I guess every blogger in the world must have blogged about this in the hours since the news hit. I was too shell-shocked in the beginning to think about writing anything. Actually I didn’t even believe the news to begin with, I thought my brother was bullshitting me. I checked CNN, same thing. BBC, same thing. Yahoo, same thing…realization slowly started to dawn. RIP Michael, I’ll miss you.
I don’t have a “how I met Michael’s music” story. I was born listening to Michael Jackson. My father, my mother, all my older siblings were huge fans. We would blast his music at full volume and dance around the living room all evening long, who knows what the neighbors thought! We watched ‘Moonwalker’ over and over again until the tape tore, then patched it together and watched it some more. We would reenact his music videos in our rooms, we would try to do the moonwalk. And it wasn’t just us: I remember in third grade just after the Dangerous album was released my teacher made us all learn to sing “Heal the World.”
His legal troubles never meant much to me. Were the accusations true? We’ll probably never know. And to be honest now I’ll never care. All I’ll care about is the legacy of amazing music he left behind. All I’ll care about is the way he changed the face of pop music universally forever. Rest in Peace, Michael. Maybe in death you’ll find the peace you never had in life.
