Dear Editor,
Michael Jackson (MJ) was extraordinarily talented and occupied a space in the public imagination shared with none other. As a child of the ’80s, no musician or entertainment personality affected popular culture like MJ, and some may recall those colourful, emblazoned jackets, gold-rimmed sunglasses, ‘jeri-curl’ hairstyle, and, of course the break-dancing, among the things that influenced society.
Looking back, MJ was a revolutionary. Everywhere in the clubs or on the streets or in schools or at bottom-house parties, folks were trying break-dance moves, the most famous being the ‘moonwalk,’ of course. Up in Queen’s College where students were treated like robots, in that they were hardly encouraged to be expressive beyond getting good grades, break-dancing became the new craze.
Others are better positioned to speak about this, but I believe students would flock backstage especially, to watch some of the locals practise moves. One was today’s popular attorney, Mr Glen Hanoman, who was equally popular in school back then. In those days, groups would form and give themselves a name, and I believe some of our boys belonged to a group called The Whiz Kids, which may have been formed outside of QC, initially.
There is no album like MJ’s insurmountable Thriller, which racked up 8 Grammy awards and placed 7 number one singles on the chart. But more than this, it was an album that reached beyond the music industry, affecting fashion, video production (still a young trade then), the dance industry, etc.
Dance music or club music was still off-disco in the early ’80s, and then Thriller moved this type of music into totally new territory – the tone, the arrangment, the rhythms altogether brought us a completely new sound that stomped all we knew in R&B, hip hop, or pop.
No album had such an effect since the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 – the first album to be a first for many things, such as music video, and having lyrics printed on the album sleeves, or to have the songs flow into each other as one stream of continuous music (no breaks at the end), and the first to have a song (‘A Day in the Life’) that stretched beyond the usual 2 minutes.
Regarding Thriller, I don’t believe anyone ever had 7 number one singles from the same album. The Beatles had five number one singles on the chart in succession, but not from one album. They held, at one time, the top five slots (number 1 through 5) and 8 of the 10 songs in a top-10. But Thriller, like Sgt. Pepper, pushed popular music into vaster empires from which Western music culture has benefited significantly in a wholesome way.
Once Thriller was established, it became the benchmark for all artists, whether one was pop, heavy metal, or hip hop. And while the two artists that dominated the scene were MJ and Madonna, MJ was the rock to surmount. MJ alone was electric; no person’s sound captivated our spirit like his, whether one was on a dance floor or on a stage.
As dancer he still, to this day, has more control over the space he occupied than any other entertainer I’ve seen on the dance floor. Usher danced on stage briefly with MJ once, and despite his immense skills as a dancer, Usher was only human besides MJ.
But, in the end, just as Icarus who took flight in a way that reflects the best in human spirit always seeking to chart new territory, MJ like many great artists had to fall. In America, racism is what made him stumble. I believe always that he would not have been treated as he was if he had been Caucasian.
Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Sid Vicious (Sex Pistols) and John Lennon all had serious social flaws but the media never concentrated on these artists’ flaws while they lived. One hopes America can learn and perhaps his story will help in the continuous process of unravelling the deadly bigotry that underlines this fabric called America.
Yours faithfully,
Rakesh Rampertab
