Mourning Michael Jackson
For one whole week now Michael Jackson’s music has been playing in my head. My own personal, intimate, inner cranium iPod. You might have seen me, bobbing down the street, “rock with you” playing in my inner ear, no headphones in sight. Mainly it’s songs like that – Rock with You, Billie Jean, Bad (who’s bad?!), The doggawn girl is mine, and off the wall, (oh tonight, we're gonna put the 9 to 5 up on the shelf ... life ain't so bad at all"), all songs I remember from my early teenage years, crowded in to the tv room at the all girls’ boarding school I was subjected to, watching MTV, the meaning of the lyrics going completely over my innocent catholic school girl head, but the rhythm of the music and the dance and the beauty that was Michael Jackson taking me in completely.
I have been mourning Michael Jackson’s passing … selectively.
I turned on AC 360 the other night only to hear Anderson (who I like actually, an awful lot) say something a long the lines of “nothing but the facts here,” as he led straight in to an interview with the wonderful Sanjay Gupta in which they did nothing but speculate about the types of drug concoctions that might have killed Michael Jackson.
I've steered clear of the television machine ever since. Truth be told it's hard to watch the same people who preyed on his vulnerabilities now laud him in his death.
Instead I've been drawing on friends, primarily, believe it or not, through that other news aggregator: facebook.
Friends linked to videos, like this one which I watched on the night of his death and it just blew me away. Bloody hell. So young, so talented. Another, a booker for WNYC’s The Takeaway forwarded on an interview with Chuck D. You can check that out here. A beautiful tribute from the brilliant poet, writer, Carl Hancock Rux, which you can read* here absolutely nailed the way I felt, and this, I thought was lovely from the Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America’s Don Gomez.
There is also this lovely piece from Kelefa Sannah in the New Yorker.
I loved Michael Jackson. I loved the way he danced, the way he turned, the way he looked. I thought he was beautiful. I choose to remember him that way.
NOTE: you have to be on Facebook to read Carl Hancock Rux' tribute, so just in case you are not, here it is:
For MJ
It wasn't
a man who died
It was
a room
of twirling disks
and posters
of oily palms
shaping hair
into a black sun
a first love
we learned
and lost
a dance we
tried to do
so many
summers
ago
a new leather
jacket
set aside
and covered
that surge of light
from a TV screen
a boy's
soft soprano pitch
and
perfect pirouette
a regret
for everything
that distorted
a face
God made
so perfectly
the first time...