Photo captions: On the left, is The King of Pop. On the right is your narrator in his younger years, looking a cross between MJ and a gay surf hell’s angel (this look is so ready to come back in style). White golf shoes with black fat laces, Lee jeans, cut-off rag tee, black leather MJ-wannabe zipper vest, black leather studded fingerless gloves, studded leather bracelet, black Loc wrap-around shades, cigarette and bowl cut hair (by mom). I’m dating this image at summer of 1985, Ocean City Maryland. Historical evidence. My dad posted this photo to his facebook account yesterday. Very timely…
This pretty much sums up my thoughts on the death of Michael Jackson:
“Yesterday was a sad and a bad day for me, because I think Michael Jackson died of a broken heart and a broken soul … It’s kind of haunting that these record companies wouldn’t give him the light of the day or these radio stations wouldn’t give him the light of the day over the last couple years, but now that he died everybody’s on his jock, so to speak. It makes me angry because in the end, no matter how much he messed with himself or his appearance, which to me didn’t mean anything to anybody when it came down to him wanting to entertain and just make people have a good time, I just thought all of that was irrelevant … I feel kind of crappy for the hypocrisy of this country and its coverage.” — Chuck D
I don’t know if MJ was actually a pedophile or not, but I do know he was a seriously troubled guy, who kinda regressed into being a 10 year old, in order to combat the stresses of his public persona and strange predilections. In the end, the pressure caught up with him. MJ carried a lot of pain with him and that’s a horrible place to be.
MJ made some freaking good music and was literally the soundtrack to a good portion of my childhood, so I look forward to washing away the memories of kooky MJ tabloid stories and being able to embrace his music again without all the saturated, media-hyped post-mortem eulogy and with a purposeful naivety.
Chuck D quote via this Vulture article.
2 Comments
I dig the Quality archive photo! You could of been a gang member for the Beat It video.
“No one wants to be defeated” in Ocean City.
A very beautiful post. The media loves to pretend it’s invisible and has no part to play in these things. An older, wiser person who comes to fame can make some wise choices to retain their space and the integrity of their life, but Michael grew up in the glaring spotlight of media scrutiny and knew nothing else. At heart he probably just wanted to grow up and be just like any other kid but never was given the chance. In the end he never knew who he was and in the mirror world of the media spotlight, constantly tried to re-define himself in the end failing because he had no way of finding out who he was because there were too many reflections in too many mirrors.
It’s nice to see it from your perspective because he was so important to those who grew up in that era. Sad that the media still get it all wrong because they are incapable of turning that spotlight on themselves.