Mind Your Own God Damn Business

I don’t know if any of you have heard about this, but Michael Jackson is dead.

Suck it, Tom. Those boyish good looks can't help you now.

First of all, if you’ve been frustrated with the media’s nonstop coverage of his death instead of other news and you don’t follow football, now you know what every off season has been and will continue to be like for me until Brett Favre dies. I hate you, Brett. Make a goddamn decision about your career so I can go back to reading about the Broncos slow, steady collapse.

(On a somewhat related note, I have decided to go with pictures of former Denver Broncos linebacker Al Wilson ruining people’s shit in lieu of  Michael Jackson pictures for the duration of this post. I know I’m talking about Jackson, but I couldn’t find a single picture of him fucking up Tom Brady.  )

Second of all, I’ve been kind of confused about everyone’s reaction to Jackson’s death. For the past twenty years, Michael Jackson has been in the news for one thing and one thing only: being crazy as fuck. He’s been hanging babies out of windows, doing weird things to his face and engaging in some pretty suspicious activity with young boys. He’s been a walking, talking punchline for a long, long time, and I thought that the public viewed him as a guy that made some really good records when he was younger but knew that he kind of ended up going off the deep end.

Strangely enough, the second he died, everyone seemed to forget every nutty thing that has happened between Dangerous and now; Facebook and Twitter were completely flooded with kind words for Jackson – nothing that has happened during the time I’ve been on facebook has elicited as much of a response. All of the media outlets spent all of their energy covering his death and throwing together montages of him.

That's right, fuckers: He can fly.

I don’t quite get it. Up until June 24th, people rolled their eyes a little bit or made a pedophile joke when you mentioned Michael Jackson, but after a fatal heart attack, it’s like his record was wiped clean, and I’m not quite sure why. It’s not like he died rescuing orphans from a burning building or flew his plane into an alien spaceship to save the human race, thereby redeeming himself. He didn’t reveal that he had been secretly living in Cancun incognito and that the pale guy with the weird looking face that everyone has been making fun of all this time was actually just a very, very poorly selected body double. He didn’t release a touching memoir that justified his actions and helped everyone understand why he did the strange things that he did. He just had a heart attack and died. I’m not saying that it isn’t sad. I’m just saying that it’s very strange to me that his death seems to have somehow completely purged everyone’s memory banks of everything that Jackson did after 1987.

Third of all, once he died, everyone everywhere shared a childhood memory of Michael Jackson’s impact on them, usually in relation to Thriller. After reading several thousand of these, I realized that I actually know less about Jackson’s musical career than I do about his melt down. I’ve heard his hits, and I enjoy most of them, but I’ve never owned a Michael Jackson album, or listened to one all the way through. I did a little bit of research and realized that there’s a reason that they called him the King of Pop – Thriller is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest selling record of all time, and still sells about 130,000 copies a year according to always-completely-accurate-and-never-wrong-about-anything website Wikipedia.

God I love those goofy bastards.

I decided to give Off The Wall, Thriller, and Bad a listen, and they were pretty awesome. I have to say, if I were forced to make a record good enough to make people overlook the fact that I was probably a pedophile, that album would be Thriller. I don’t think you actually can make an album that good, but Thriller comes as close as possible. (Unless, of course, you count Slipknot’s Iowa. I don’t care about the goofy masks or silly fake-snow-and-spinning-drumset concerts or that music snobs and even metal snobs think they’re bad. I fucking love that album. If it couldn’t be a metal album though, I would go with Thriller.)

After listening to it for a few minutes and looking over the track listing, I realized that there’s a reason that I only know Michael Jackson’s hits: It’s because that’s all he made. There are only one or two songs on Thriller that aren’t immediately recognizable to anyone over the age of 20.

I think that the reason that people are able to completely forget that Michael Jackson was a nut is because a lot of people have separated late 80′s black Jackson and 90′s and 00′s Jackson into two separate people in their head. It’s probably pretty easy to do. They seem like very different people. They don’t even look the same. I even noticed myself doing it while I was listening to his music. It was like “Billy Jean” was somehow wiping my memory of all of the weird behavior he had displayed.

Why you shouldn't try to jump for a first down when Al Wilson is on the field.

The spell was broken, however, when “The Lady In My Life” came on and something about it weirded me out. After mulling over it for a while, it dawned on me that the only time I had ever seen Jackson appear to show any interest in women was in his song lyrics. For whatever reason, I decided at that point that 80′s Michael Jackson wasn’t any less troubled than the Michael Jackson that middle school kids make fun of. He was just better at hiding it.

I’m going to bed.