What a long, strange ride it's been. How can we even begin to take stock of a life like Jacko's. An individual who has been one of the most famous human being's on the planet for the entirity of my twenty seven years? Well one way would be this: *robbed from comments on Charlie Brooker's piece about Jackson's death*
long enough for them to play a bit of Billie Jean and Beat It and Smooth Criminal and Blame it on the Boogie and so on, reminding me that he was a bona fide musical genius, I went to bed.
Hopefully to wake up sane the next morning, 'musical genius' Charlie?
Stravinsky was a musical genius without whom we'd never have had (besides his own wonderful work) John Williams ripping him off giving us the themes for Stars wars, Raiders of the lost Arc...etc.
Michael Jackson was a freak obsessed with grasping his own groin and squealing without whom we'd never have had Five Star.
Some perspective here please, especially from you Mr Brooker.
And don't give me the record sales bullshit or I'll fire the Spice girls at you, one by one from a Trebuchet, a zigazig ha'ing as they arc sort of towards your general vicinity (Yeah have you ever calibrated a giant medieval catapult for the added effect of girl power?).
Yeah fair enough Jackson got Black music onto MTV but the best thing he ever accomplished besides that was to entice a certain Mr Cocker to pretend to waft his farts.
Right. I'll hold my hands up. I'm a massive shit for picking on one particular poster (who of course I have never met) & using their words & opinion (which of course they are entirely entitled to hold & put on the interweb) to illustrate whatever point I was attempting to make when I started typing two minutes ago but really? Really?
Boil this down to bare bones and it reads: "Look I am referring to Stravinsky! I am a class act. Even though I am kicking the corpse of a seriously disturbed man online. Whoo!" I don't pretend to know an awful lot about music but:
1) Think comparing Michael Jackson to Stravinsky might be missing the point a bit
2) Stravinsky would definitely have moon walked to Smooth Criminal after he'd had a few.
Still, we all love the giddy vicarious thrill of a celebrity death (the Actual Problem that rears it's multitudinous, poison belching heads again & again), so I'll stop being a spoilsport & sign off with two points:
1) In roughly a fortnight it will get Very Bad, for now it is possible to dodge a lot of the unpleasant voyeurism & gleeful speculation that inevitably follows the death of any public figure & simply wander around in the sunshine accompanied by a backing track of storming pop songs from your childhood blasting from Every Radio. It's quite nice. I walked down Oxford Street on sunday & was too busy enjoying MJ's greatest hits to notice no bastard on that street seems to remember how to walk. A minor miracle.
2) Jackson Definitely touched those kids. Once he's in the ground various hair raising scare stories will shoot from the woodwork like a plague of Lovecraftian maggots bulleting from the walls of a decaying New England pile. No one will bother to consider that (and don't get me wrong, I am in No Way condoning what happened in these instances) he was not a man in his right mind (in many ways a child himself) and much of the blame for what happened lies with people around Jackson and perhaps some of the families involved. Right mind or not, if I ever have children the suspicion that something untoward might happen to them would probably be enough to prevent me letting them go & sleep over at a reclusive millionaires fairground/fortified compound. Maybe I'm just old fashioned.
For now much of this seems to be overlooked because now he is gone Jackson can be filed away mentally (rightly or wrongly) as a fond memory of growing up. In the same way I will doubtless go and see Transformers 2 despite the fact I know it will be shite but am willing to overlook that because when I was six years old those robots meant so much to me, even though it was all just a heartless corporate way to flog toys & the cartoon frequently looked like it had been drawn using hammers. Perhaps when you are as famous as Jackson that is the best you can hope for anymore?
Oh & Lest We Forget if it weren't for MJ Joe Pesci would have gotten every kid in the world hooked on drugs and then blanketed the earth in tarantulas. Think about that coffin kickers. Not the tarantulas. That would have been fucking ace.
No comments:
Post a Comment