...when music was not ironic? Remember when music was practically an athletic event, like a tennis match - all the audible grunting, lunging, popping, swishing swipes of the racket? An explosion of drums, throat catches, white knuckled microphone clutches? Screeches and guttural moans? Earnest emotion?
You might have seen me this morning on the subway platform, swaying side to side ever so slightly, employing what was to my mind, a Fosse-like microcosm of movement. Misty-eyed, I was listening to Will You Be There, watching a rotund girl in a sea-foam colored tank top listen to what I can only guess by her modified gyrations was Beat It.
The cultural void that I was raised in left me blind to certain pop-culture events, Paula Abdul, for instance, Saved by the Bell, most remarkably. I was given oat cereal with dried fruit as a snack and records about Mother Goose as entertainment.
I remember my father instructing me to sit down in front of the television - there was something that I needed to see. Instructional, edifying. I trembled with excitement: the glowing box! What treasures would it reveal?
He made me sit down and watch the entire music video of Thriller.
"This is important" he said. "This man can dance better than Fred Astaire- better than Gregory Hines, better than anyone."
He was right, of course. I'm speaking to the cross-cultural, transcendental quality of this pop star, that people danced to, unabashed. There is nothing ironic about a song that trembles inside of you, zig-zagging down each leg and up through the spine. There is nothing ironic about a good, sweaty dance. There is nothing ironic about an artist who, despite great personal pain, surrendered it all to art, which is all we have, really. (That is a genuine sentence, replete with commas, for I will not skirt around pathos today.)
Sincerity. That's what I am remembering about Michael Jackson.
Originally published at A Thing of Today, June 2009
