A strange thing happened to me yesterday. I woke up and Michael Jackson was dead. It was the strangest feeling I have had for a very long time. Obviously I understand that he was a human being, and that his end would come sooner or later, and undoubtedly sooner than my own (his being thirty years my senior), and yet there was a surreal atmosphere that pervaded the reality of the event. I am now living in a world without Michael Jackson. This dawned on me most vividly as I sat watching a tribute doc to his life on T4.
My own relationship with Michael started as far back as I can remember. As a four year old I recall being mesmerized by the moonwalk, attempting to emulate it (to no avail) with my brother on the carpet of my parents apartment in Tehran. All this left us with was frustration and carpet burns. I remember spinning and strutting and yet sure that somehow, no matter how much I practice I would put in, be unable to do it like Michael. We went through the Thriller experience while I was young, and then through Billie Jean and all the other hits of the eighties. This was while I was still living in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war. My parents would tease me as a child, and ask me to preform my own rendition of the Jackson dancing at parties when guests came round; my own childish version of the routine.
Then coming to London, the relationship continued, through the best way I can describe it is as a long distance affair. I was, I must admit most into Michael in the late eighties, when Bad and Smooth Criminal were the pinnacle of Jackson in my memory. I recall the first birthday party to which I had been invited, a classmate called Juan Pablo Lopez. It was the first time I had been to a birthday party outside my immediate family. I was 10 years old, and I have a vivid recollection of making a Michael Jackson mix tape, it was a black casio tape, with a white labe written in green ink, which was eventually played in the latter half of the party, and by my persistent request.
My uncle owned a pizzeria in Camden through these years, and between 11 and 13 I would make random trips up to hang out there and play through his music collection. The Michael Jackson greatest hits album was always a favourite. This was when I first discovered Dirty Diana, huddled beneath the cash register and endlessly flicking through the tracks of the CD, much to the annoyance of the customers.
Then there were the videos of the nineties. Of greatest note to me was the morphing sequence at the end of 'Black and White', ending with the camera pulling out to show the artifice of the video makers construct. I also loved the drama of the young boy arguing with his parents about the volume of the music at the start of that video; a the non sequiter that somehow attached me to the video in shared and universal adolescent experience. 'Scream' was another favorite, though I suspect that for the hormonal teenager that I was Michael was playing second fiddle to Janet's bikini and breasts.
And from this point Michael really feel off my radar. I recall his trip to the Oxford Union to talk, not because I was there, but because of the queues that spanned from the Union, along Cornmarket Street and all down Broad St, a distance of at least half a kilometer.
Sporadic reprisals have sprung up over recent years, but for me the core of the Michael Jackson that I knew ended in the early ninties. His most important tracks to me were 'Bad', and 'Smooth Criminal', simply because they somehow defined that period in my life, moving to London, and yet still being able to bring Michael with me.
And this is the genius of Michael Jackson. Just looking at the facebook posts when the news broke, you realised that everyone has their own, personal relationship with him. Peter Morely commented on the Newsnight special about the different faces of Jackson, and yet it is somehow so much more personal than that. Everyone can chart the interconnection of their own life with Michael Jackson, and knowing that no matter how old you are, Michael Jackson will still be Michael Jackson. And this was why its was so strange that Jackson is no more. He was timeless, and not of an era, and in this was he actually became his icon, Peter Pan.
I must admit, that as i sat on the couch watching the various videos play through from the eighties onward, a tear did creep into my eye for the sense of loss, not of a musician or a celebrity, but of a part of my youth that he so strongly represented.
