On June 25,
2009, just a few minutes to midnight, East African time, I switched on to CNN
and found a breaking news story: Michael
Jackson Suffers Cardiac Arrest. All the other major international news networks
were carrying the same story and there seemed to be a lot of buzz around it.
There were
many talking heads on some of these channels speculating on the unfolding
events in Los Angeles, but one medical doctor caught my attention. He was
explaining the difference between a heart attack and cardiac arrest because
apparently many of us didn’t go to med school on account of not paying much
attention in heart class in high school.
A heart
attack occurs when a part of the heart muscle dies because of a blocked coronary
artery, but the heart continues to beat. Which is why many people might suffer
one and not even know it, particularly if the accompanying chest pains are
mild. On the other hand, a cardiac arrest happens when the heart completely
stops beating.
Now, what the
doctor was saying was that people don’t usually come back after a cardiac
arrest, and he actually went as far as to say that if Michael Jackson wasn’t
dead already, it was just a matter of time before they pronounced him.
Well, TMZ.com
did just that, seeing as they were the team of doctors attending Jac-
Oh, wait.
Actually, they are just an entertainment website that likes to be the first to
break a story thank you very much we’ll confirm the facts later!
So, for about
half an hour or so, they were the only website on the globe that had “Michael
Jackson Dies” as its lead story while
everyone else was twiddling their thumbs waiting for word from UCLA Medical. Sadly,
it turned out they were right.
I can’t
remember the exact moment I first heard Michael’s music, but it was in the
early eighties. The album Thriller
had come out and it was proving to be kind of a big deal the world over. And by
that I mean in my universe. In my young mind, that album was the most artistic,
versatile, eclectic, beautiful piece of music I had ever heard! I didn’t even
know the meaning of some of those words I just used (hint: now I do, thanks to
Google).
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| Young Michael Jackson |
No, actually
that’s my nephew Larry Lari, a budding gospel musician. He’s got a single
called Ombi. Check out the video on
YouTube!
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| Young Michael Jackson |
Granted I
didn’t have anything to compare it to, having gleaned all my musical knowledge
on the only TV and radio station in the country, VoK, but just the fact that it
turned out to be a big deal not just in my mind, but in every country on earth
(well, apart from Lebanon because they were busy fighting a civil war and were
kind of douchebags about taking time off to appreciate some record breaking
music) proved that he was destined to be the biggest musician of our time.
I remember as
the years rolled by, I would recruit some boys that I grew up with, brothers
Jaymo and Michael (yeah, you know who you are!) into my one man Michael Jackson
fan club. And boy, did we break out some cool moves!
I followed his
every career move with the dedication of a super fan and even managed to get
some of his older music from his days with Jackson 5 and later The Jacksons.
Some of his solo projects from the seventies were beautiful pieces of work too.
Have you ever listened to Ben?
He released
that song in 1972. He was singing about a… pet rat, which I’m going to go ahead
and assume was, I don’t know, kind of a stupid thing to do. But for me, it remains
one of the best songs he ev- A RAT? MICHAEL, REALLY???
In 1979, he
released his first solo album, Off The
Wall, and if the world hadn’t been paying attention before, it did now.
This 21 year old was gonna go places! If only there was a way his music could
find acceptance across the racial divide. You see, in those dark ages, and by
that I mean any time before the eighties, black folks and white folks in
America listened to music only from their own kind!
Michael
Jackson was the first crossover artist to appeal to all races, particularly
when he performed Billie Jean in
front of a live audience and millions of TV viewers, and introduced the moonwalk to the world at the Motown 25 event in 1984. That
performance was a thing of beauty at the time. And everyone just loved him.
In subsequent
years, he did go on to make beautiful music, including the albums Bad (which did really well), Dangerous, HIStory, Invincible and other
singles. But he was never able to replicate the success he enjoyed throughout
the eighties.
I guess part
of the reason that a lot of his fans started looking the other way was when his
complexion started changing and they took offense that he was trying to change from
black to white (pun intended). Of course, we did come to know that he suffered
from a skin condition called vitiligo.
This results in the de-
What; do you
not know how to spell Wikipedia?
So anyway, it
saddened me that the things that were happening in his private life, the
cosmetic surgeries, his odd behavior including sleepovers with young boys - how
could he not know that there was no way that
was going to have a happy ending? - the
alienation from family and friends, etc were distracting his fans from the
genius of his music.
That in the
end, it would be a sad epilogue to his life that the King of Pop would be
forced to try and make a 50-show comeback in London just to keep his head above
water from all the debts he had managed to incur in the course of time. 50
shows that there was no way a 50 year old man with a record of poor health was
ever going to pull off!
Be that as it
may, if there was one thing I will always admire Michael Jackson for, was his
dedication to perfection in his work. If you watched This Is It, you know that he wanted to put on the greatest show of
his life.
During the rehearsals, every lyric, note, dance move, the lights and
sound effects, everything had to be just right and if it wasn’t, it had to be
done all over again until it came out the way he wanted it to.
How many of us do that at our jobs, our businesses? Food for thought.
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| 1958 - 2009 |
