I was 16 years old and waiting with breathless anticipation for the world premiere of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. It was 1983 and the world was swept with MJ fever. That’s the name we called him. MJ. It was a serious crush. No man could sing or dance or perform like THAT. For some reason, he didn’t hit the radar screen for me before that. "Rock with You" was a big hit I hear, but MJ sort of exploded on the scene out of nowhere for me. I knew he was the cute kid on the Jackson 5 cartoon I used to watch, but this kid was now a huge sensation.
I still see the poster I hung on my bedroom wall. The slicked hair with the curly-q in front, the white pants, the yellow sweater vest. I wore his face on pins, I listened to Thriller over and over again. He only became more popular.
Katarina Witt skated to "Bad” at the end of the Olympics in 1988..but by that time I was in college and the crush had dissipated. He was bigger than God around the globe and he started to act weirder and weirder. I still thought his music was great, but his strangeness started to overshadow his talent and things were never the same.
Just a month ago, my son was talking about this funny video I had to see. It was Weird Al singing “Fat”. He had no clue it was a takeoff of Michael Jackson’s “Bad”. I went to YouTube and started pulling up all of MJ’s videos. I said, this guy was bigger than anything when I was a kid. He only heard vague references of him on shows like the Simpsons.
Yesterday, when I heard the breaking news from ABC on WILK, my son was sitting right next to me. He said ‘did he really die?’ I sat there in disbelief, stunned. I think I felt like my mom did when I was in the room with her when breaking news announced the death of Elvis. But I didn’t break down and cry like she did. While his music was a big part of my teenage years, and I was totally infatuated with him for some of that time, I mourned his loss a long time ago. I mourned his loss after he started looking like a different person, when he started entertaining little boys at his ranch, hanging around with chimps, showing up in court in his pajamas and dangling his baby from a balcony. . Michael Jackson stopped being the MJ I listened to and loved long before his untimely death. I wonder where that person went all those years ago.
Corbett
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