Back in Chicago, Reflecting on the King of Pop
I returned this afternoon from a quick, pleasant trip out to Berkeley for a workshop. Got to love that dry California air….
On my way to San Francisco Thursday evening, as I was changing planes in Minneapolis (can you guess what airline I was flying?), every third person I passed was talking about Michael Jackson. I finally passed a television monitor and saw the news: the King of Pop was dead. The reporters were making their live remotes from outside the UCLA Medical Center, on the campus I know so well.
By coincidence, just the day before I happened to listen for the first time in ages to Rhymefest’s brilliant 2007 unreleased mix-tape, “Man in the Mirror,” a funny yet ultimately respectful mash-up of Michael’s music and words.
To be honest, I was never a huge MJ fan: I don’t own any of his CDs, for example. I was always more of a Prince man. But I grew up in the era Michael dominated, a situation Joe Posnanski described with his typical precision and grace. When I was twelve, my parents gave me a copy of the Jackson Five’s “Greatest Hits” album, and for the next twenty years or so, Michael provided the basic soundtrack to life. I was especially thrilled when he smashed down the color barrier on MTV.
I recall in particular a night in the summer of 1983. My girlfriend had just dumped me for another guy, and I went to the Greyhound Depot in downtown St. Paul to get on a bus to anywhere. I just wanted to get out of town, clear my head–and avoid hearing the roar of my ex’s new boyfriend picking her up on his Harley, just five doors down. I ended up in Mankato, Minnesota, staying for three days at the Holiday Inn. The first night there, I was sitting alone at the hotel bar, feeling sorry for myself, when the deejay put “Billie Jean” on. What a great song to hear at that moment: the vaguely aggressive rhythm, the spiteful lyrics! I walked up to a complete stranger and pointed out to her that it was Michael playing and we simply had to dance. She agreed. Man, it felt good.
One of the great things about MJ was his willingness to embrace the “pop” label. In other words, he was so cool he didn’t need to worry about seeming cool. The self-proclaimed King of Pop didn’t have to pretend to be alternative, hiphop, or whatever. Nothing wrong with that. A good pop song can’t save your life, but it can at least save your evening–like it did for me back at the Mankato Holiday Inn in 1983.
