Michael Jackson

I stayed home at Interlochen for about a month before our planned departure for the big bad apple, and, during that time, my friend Allen, who had graduated the year before me and who, in ACE, was the A to my C and Eric’s E, tried to convince me to stay and form a band with him. He had recently switched from tuba to electric bass and thought we could make a run of it. I couldn’t play anything but a little piano, but we wrote a few tunes together and practiced them a bit and had a brief fantasy of being rock stars (if ever there was a time that a keyboard player and a bassist could make a go at it, it was the early '80s), but ultimately I knew it would go nowhere and I really needed to get out of Interlochen. My year in Chicago had been an unmitigated failure and I needed to get back in the saddle again right away or risk getting stuck in rural Michigan forever. And I just couldn’t see that happening. Besides, the adventure that living in NYC with Eric offered was too great to resist. Allen conceded that he knew that was how things were going to play out, but he still had to give it a shot, for which I was grateful. The fact that he had such confidence in my musical abilities, based on nothing more than a handful of awkward tunes I’d managed to bang out on the piano, was inspiring, but I just wasn’t band material.

Years later, I’d have to learn that lesson again.

Anyway, I grabbed Eric’s hand and we both ran for the edge of the abyss and jumped over into our new adventure, not sure where or how we’d land, but confident we’d be alright.

And that summer and fall, Thriller just kept growing and growing. Each single released was bigger than the one before, and the album just seemed unstoppable. There were months during that year when you couldn’t go outside of the apartment (or, stay in it, really) without hearing the slinky, chugging beat of Billie Jean pouring from every window and stoop and car that drove by. The popularity of Thriller was astonishing. For a few months there, the legacy of Beat It played itself out and everybody wanted to be Michael Jackson. Rich, poor, young, old, black, white, yellow, green, everybody thought that Jackson was the man. It didn’t matter what kind of music you usually listened to – punk, new wave, opera, country – there was NOBODY that thought Thriller was anything but amazing. I didn’t buy my copy for a couple of years after that because I didn’t need to – I heard more songs from Thriller more times than I heard anything I actually owned, just by being part of the city at that time – but I happily joined the ranks of the 26 or however many million people shelled out money for that album. Michael would sneeze and it would make the front cover of every magazine and newspaper in the world. The oldsters nodded their heads and muttered “Beatlemania” or “just like Elvis”, but I certainly had never seen anything like it. There had been stars, but Michael Jackson was something else entirely. He was his own constellation.

I remember when the video for Thriller (the song) came out. Now, Thriller is a pretty weak song, but that didn’t matter in the least. There was so much momentum behind that album that a recording of Jackson farting would’ve topped the charts. And while Thriller was no great song, the video broke all conceptions of what a music video was and what it could accomplish. Sam Goody’s in Times Square set up a big television monitor in the window and played the half-hour video on a tape loop day and night when it was released and it didn’t matter what time you were there, you had to cross the street if you wanted to get by, so large were the crowds pressed up against that window. Michael Jackson was beyond popular, and the crush of humanity desperately pressed up against that window eventually made him crazy.

Although, through the long lens of hindsight, there are some bad tracks on the album (PYT isn’t so hot, the aforementioned duet with Paul McCartney, The Girl is Mine is fun for a few listens but then overstays its welcome and Baby Be Mine just plain sucks), Thriller is a remarkably solid album, and may well deserve to be the best-selling album of all time. (There’s some debate about this as The Eagles’ Greatest Hits has, I believe, actually sold more copies, but I don’t think it counts. That’s a collection of hits from many different albums, whereas Thriller was a single album prepared and released at one moment).

Despite the popularity and undeniable charm of Billie Jean and Beat It, my favorite track on the disc is the lead-off cut, Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’. I love the stuttery beat and the way it opens up the album and sets the stage for a new paradigm in pop music with three short drumbeats, very much like the way Talking Heads fired its Remain in Light salvo three years earlier. The tribal beat is propulsive and the snaky guitars suck you in. Plus, it has to be one of the strangest songs in his canon. People who wonder when Michael Jackson started coming undone need look no further than this track. Although, I suppose you could point to his touching love song Ben, sung to a rat as early evidence of a mind wandering off the beaten path.

The lyrics, as catchy as some of them are, are almost entirely incomprehensible. Something about being too big to get around (these lyrics are very much like the stolen preacher’s rant from Brian Eno and David Byrne’s Help Me Somebody) and babies starving to death and rumors blowing up out of proportion and believing in yourself. Or something like that. And then it gets really weird. He repeats over and over again “you’re a vegetable” while also throwing in that “they hate you, you’re just a buffet, and they eat off of you”. After a bewildering “hee haw” (wha?), the song shifts into its final stretch, with the nonsensical refrain (in which he implores you to “help me sing it”)

but I don’t really think that’s true. Still, I’m happy to pass it along for your consideration.

After the phenomenon of Thriller finally burned itself out, there was no where for Jackson to go but down. And down he went, spiraling into his over-publicized madness, mutilation, and perversion. His albums still sold well, but one needed look no further than the titles to see him flailing for help. Bad. Dangerous.

It seems clear to me that Michael Jackson has gone insane. I certainly can’t condone his pedophilia, if, indeed, he’s guilty of that. It is a horrible, heinous, damaging crime. But I also can’t help but feel sorry for him. With that level of scrutiny and public pressure and with the stories of his overbearing father and his lack of any kind of childhood, who could he possibly turn to? Who could he trust? He was all alone in the spotlight, and he couldn’t crawl away for even a moment. No wonder he created Neverland, but even the name shows he knew it was an unreachable fantasy. Inside that damaged shell is curled a poor sad little boy, with enormous talent and unbearable pressures. He has been crying out for a long time, before Thriller even, although the seeds of unhappiness and paranoia (listen to the words of Billie Jean for further proof) started sprouting on that monumental, world-changing album, one of the greatest pop icons ever created. But fans don’t care for the troubles of stars, even if they’re jumping up and down begging for it – look at John Lennon and Help, could any message be clearer or more willfully ignored? So it was with Jackson, telling the world he was bad, he was dangerous, he was a vegetable, a buffet that fed the world that hated him. But did anybody hear him? Of course not. How could they, over their own bloodthirsty idolizing screams?