It's been two months since we've blogged, and right now I'm hiding in the freezer at Starbucks with my manager's iPhone that I swiped from her purse to try to blog this out. So here goes:
Michael Jackson died today.
In all the insanity (practised surrealism?) of his later years, what gets lost is that this guy was a force of nature. There have been better albums written, to be sure, but in a lot of ways Thriller was *the* high water mark for the album as art form. The album was a phenomenon that remains completely unrivaled in music. It's the highest-selling album of all time, Vincent Price narrated the music video, Eddie Van Halen performed the solo on Beat It, Paul McCartney appeared on The Girl is Mine, and Weird Al Yankovic owes the fact that anybody ever heard of him to Michael Jackson's popularity. When I was six years old, I had a 3D View-Master reel of the Thriller video. The album -- an album! -- spun off merchandising that rivaled what Pixar has done with its most successful films. Plus, that shot of Jackson with the cat's eyes at the end of the Beat It video creeped the shit out of me for years.
Look, he was an odd man in a lot of pain and who never really inhabited the world the rest of us live in. But he raised the bar both for pop music and doing weird crap in public that makes everybody scratch their heads...which, as practicing Surrealists, we can do nothing but endorse.
We'll see you around, Michael. And wherever you are, may the sidewalks light up when you step on them.
Vince out.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
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