Michael Jackson

When I was eight years old, I could moonwalk like Michael Jackson. Or at least I thought I could moonwalk like Michael Jackson. I had a poster of him on my wall from the Thriller tour. I had a baseball t-shirt with yellow sleeves and Jackson on the front. When I went down the street to play with my best friend Andy, I always begged him to let me watch "The Making of Thriller" video just one more time. I was devastated when I wasn't allowed to stay up late to watch him perform at the Grammys the year he introduced the moonwalk.

When my dad told me today that Michael Jackson had died, I was in shock at first. On the forefront of my brain was the more recent things; the fact that he never left the house without a mask on and he made his children do the same, the fact that in the middle of his trial he got up on the top of an SUV and did a little dance move for his fans. The fact that he clearly had a plastic surgery obsession. I thought of the strange things he's done.

Mostly though, I felt sorry for him. For this man who worked his whole life and never really had a childhood then proceeded to be a complete weirdo by attempting to never have an adulthood. I wonder where it went wrong. Where was it that someone could have said (but didn't), "Y'know Michael, having a pet chimp and carrying Webster around on your hip could snowball into more unusual things and before you know it, you'll be grabbing your crotch as part of a dance move, have a collapsed nose from too much surgery, hire people to give birth to your children, and you'll have to move to Bahrain and sell your amusement park home in America".

As a child, he was pushed by his father to lead the famous Jackson 5. He went on to "invent" the moonwalk, amaze us with a sidewalk which would light up when he walked on it in "Billy Jean", produce the longest music video ever in "Thriller" and it's fourteen minutes of creepy zombie dancers with killer choreography, and introduce a new special effect in which one face would morph into another and so on in the video "Black or White". And I'm not even talking about the massive musical contribution.

How does a man like that, a man who, let's be honest, is part of American history, morph into what we knew him as in the last decade of his life? I don't know. I do know that I even when I would go "clubbing" just a few years ago in Florida, I always hoped to get a reprieve from the Usher and NIN songs with a little "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough". I will always be listening for that song to be played. That's the stuff I prefer to remember, the ABCs and the 123s.