Appropriate or not, perhaps the first thing I think of when I hear the name Michael Jackson is an unfortunate individual who followed me on air at a radio station in the late 1980s.
The odds were stacked against this chap – as thick as mince, no sense of humour and with multiple speech impediments, he spent much of his time in a world entirely of his own.
I once ended my programme one Friday evening in the summer of 1989 with the then current Jackson single Liberian Girl, which was – astonishingly – the ninth single to be taken from his 1987 album Bad.
I suspect my fellow presenter had no idea that there was a country called Liberia. Even if he knew, he couldn’t pronounce it.
“Michael Jackson there,” he back-announced as he took over the desk, “and Librarian Girl. I was at the library just this morning, as it happens, swapping some books and CDs…”
It took me nearly ten minutes to stop laughing. Bladder control was only just maintained.
I had never really considered myself much of a Michael Jackson fan – there were too many ambiguities to the man for me ever to take him to my heart – but I have been surprised to learn since his death that my iTunes music library contains 23 of his solo tracks, three duets and 21 more songs with various combinations of his brothers. In an iTunes library of 19,000 songs it’s not a lot, but there are only a handful of singers who appear on more than 47 songs in my collection.
That said, to anyone growing up through the Seventies and Eighties, Michael Jackson was an important – at times iconic – part of the musical landscape and I have never underestimated or under-appreciated the talent he brought to pop music and the part he played in its evolution.
We’ve witnessed this week a sad end to a sad life. To quote Popdose’s ever-quotable Dw. Dunphy:
Over the years his personal and professional lives had crumbled under the weight of scandal, strangeness, and the possibility he really was a criminal, smooth or otherwise. He became the picture of Dorian Gray hanging on a wall in the dilapidated receiving room of the Neverland Ranch, his home and personal playground. In the real world his achievements faded like his skin color, his moves stiffened into a frozen visage of surgical masks, glasses and disguises, and coats hastily thrown over his head. His music came sporadically and was never again as exciting as it once was.
Indeed, for all its wall-to-wall coverage the mainstream media has failed to acknowledge in the past 48 hours just how irrelevant – creatively and musically, at least – Michael Jackson had been for a very long time. Two days ago I would have said he had released no pop music of genuine brilliance in 22 years – since Bad (the album, not the limp single of the same name) saw the light of day in the summer of 1987. Having subsequently become forcibly reacquainted with every nook and cranny of his back catalogue thanks to the BBC, I would now concede that a couple of tracks from November 1991′s Dangerous might justify bringing that figure down to 17½ years.
But even my abiding soft spot for his 1995 duet with Janet, Scream, can’t sustain a claim that Michael Jackson has mattered musically for almost two decades now. To claim otherwise is revisionism, designed to distract attention from the freak show spectacle his life became. None of that, however, should detract for one second from the truly sensational music that went before.
For 20 years from the moment the Jackson Five hijacked the airwaves in 1969 with the irresistible I Want You Back through to Bad’s Smooth Criminal and Dirty Diana, Michael Jackson was undisputed pop music dynamite. In his solo prime Jackson leant heavily on the songwriting skills of Rod Temperton (who composed the songs Rock With You and Thriller, among others) and the production genius of Quincy Jones but the SMIPs were his alone – his squeal of inarticulacy during the introduction to Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough [0:15]; the cry of, ‘Just look over your shoulders, honey!”, aping Levi Stubbs at 3:03 of I’ll Be There; the call and response, “Baby!” with Jermaine during the third chorus of I Want You Back [2:19-2:22]… That list could go on.
It is hard to recall it now, but there was a time when his vocal hiccups were an exciting and exotic flavouring to the dish, rather than a too-often-reheated affectation; when there was not a middle-aged man trudging around a stage fiddling with his genitals, but a lithe and sinewy young man whose dancing could genuinely delight and thrill.
The recording of Billie Jean is immense in every respect. Bruce Swedien’s sound engineering is so crisp that it is possible to tell the record from half-a-bar of Ndugu Chancler’s drummed introduction alone – no drums in pop had ever sounded like that before; Louis Johnson’s bass had never rumbled along the bottom of a rhythmic valley so deep; Greg Phillinganes’ and Greg Smith’s synth lines throb beautifully; David Williams’ guitar sounds like he’d prised it forcibly from the hands of Nile Rodgers; Jerry Hey’s string stabs would have graced a Chic track every bit as much as a Hitchcock movie; and even Tom Scott’s (uncredited) flourishes with the ridiculed and ridiculous lyricon [at 1:13-1:14; 1:21-1:22; and 3:06-3:13] find a perfect home in this setting.
I have deliberately sought to banish from my head memories of my time as a boarder at a minor English public school in the early Eighties, but one thing that will stay with me forever is the excitement I felt first time I saw the video for Billie Jean on Top Of The Pops in early 1983 – a perfect union of sound and vision I will never, ever forget.
Retiring to bed this Thursday evening just passed I would never have imagined myself ever quoting the preposterous Sean Combs with approval, but his comment after the news of Jackson’s death broke overnight reminded me how I felt that Thursday evening in January 1983, sitting in my dressing gown before the television set in the assembly hall with 20 or so other boys:
Michael Jackson showed me that you can actually see the beat.
Billie Jean‘s relentless beat can be seen – exquisitely embodied by a nimble-footed, 24-year-old man in a pink shirt, red bowtie and black leather suit gliding down an illuminated pathway – even if you’re hearing it on the radio or your iPod.
The very best pop music is united by an undeniable urgency. Billie Jean has it by the bucketload. Whatever emerges over the coming weeks, it’s how I’ll remember Michael Jackson – preserved in time at the height of his musical powers, insulated from all that would come – and it’s my first Perfect Pop Single.
He has a halo: we really do adore him
