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Sunday, July 4, 2010

Michael Jackson --One Year On!




Michael Jackson --A Growing Legend!

Hum a few bars of the first Michael Jackson song that comes into your mind without thinking about it. What was that song? For me the challenge would be easy because the song that is always on my mind is “The Earth Song”, a homage to Mother Earth, and a call to arms to protect and conserve nature. I regard this as the crowning glory of all MJ’s works.

I am starting to write this on June 25th, the first anniversary of the very premature death of a very special person. In his own words, “Gone, too Soon!”

The paradoxical thing is that MJ would not have wanted to have lived a long time to have grown old. He said that the process of growing old is ugly, and I cannot imagine MJ as an old man.(I’m also convinced he did nothing deliberately and intentionally to shorten his life.)

He left us on the top of his game. I have watched the rehearsal video for that gigantic round of planned London concerts. That would have been quite an undertaking, and it’s a shame that the concerts never did take place. What an EVENT that would have been! Those people attending would have left dizzy from the heights they would have travelled to. We can only but imagine. In the time-honoured tradition of show business, always leave your audience gasping for more. That was vintage Michael Jackson.

The year has flown by in the twinkling of an eye. Apparently, even in the eyes of his family time has simply vanished. The saying goes, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Time has been very kind to MJ, to the point that romanticism has taken over. We only remember the good parts, which is just as well because the so-called bad parts were probably in large measure simply misunderstandings. In that case he would not be the first famous artist who was so ahead of his time that the public at large simply could not understand him. Just ask Brando, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendricks, The Beatles, Charlie Chaplin, Janis Joplin, Bette Davis, and a thousand more pioneers who the world thought were a little weird. Of course they are weird, because they are ahead of the crowd and what we don’t understand we label as being weird.

He has left the world a huge legacy in his songs, but in particular his vision of Neverland, where children never have to grow old. By all accounts it was a fantasyland
in the style of Peter Pan, who Michael believed himself to be. In my view he should be applauded for having taken an 11 kilometre tract of land and turned it into a zone of lakes with swans and fountains, and rollercoaster rides, and castles and steam railroads, and a zoo, among a lot of other things too hard to imagine, thereby celebrating earth and children in general. Was he a danger to children? Probably not, as he was a child himself. No criminal charge ever stuck, nor did we hear any child actually say that Michael molested him. So, we can now let all that unpleasant business slide into obscurity and simply remember the music.

He left something else as part of his legacy: he left three children who are growing up, but I can’t help hearing in the background a quiet drumroll. His children will have inherited his genes, and possibly his talent. Will they begin where he left off?

Stay tuned!

Copyright © 2010 Eugene Carmichael