Michael Jackson, we will miss you

How can one know what to say when hearing about the death of someone like Michael Jackson? Even that statement doesn’t make any sense; there is, and never will be, anyone else like Michael Jackson.

There aren’t many celebrities that we can look at and get close to what Michael Jackson has meant to so many of us throughout our lives. The closest names we can think of are Brooke Shields and Sammy Davis, Jr. They make the list because they were in the public eye since they were kids, Brooke with her first ads at the age of 10 and Sammy when she was performing with her father. and his bandmates since he was 3 years old. However, none of them reached the importance of Michael Jackson.

For example, Michael Jackson, in a weird way, aged backwards, almost like Benjamin Button, the movie with Brad Pitt. As a child he was already an adult beyond his years, he helped the family to make deals, he was the leader of his singing group from the age of 5 and he sang and danced as if he were already a seasoned artist of years much older than him. . he could have gotten closer.

Compare that to the Michael Jackson who took the world by storm with the Thriller album, the man-child who, now that he had unlimited wealth, decided they weren’t going to make him grow. He built the best children’s paradise at Neverland Ranch, and then invited children, as playmates, to come and play with him. Then, over the years, as he got older, he struggled to have his own children and play with them as if he were still the biggest kid in the room.

Beyond all that, however, was the music and the dancing. He touched our souls, first with his brothers. From the moment America heard “I Want You Back,” then saw them on The Ed Sullivan Show, it was determined that there was no comparison to the family groups that had come before them, like the Osmond brothers or the Gibb brothers. In fact, this was something drastically different; these guys had souls, and their leader was named Michael.

Who did not remember the moving way in which this boy-man sang love ballads with the emotion of someone who has really lived them? Songs like “I’ll Be There” and “Got To Be There” would have made you cry if you’d been allowed to cry when you were young; the girls did cry. The ballads were balanced out by songs like “ABC” or “Dancing Machine,” where everyone I knew was trying to figure out how I did that special robot dance that even their brothers couldn’t emulate.

Then we moved on, and we watched Michael Jackson and his brothers grow and grow, leaving Motown and establishing themselves as an independent force with three group albums, one of which included the number one song that helped close out the ’70s called ” Shake your body to the ground.” Who could have imagined that this would be the last truly important song the Jackson brothers would have as a group and what was about to happen to their brother Michael?

What happened? Most people don’t know this, but the music industry was crashing. Record sales were not going so well. We had all learned to record music from the radio, and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t so clear. MTV had come out and we were starting to watch videos. But there was no black music on MTV except for an old video of Jimi Hendrix playing a song few people remembered, “Are You Experienced.” Then CBS Records, to which Michael Jackson had moved as an independent music force, gave MTV an ultimatum; play the Michael Jackson video or you will never be able to play another video by a CBS Records artist.

That it had to come to that is shocking, especially in light of the fact that Michael’s second single album (he released the “Ben” album as a solo album in the early ’70s) had gone to number one and produced four charts. hits, including “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” Sure, MTV had his concerns; the first song released from the album, “The Girl Is Mine” featuring Paul McCartney, wasn’t exactly the style of music MTV wanted to be associated with, even if the song went to number one.

If someone with your pedigree couldn’t get on MTV, how much would it be worth? CBS had high hopes for Michael Jackson, and eventually bullied MTV into putting “Billie Jean” on his station.

To say it was an instant success is an understatement. People loved the song’s driving beat, and they saw a very different looking adult artist than they were used to. Then they saw him perform at the Motown 25th Anniversary Show, and the rest is history. Thriller sold more albums than any other record in history, breaking so many records that will never be broken and saving the recording industry. In fact, if one looks at the true golden age of music, it would be the period between when Michael Jackson released Thriller and when he released the Bad album. That was the mega-album period; Without Thriller, Prince’s Purple Rain album, Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA album, and U2’s Joshua Tree would never have sold the number of albums they did. Thriller was to the ’80s album what the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever was to the disco era, and Peter Frampton’s album Frampton Comes Alive did to rock.

What was the difference? Michael Jackson didn’t just make music; he danced. And he did it better than anyone except Gene Kelly. Dancing made music a part of our lives and spread the popularity of both Michael Jackson and his craft. And what made it so special is that we got to see the evolution of the artist right before our eyes. Many of us grew up with him, and that made him special to us. We could remember what was going on in our lives when his songs came out and how they made us feel better.

And he kept coming to us more and more often. We had Dangerous; we had HISTORY. We had Invincible. We had the videos. We had “We are the world.” We had more to come, and we were all looking forward to that, plus the upcoming shows that he said were the last hurray.

And then it was gone in an instant. No one saw it coming, that’s for sure. Two days after Ed McMahon, hours after Farrah Fawcett, and knowing how ill Walter Cronkite was, who could believe the breaking news that Michael Jackson was being rushed to the hospital after cardiac arrest? Who could believe the rumors that he was in a coma? Who could believe the rumors that he had passed away? And did he have a cardiologist with him? Inconceivable.

Yet it was true, and we were surprised. She made us take a look at our mortality. He made us feel bad. But we were not prepared to feel bad. Instead, we wanted to feel good, because deep down we know that he did all this for us from the beginning. He didn’t seem, in person, the happiest guy in the world for the past decade. With good reason, it seems, stuff we’re not going to get into. And yet, when it was all said and done, the only thing that mattered to her, other than his children, were his fans. He wanted us to enjoy him, his music, his dance and everything he had to offer us.

If you’re like me, after you got over the initial shock and had to walk away from all the overwhelming news, you put out your Michael Jackson music, the solo and group stuff, the songs he did with others like “We Are The World and “State Of Shock” with Mick Jagger and “Scream” with his sister Janet, and we listen to those songs over and over again. I listened for days; I’m still listening a week later.

As a younger person, I did the same. I would buy the latest Jackson Five album, or Michael Jackson’s latest album, the day it was released and listen to it over and over for weeks. Then when everyone else caught up, I’d feel special because I already had it. I didn’t have to wait to see if I was going to like any of the songs first; I bought it because I knew that it would not disappoint me, that it would have songs that I had to have in my life.

Until the end, he controlled my emotions. He helped make me happy. He helped me reflect on different aspects of my life. He made me think about things like racism, poverty and violence. He helped me make myself whole. And he was not alone. He touched the world, the most famous artist in history, bigger than Elvis, possibly bigger than Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan and Princess Diana. In the first week after his death, 9 of the top 10 albums on the Billboard charts were Michael Jackson-related albums. That did not happen with the death of Elvis.

It’s hard to fully convey what Michael Jackson meant to my life and the lives of others in just a few words; Look how many words he’s taken to this already, and there’s so much more that can be said. Michael Jackson was all about us. He sacrificed his life, his privacy, his happiness, so we could all feel better about our lives. There is nothing more selfless than that. RIP, Michael; We will miss you more than we will ever know.