It was around this time, growing up, that I found a new obsession besides karate; two, actually. The first was music.
From since I could remember, music had a strong effect on me.
I’d hear my parents playing Rolling Stones records and would sing and dance along, dancing wildly, kicking and strutting, like I was Mick Jagger. And in my mind, I believed I really was.
I loved the Beatles, too, especially their earlier pop stuff, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” their first record.
I’d play the vinyl, dance around the room, grab a broomstick and become a Beatle, pretend it was me singing, playing guitar.
(It was around then that my parents took notice of my hot-feet, predilection to spontaneously dance. My mother, once a ballerina, decided to enroll me in ballet
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent classes, which, for whatever reason, I never took to. I can remember an incredibly vivid dream I had during my ballet days of me cutting off my penis with scissors and then ballet dancing in a unitard afterward. I’m sure Freud would expound eloquently on that one…)
As a little kid I loved my parents’ records, The Stones, The Beatles, Elvis, but my favorite artist had to be Michael Jackson. His album “Thriller” remains one of my all-time favorites, to this day, and the feeling is inveterate. Oh, how I’d groove and move to that record, dancing around the house like my feet were on fire!
Now I know, of course, that there was a demon in Michael Jackson. No normal grown man has little boys, not his own children, share his bed.
To me, though, there were two Michaels. The first Michael, the Thriller and pre-Thriller Michael, that was the Michael I loved. The Thriller Michael, the suave, slick dancing, moonwalking and multi-octave singing, “Billy Jean” bad motherfucker Michael.
Everything post-Thriller is a different Michael. Certainly aesthetically. The man was consumed by demons, his fame, his upbringing. Not that it excuses anything, but it simply explains it, I aver. His mental development froze. It’s rumored he’d been chemically castrated, which could explain more than his falsetto.
Thriller, pre-Thriller Michael was the greatest pop singer. Ever. Period. And nothing, not even an HBO documentary can change that.