Recently, I started watching Doctor Who. Not the old series, but the new, revived one that started back in 2005, where in the second episode, although I watched the four series out of order, the last “pure” human in the year 5 billion appears as little more than a stretched out piece of skin with a face, connected to a brain in a separate jar, and one of the show’s characters quips that she’s going to go talk to Michael Jackson. Coincidentally, I first watched this episode on Thursday, just a few hours after Michael Jackson had died. Obviously, the show can’t be blamed for anything, but it was so weird to think about how that line changed so much over the course of a few hours.
Not that I’m the best person to talk about Michael Jackson. I can hardly say I was around to experience The Jackson 5 or any of the key moments of his career, or any of it, really. I can barely even say I know any of his music. I have his Greatest Hits album in my room, but the only songs I can actually recall listening to are the ones everybody knows anyway, like “Beat It” and “Thriller” and, my personal favorite, “Billie Jean”. People better suited to talk about his importance in music, racial issues, life, the universe, and everything (or to even spoof it properly) have, and will, do just that, and people who aren’t have, and also will, do the same, and have almost certainly filled up the blogosphere with God knows what they thought the world needed to know about how they felt about him, for better or worse. The very fact that I’m writing this post, of course, gives me a certain amount of hypocrisy.
But at the same time, just a month or two ago in school, my friend and I were sitting in Psychology doing our busywork and listening to my iPod on shuffle. After rather pickily skipping 10-20 songs, we heard Jackson’s unmistakable “WhoooOOO!!!” that kicks off “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”, and immediately started dancing in our seats.
Maybe that’s saying something anyway.
