There's plenty of tribute out there for you to peruse, so I'll keep this as short as possible.
My first record was Michael Jackson's Thriller, a reward that was the result of a deal I'd struck with my devout-Catholic parents in grade ahemkoffkoff back in 1983. A quarter of straight A's for one slab of black-person disco. Because of their close-to-fanatical interpretation of the Church's teachings and, therefore, the absolute ban placed on any and all forms of rock n' roll (as all popular music was deemed), I get a late pass on this generation-defining album.
Up until then, I had gotten my Michael fix from sneaks of MTV whenever we could afford to have cable turned on, mostly in the form of the "Beat It" video, which is probably why the track remains one of my top 3 from his catalog to this day. I shoplifted a copy of "The Michael Jackson Story" by Nelson George from a Scholastic book fair at school, and read it cover to cover, over and over. I even dug it out of the archives to do a book report for an English class in 1986, years after the shine of Michael's ubiquity had faded.
Bad helped get me through a particularly bad semester when I was exiled to a local all-boys school, and by Dangerous, Michael had just become a standard, an old favorite that was a pop staple in a music collection that had grown to become almost exclusively stocked with hip hop and heavy metal. I did geek out a bit whenever he rocked with Slash from Guns N' Roses, and bumped the Fugees remix of "2Bad" (off of HIStory) with the John Forte rap verse. I discovered Off The Wall properly for the first time as I began DJing, but MJ had become someone to take for granted, no longer a must-check as the music world became bigger and bigger through college and the beginning of my own small career in da biz. I copped Invincible out of loyalty, for the same reason I still buy records by any number of acts from youth: They were there for me when I needed them, and if my ten bucks can do the same for them in a time when most of them have been abandoned by all my friends who "grew up," then I'm glad to do it.
I've already gone on too long.
I tuned out during most of the scandal, but sadly, it seems the great majority of it was for good reason. Specifics of guilt aside, he was a troubled man who came from troubled beginnings and lived a life whose pressures would have felled many of us much quicker. Some have no place for empathy or sympathy for such a figure; I'm not one of those people. He gave me too much, so even if I can't necessarily give him the benefit of the doubt, I can give him what he gave me: support. Michael Jackson was my gateway to music, and music became what has propped me up in some of the most difficult times of my life. Without question, I owe him one.
I only hope that wherever he is, he can find the one thing he could never seem to while he was here: peace. May he finally rest in it.
Click here to download the "2Bad (Refugee Camp Remix)" featuring John Forte
