January 4th, 2010 Note: I wrote this about 6 months ago now, and appar­ently forgot to actu­ally pub­lish it. Oops! It’s been a long time since I really thought about how much Michael Jackson’s music meant to me when I was younger. Around the time that Dan­ger­ous came out, I was about to head into middle school, and was start­ing to spread my wings a bit musi­cally.

A lot of my friends were get­ting into the grunge wave that was sweep­ing through the music scene like a flannel-​clad hur­ri­cane, and pop just wasn’t cool any­more. So with that, I had bid Michael Jack­son an uncer­e­mo­ni­ous farewell. I remem­ber think­ing that “Black or White” video was really cool, but the song didn’t really do it for me that much.

I was an adult now (okay, I was 12), and I had a more refined palette. Or some­thing like that. Of course, like most people that’s where we left Jack­son as a musi­cian.

The mid 90s and the past decade have included two album releases but they were over­shad­owed by all of the other drama in his life, and a chang­ing music scene had rel­e­gated the King of Pop to court jester status. His death last week got me think­ing though, and I’ve gone on quite a Jacko binge since then. At some point you stop caring about what is sup­posed to be cool, and you just listen to what you like.

God knows my entire music cat­a­log reflects that mind­set (at least that’s what my friends would say). In my case, basi­cally any Jack­son music up to (and par­tially includ­ing Dan­ger­ous) is some of the best pop music ever made, and it’s sad that some­thing like Jackson’s death had to remind me of that. I know Rick and I both men­tioned that Thriller was on our top 10 list of all time great albums, but I think the entire cat­a­log up through Bad has actu­ally improved with time in my mind. It’s kind of cheesy in places, but I’ve basi­cally been lis­ten­ing to any­thing from some old Jack­son 5 through Bad on repeat, and I’m still not tired of it. We could all do with­out the second, freak­ishly awful part of his life but if you are able to sep­a­rate the singer from the person it’s hard to argue with how amaz­ing he was.

You have to wonder if we’ll ever see another super­star musi­cian like that again – some­one who is so pop­u­lar, com­mands so much atten­tion, makes such great music, and basi­cally lived an entire life in the public eye. Anyway, back to my Thriller album. Wel­come!

If you’re new here, you may want to sub­scribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! Posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 11: 14 pm and filed under music.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.