Collected Thoughts 6-25-09

My mind has been flooded with various Michael Jackson thoughts. During the molestation trial I became obsessed not unlike the way in which Clarice Starling became enveloped in Hannibal Lecter. It's all coming back to me now...

• Of course the Jackson 5 and Off the Wall stuff is great, but that stuff is great in the way teenage romances and musical guests on talk shows are great. I've been thinking about what elevated Michael, what made his music so much more impactful, and someone else (I can't remember who) tipped me off: it's the menace in his music.
  
  Think about it. The best of Michael, the music that swells in equal measures one's heart, spine, and loins, is the material he recorded with a menacing sneer. "Billie Jean," (and other Thriller singles) "Smooth Criminal," "Scream," and the much under-appreciated "D.S." from HIStory all feature this quality. It's in Michael's voice and usually a spiny guitar part. Justin Timberlake is always at his best when he copies it. When Michael lost the menace and started writing terrible love songs is when his pop power diminished.

• (How fucking hot is Janet Jackson in the "Scream" video? Good lord.)

• I think YouTube and easy-access digital media has had a hand in returning Michael to his former glory post-mortem. Everyone seems to be watching "Smooth Criminal" era concert videos with their jaws on the floor, or ordering early career stuff on Amazon and iTunes.

• That said, a part of me feels like I'm being denied the monument of spectacle that would have been a 75 year-old Michael Jackson. He'd have had no money, no one to float him, no face left, and three weird as hell progeny bopping around the globe. This man was not going to become more normal, he was going to become more bizarre. He would have been unlike anyone else who ever lived.

• Man, 50 is too young for anyone to die.
  

• I'm pretty sure Katherine Jackson will get the kids when it's all said and done.
  

• There's a "secret library" of unreleased material. During the trial there was testimony about Michael's Neverland dance / recording studio. We heard about how he'd go in there in the middle of the night just to fiddle with the recording gear or choreograph dance moves alone. I'm sure there is some fascinating, self-canibalizing stuff in there. I'm dying to hear it. It's probably terrible... but what if it isn't?

• Thomas Mesereau, MJ's chief attorney during the trial, said nice things about Michael on NPR today. I adore Mesereau; he is a brilliant attorney. I could listen to him read a phone book. He said Michael had a kind, loving heart and just wanted to be around other people like him.
  
  That's a simplistic view of Michael, but the second half is true. When you think about it, Michael's best work was done with people who actually cared about him. Quincy Jones still professes admiration. You can tell the difference from when Michael's collaborators were working with him vs. when they were just profiting off him.

• I keep waiting for BJ Hickman to resurface. He was the Michael Jackson superfan Diane Diamond got a restraining order put on. I met BJ a couple times; he was a real-life Eric Cartman.
  

• My favorite reaction I've heard so far came from my college editor's Facebook page. He mused (paraphrased): "Tito Jackson's brother died".

• Here's an article written about Michael in 1984. It sounds like it was written about the last ten years of his life. I'm too young to remember press coverage on MJ in his meteoric rise, but it was always my (apparently false) memory that the really weird stuff didn't start until around the time Dangerous came out. I always thought that the In Living Color parody of "Black or White" was a pivotal step in shame and humiliation. I guess not. I guess you could have seen it all coming 25 years away.
  

Other non-MJ thoughts...

• Relevant 2 My Interests makes a fair point. With the sheer number of celebrity deaths in this day and age, in 30 years five "famous" people will die every day.
  

• Monday while I was going through my Google Reader from the last week I hit a streak of LA blogs referring to or reviewing Grizzly Bear in some way or another. Ugh.
  
  The current crop of indie bands remind me of that time when a lot of people I knew were really into Fatboy Slim and Moby. Like those two samplemasters, today's indie "it" bands make music that seems very creative and moving on the surface, but is ultimately shy on beef.
  
  I heard a Moby track on the car ride back to Indiana and I was shocked at how shallow it sounded. My guess is that Grizzly Bear, Phoenix, and their ilk will hold-up in similar fashion. At the end of the day those bands amount to fancy elevator music. There's no meme, movement, or iconic frontman to historically place them. There's no reason to care past the next year or so.
  

• I miss the days when everyone who liked music was talking about The White Stripes or The Strokes instead of Grizzly Bear or Phoenix. There is plenty to mock about those mainstream rock bands, but they earned their place with songs, not just sounds.
  

• Hungry Beat has left Pehrspace and moved to La Cita.

• SOS had two good piece of news last week: SSPU topped the Billboard Modern Rock Chart (!!!!) and Muse has a new album coming out in September. Muse is, in this writer's opinion, one of the under-appreciated bands of the decade. Their show in LA a couple years ago was unfuckingreal.

• MGMT opening for Paul McCartney is genius. The average MGMT fan is 1) still very devoted to the band (i.e. will see them on any tour stop) and 2) just pop-curious enough to be willing to shell out a little extra dough to also get to see a Beatle play live. And the average Paul McCartney fan will not hate MGMT.

• The X-Men romantic story arcs mapped out. Comic books are fucking ridiculous. (But there's an amazing Toad-obsessed-with-Scarlet-Witch one-shot begging to be written.)

• When the earth lets loose a stinky one, the heavens shake. A friend of mine pointed out that, relatively speaking, 50 miles bellow us and 50 miles above us are effectively unknown alien voids to our existence. We're all fucked.