Sometimes it's when you have to say goodbye that you realize how something has been a part of your life that you've almost forgotten or, worse, taken for granted as you moved on--'another part of me' . . .
There was a lot of confusion about Michael Jackson. I'm not talking about in his own head. I'm talking about the time when I was barely eighteen, just into college, and Thriller was out. Not in India, of course--no such luck back in those days. Television was doordarshan, and the print media wasn't so into focusing on pop musical sensations either; Musical Bandbox faithfully played Engelbert Humperdink. But nature will find a way--I probably read up on MJ in some magazine at the American Center, and the day the pirated cassette of Thriller hit Free School Street, I grabbed it. It took my breath away (though my favourite MJ song from that era was and still is Say Say Say with Paul McCartney, not from Thriller but from McCartney's Pipes of Peace) and I almost forced MJ on my friends, inviting them over for a game of carrom and amping up the tape deck with Thriller. The beat got to everyone, of course. Problem was, no one could quite figure out what he was saying. I had studied in a 'vernacular' school--I was now studying English Honours at the elite Presidency College, but had retained my old friends group. They surrendered like Madan Lal before a Holding bouncer when confronted with MJ's lyrics. (Not that an 'English medium' student would have fared any better, unless they had had some practice listening to R&B or soul, but an 'English medium' student would have glibly pretended to understand--and probably got away with it.) Days later, one of my friends reported that he had finally decoded The Girl Is Mine. 'What he's saying is, "The girl is mine, the dark brown girl is mine".' (That would be to bring colour to the fore in a way that MJ would probably not have dreamed of--and yet it did sound so very right to us Fair & Lovely types.) I knew that wasn't it--but I couldn't tell what he was saying either. It took a long time, till I got hold of the lyrics from somewhere, to realize it was 'doggone', and a while more to figure out what that meant.
Like I was saying, Michael Jackson created confusion.
Thriller was an extraordinary album. It started out with a simple enough dance number--Wanna Be Startin' Something. Followed by the innocuous Baby Be Mine and The Girl Is Mine. Then came Thriller, the last song on side A, and it completely transfixed you. If you managed to get out of the trance of replaying it for long enough to flip the record, you had the mega tracks Beat It and Bille Jean that came at you like twin bazookas, before the album retreated again into the comfortable melody and rhythm of Human Nature, PYT and The Lady in My Life. In those pre-CD days with no go-to-previous-track facility, we got a lot of exercise getting up and manning our turntables and tape decks, listening to our three favourites over and over again.
That wasn't the order in the pirated tape I had procured, of course. The pirates (well, maybe not the ones in Somalia) always seem to want to go one better than the original--so the tape started with Beat It, followed by Billie Jean, Thriller and The Girl Is Mine. You had to flip to side B to hear Wanna Be Startin' Something. You can imagine that we basically listened to side A over and over again. (Also explains why my friend was so bent on decoding The Girl Is Mine--it appeared on side A and was sort of the only gentle medium pacer--the other three were hardcore!)
Then, finally, the album came out. No Planet M and MusicWorld in those days--there was a snooty little place on Chowringhee in the vicinity of Tiger Cinema: I darted in, ignored the looks, flashed my money (obtained by selling off a few kilos of textbooks on College Street) and darted out with the treasure. Ah, the sound! Even on my very basic turntable and amplifier. But, sadly, no lyrics. For some strange reason, the albums published in India would never have lyrics--strange, because, as I was saying, that's where they were needed most. It's only now that Star Movies and HBO show Hollywood movies with English subtitles. How we would have loved it if we had that benefit when we watched Apocalypse Now in a decrepit theatre with a muffled sound system and cracked speakers. (Look on the positive side: made us appreciate the visual art of the film that much more!!)
The thing about (cheaply produced) vinyl records in hot and humid climate is that they warp easily, they develop scratches, and the needle goes completely wonky. Long before the remix age, our turntables treated us to remixes of our most beloved records. Songs would skip lines--a good clean wipe with alcohol could sometimes fix that; but then the needle would sometimes scratch a groove into a song because of the warp, and then when you played the song it would repeat a line a couple of times, before skipping ahead. This happened with my record of Thriller, with Vincent Price's spoken part in the song Thriller, which now went like this:
Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour's close at hand 's close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y'all's neighbourhood y'all's neighbourhood
And whosoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell hounds of hell
And rot and rot inside a corpse's shell
The foulest stench is in the air stench is in the air
The funk of forty thousand years
And grisly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to closing in to seal your doom
And though you're fighting to stay alive fighting to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can resist sist sist
The evil of the thriller
Ha haha haha ha haha haha hahahaha haaaa
It was completely creepy. The sung part would go normally, and then lunacy would break loose. You knew what was coming, like a horror movie you'd seen before, and still you couldn't resist its thrall. The magic of that scare, with the steady orange glow of my turtable in the dark accentuating the wonkiness that was still playing to rhythm, was never there again--when I saw the video, when I owned the song on cd, when I tried to visualize it with all the gore my imagination could muster.
We still hadn't encountered MJ's most famous aspect though: his videos. There was no MTV, no videocassettes available freely yet. Then the metro channel had something called the pre-Grammy show, the night before the Grammies, where they showed videos of the nominated songs--so there was Beat It and Billie Jean. The Billie Jean video had us all transfixed. What dancing, what mood, what perfect sync of music to visual. (Like P.Diddy said, MJ actaully made us see the beat.) But we were confused. What was going on in the video? Was he also the cat? After we had debated this long enough, we came to the larger question: what on earth did the video have to do with the words of the song? After much head-scratching I had to admit: nothing. My 'dark brown girl' friend enlightened me: 'It's actually a love song, see? Unusual, but a love song. "Billie Jean is not my lover / She's just a girl who says that I'm the one / But the child is not my son." He has just met this girl, they are not lovers yet. But she wants him. But he notices this child standing beside her. And she says, no no, he is nothing to do with me.' Again, somehow, I knew that was not it, but it was no less helpful a comment than the one that came from a music reviewer in a newspaper: 'The song has nothing to do with the famous tennis player.'
Confusion, confusion. Of a kind that Shahrukh and Salman with their tumhara anjali mera anjali couldn't even imagine.
Michael Jackson confused me. And therefore intrigued me. And that's what I want to remember him for.
It's been twenty-five years since then, and so much has happened. Now MJ is gone, and it is his music and dance that will live on. But my MJ moments will be forgotten, were forgotten already, till thinking about him brought them back. So I wanted to remember the time.
And now: the great pearly gates. Beyond the gates lies pill heaven. Pill, suitably decomposed to mirror its physical state, knocks.
Saint Pillar: Name?
Pill: Demerol.
Saint Pillar: Claim to fame?
Pill: Are you kidding me? I am the greatest. I have played a decisive role in controlling the life of a human being who had the greatest influence on humankind in recent times.
Saint Pillar: Come off it. That honour goes to the anti-depressants Osama bin Laden took.
Pill: Typical. I'm Demerol, mate. I'm the straw that broke the camel's back. I killed Michael Jackson.
Saint Pillar: Oh, that Demerol. Yes, we've been expecting you. We have a special place reserved for you.
Pill: Good. Now we're getting somewhere. Lead me to it.
Saint Pillar: But it's not here. It's in Oblivion. In the Mythical Beasts and Objects section. I'll help you down. (kicks Pill, Pill tumbles off cloud; as it's shooting down, it hears) There's a space waiting for you right next to The Bullet That Killed JFK.
It don't matter if you're black or white.
