It's hard to imagine any current artist drawing such mass adulation; the marketplace is so fragmented now, when every genre further mutates into alt- or neo- subgenres. There could never be a Thriller today, an album that so many people, from a kid like Natalie to adults like me, just had to have. Will anyone else, decades later, inspire such tributes as the 1,500 Filipino inmates re-creating the Thriller video in their prison yard?
I remember covering one of his stadium concerts once (I think it must have been the 1984 Victory tour) and it was this total frenzy of Michael-love. Kids wore single gloves, and older ones did their hair in shiny Jheri curls, with everyone just crazy happy to be there.
It was this moment in pop music, when MTV was in its infancy and a new crop of artists were defining themselves - and culture - through videos. I remember covering Madonna and Prince concerts around the same time, and everyone picked up their concert-going fashion cues from cable television. Madonna's fans turned out in torn tights and bare midriffs, Prince's in purple Edwardian get-ups.
And actually, even though I had a great vantage point from the press box, I remember finding myself watching Michael on the video monitors rather than the slip of a figure on stage, because of course that was the medium he so mastered. He was amazing, an intense and polished pro at this point, having performed since he was a little boy. But he didn't strike me as one of those artists who, as they say in the theater, breaks through that fourth wall separating him from the audience.
Maybe I'm projecting that now, given what we know of his public shyness and troubled soul. He seemed as comfortable on camera as he was awkward in real life.
What a tragic mess of a person. It seems cosmically unfair, really, that someone so gifted didn't seem to enjoy his life more. Whenever I'm in thrall with an artist - it's usually a dancer - I think I would be happy just watching myself dance in the mirror all day. And so it was with Michael Jackson, of whom as no less an authority than Fred Astaire once said, "My Lord, he is a wonderful mover ... and it is just great to watch."
And yet, offstage, he made you want to avert your eyes - the utterly unconvincing marriages, the innumerable cosmetic surgeries that turned his face age-, race- and even gender-nonspecific, the rather sadly predictable friendships with fellow man-boys like Macaulay Culkin and Emmanuel Lewis and, ultimately, the creepy palling around with actual boy-boys that left him in so much legal, financial and career trouble.
There is something disturbingly self-fulfilling about his fall from grace, given what we know of his attraction to other shooting stars who would ultimately flame out, from Marilyn Monroe to Elvis to Princess Diana.
And now he has followed them to early death. How banal that should seem, and yet it doesn't; witness the genuine grief so many around the world feel at his loss.
I'd like to have seen what happened next, how the comeback in London would have gone, whether there was another act left in his battered life.
I'd also like to think that, however delayed, this was one child who would get the chance to grow old.
