe old age of 24, I found myself doing a little squirm of excitement and running onto the dance floor every time a Michael Jackson remix came on.
In recent years, Michael Jackson has faded into media obscurity, and the lingering memory of him has been as an artist. And he proved that he still had it by selling out a series of concerts at the O2 Stadium in London.
His death came as a surprise, but not a shock. I've always felt terrifically sad for his lost childhood and his strange existence as an adult and a man, but there is some glimmer of consolation in the fact that he died at a time when the world was willing to celebrate the art rather than the spectacle.
- Georgina Guedes is a freelance journalist. She chose not to call her column "The Day the Music Died".
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