Here in Tallahassee we've got a pizzeria that stands with the best: Decent Pizza. The guys there throw a mean pie, a pie that reeks of misshapen attitude. I grew up in N. Jersey, have lived in Bklyn, and like to think I know. . .
There's always great music at Decent, which has a hole-in-the-wall brick interior and fills up, evenings, with interesting folks--families with cool kids; planted people reading; young people with many varieties of hair and colors in it; all people colors, too. Usually, it's rock and roll or r n' b, generally rough-edged, played loud.
One night my wife was in France giving a paper, my daughter was with her grandparents, and I was lonely. So--natch--I went to Decent to nurse my wounds. The place was full and I had begun to work on my two huge onion and sausage slices when Thriller came on.
It's hard to describe the electricity that coursed through Decent Pizza that night as EVERYONE--and I mean the fat guy in overalls with the monster truck with Georgia plates that loomed outside, fairly filling the front window--everyone--bopped and swayed and glowed like fireflies in the dank semidark of Decent Pizza for upwards of half an hour to Michael Jackson and those riddims. (Those rhythms have been overlooked in what I have read since MJ passed, but everything is predicated on them. You can't have a conversation about the genesis of Black music in America w.o. discussing those rhythms, and you can't judge MJ w.o. them either.)
We were all just. . . riveted, and we were SHARING that music--black, white, old, young, very fat, and skinny.
I'd completely forgotten about this incident, even though it kept me happy for much of the next day (this happened last spring). I was so geeked that I came home and called my brother to tell him. Because for me it exemplified something that is now largely lost in our culture: namely a music that was so beloved and so widely shared that it was a touchstone for us all. It's funny to think that it was MTV that provided it, or that Sony had to threaten to yank all of their music if MTV wouldn't play the black kid--that MTV was then built, ironically, on Michael's back--but that's the way it was.
When I was 12 my Mom gave me a Philco transistor radio for my birthday--that was my birth into pop. I used to lie in bed and listen to Cousin Brucie on WABC(ding!) play the hits, and it was always a crazy mix. The Supremes were my favorites--they were in the middle of an unprecedented 12 (was it?) number ones in a row, but I loved it all. I remember how Jesse Colin and his fellow Youngbloods' "C'mon People Now!" just made me SO SURE that people could and WERE GOING TO get it together, end war (period), and love one another RIGHT FREAKING THEN.
And it didn't really happen, didn't happen at all, discounting one or two moments--Lady 'Re--Aretha Franklin singing at the inaugural, comes to mind. But in retrospect I can see that MJ, right down to his collapsing nose (god love that poor fuck, I want to hug his beautiful broken behind even now, climb right into his coffin and weep for him) really represented that American melting pot so fully. Hell, he WAS the f'in pot. And in a wierd way, with all that followed, the equal parts hate and love shown, he came to represent our isolation and our antagonism and the ways we are walled off from one another--the rancid vacuum of pop culture in which politics now, somehow, rests too--as well.
P.S. I think that Elvis and Michael had an enormous lot in common. They were both crossover artists working through the incredible contradictions of race and class in this country, contradictions which have destroyed many of our greatest--both, in the end, fattened on them and quite shattered by them, too. To understand them you have to go further back, at least to that Jewish blackface singer, Al Jolson, the first megamedia star. But in the end we're all ventriloquizing like crazy in this country, and that includes our new Elvis Presleydent, Mr. Obama.
Watch Jailhouse Rock and Thriller and let me know if you don't see some of these connections:
http://www.youtube.com/...
http://www.youtube.com/...
P.P.S. Some of the best videos of MJ dancing to Billie Jean seem to have been yanked from YouTube. But it baffles me how anyone could watch him dancing live and suggest that he wasn't just astonishingly gifted.
And yes, his stardom was built on the work of thousands of people, but check out the recording of Billie Jean he made on his tape recorder when he first got the inspiration for the song, featured on the 25th Anniversary Edition of Thriller, for a hint of what he brought to the table. You can find it with a lot of neat mp3s and a great vulnerable adolescent picture of him (at least for now) at:
http://www.wavesatnight.com/...
P.P.S. If you haven't already seen it, do also watch this video of hundreds of inmates of Cebu prison in the Philippines doing their own Thriller tribute. I'll leave it to others to do the heavy lifting/deconstructing--it's both ghastly and compelling, in a way the ultimate tribute. That music, tentacular marketing apparatus or no, had global meaning and reach:
http://www.youtube.com/...