As a kid I grew up with Michael Jackson…luckily just not at Neverland ranch. Bad taste? Too soon? Aaaah relax, it’s been a week already. But whatever, Jackson’s deadly cardiac arrest is the single most significant pop casualty since Elvis. Like Elvis, the King of Pop slipped fatally into the pop-cultural abyss after a prolonged stretch as the brightest star in the cosmos. And it is Jackson’s decade of pop supremacy I wish to celebrate here, before he became a global sideshow. Jacko’s two seminal, sorry inappropriate adjective…Jacko’s best albums had a huge impact on my musical tastes as a carpet rat. I am talking of course about pop/disco/r&b masterworks Off The Wall (1979) and the biggest selling album of all time – Thriller (1983), estimated to have racked up staggering global sales of between 47 and 109 million copies. My mum has impeccable taste (cheers for J.J Cale, Fleetwood Mac and others) and I remember when she bought me the cassette of Thriller as a 10-year-old in 1983. I thrashed the spools off that sucker. With Billie Jean, Thriller produced one of two immortal warriors of dance music to spring from the ‘80s. Billie Jean is a flawless cut, that bassline and those synth stabs now instantly recognisable to the ears of millions. Billie Jean’s stalking feline bass groove is guaranteed to make booty rotate and destroy any dancefloor. The shit is knee deep, waist down disco dynamite. It’s the type of track that makes a turntable spin with no power source. As a genuinely revolutionary ‘80s single Billie Jean is matched only by the killer proto-techno anthem that is New Order’s Blue Monday, modern dance music’s big swinging… metronome (I wanted to say dick but didn’t know if I could slide it past the censors). Blue Monday is the biggest selling 12” single of all time and, in one degree of separation, was remixed in 1988 by Billie Jean’s producer Quincy Jones, topping the charts in our Aotearoa for the second time since its first release in 1983. In 2006 music bible Q magazine ranked Billie Jean and Blue Monday the two best songs of the ‘80s – in that order. The reason? Both tracks are musical Peter Pans, both were released in 1983 but still sound like the future, as if they came out box fresh minted in the studio only yesterday. As the glitz and strobe-lights flood clubs from Tokyo to Toronto this Saturday night Blue Monday and Billie Jean will ignite dancefloors around the world, both will continue to be endlessly spun, looped, mashed and remixed by DJs. This won’t stop because the quality inherent to both is timelessness - both tunes having eclipsed their creators to become the property of the global pop cultural psyche. Both are modern blueprints possessing what musos call ‘sonic personality.’ However, it’s Billie Jean you’ll be humming at the minute as Jackson has a slight edge in international profile, being about a million times more famous than New Order, who were just three working class lads and a lass from Manchester who just happened to become the coolest, most influential band of the ‘80s. Anyway, back to MJ. He went from walking on the moon to staring at the gutter from the stars - after 1988’s Bad it all started to go…bad, meaning bad, not bad, meaning good. The reasons why have been poured over countless times, well before his death last week. So continuing with the astrological metaphor I’ll just say that supernovas can implode resulting in black holes like Jacko’s post-Bad career. Now that he’s moonwalking on the illuminated dancefloor in the sky it would be disingenuous to paint the Gloved One as a hero without acknowledging the weird musical tripe that often coloured that late period. But before I get mean-spirited I’ll count down the stone cold classics;
Jackin’ - Top 10 pre-meltdown (1979-1988)
- The Way You Make Me Feel
- Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough
- Say, Say, Say (duet with Paul McCartney)
- Human Nature
- P.Y.T (Pretty Young Thing)
- Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’
- Smooth Criminal
- Beat It
- Rock With You
- Billie Jean
Wackin’ – Bottom 5 post-creep-out (1989-heart attack)
- Man In The Mirror
- Scream (duet with Janet Jackson)
- Bad
- You Are Not Alone
- Heal The World
Matt Time, Wairarapa Times-Age, 02/07/2009
