The first music video I ever remember seeing was Thriller - my best friend's older brother had hired it from the video store. My best friend and I watched it four or five times that day, and I tried to learn the dance moves. It was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. You made me want to be a jazz dancer.Every year that I was in dance classes I hoped we'd get to dance to one of your songs. I finally got my wish in 1996, when my dance school put on a cabaret show and my class did a horror-themed performance. We danced to Thriller, as part of our horror-themed narrative. It was so exciting. We learned some of your moves especially for our performance - the rest was original chorey.
When your Dangerous album came out, my mum's friend brought me a copy, and my best friend and I thrashed it to within an inch of its life. He and I LOVED that album. We played it every day for months. It's the first album I remember turning up as loud as I could stand, and then getting told to "turn that racket down!" by my parents.
I remember my mother pulling me out of school early one day in early 1992 because your Remember the Time music video was premiering on Australian television, and she didn't want us to miss such a huge event. It was a HOT day, and I remember just being gobsmacked by the scale of the thing. The costumes, the dancing, the way you turned to dust at the end and were swept away. All of it was bigger, grander, more ambitious than anything I'd ever seen.
You were more than a man, you were, to borrow from Tenacious D, a shiny golden god.
You came to Melbourne in 1996, and I wanted to see you so badly. I begged my Dad to take me to the airport to try and catch a glimpse but he refused. So I took comfort in the fact that you were briefly in my suburb (since at the time I lived by the airport), and watched your concert on TV.
When I heard you had died on Friday morning Australian time, I felt tears slide down my face, and I started shouting "oh god, oh god!!". It was an automatic but unexpected reaction. I felt kind of silly, standing there, shrieking and crying for you. But it was such unexpected news. The newspeople said you'd been taken to the hospital, and then less than 30 minutes later they said you'd died.
Born in 1983, I am too young to remember the influence The Beatles or Elvis Presley had on music. You were the first global music superstar of my time, and the soundtrack to my childhood. No longer will people my age look back on the deaths of Lennon and Presley with no true understanding of the impact those events had on popular culture, because we have now lived through your death. You were the biggest star I have ever heard of, you were so famous you seemed immortal. The idea that something as common as death could bring down someone as unique as you, still seems surreal, and kind of confusing.
I can't stop dancing to your songs. I have never in my life felt so compelled to movement as I have since I heard the news that you'd died. Your Dangerous album has been in constant rotation in my home, and on my mp3 player, and sounds as daring and groundbreaking now as it did in 1991 when I first heard it at the age of only 7 or 8. The thing just blows my mind every time I hear it. Nobody else was doing anything like it at the time, and the only artist who has done anything like it since is Justin Timberlake, on his FutureSex/LoveSounds album.
Your dancing continues to astonish me. There is a fan kick in the video for Bad that still amazes me - because you made a such a pretty, lightfooted move look incredibly masculine. The same goes for the dancing in the video for Beat It. You danced like a man. The choreography was strong, confident and masculine, but you still gave it a lightness that made it look effortless.
Thankyou for making dancing such a huge part of your music videos. You inspired thousands of young people to dance. Your signature toe stand remains unsurpassed in terms of techincal prowess and showmanship. No other entertainer has a move so iconic - even more so than your moonwalk, the silhouette of you, frozen in your toe stand is one of the enduring images of entertainment.
I loved your voice - your falsetto, your beautiful pop-rock vibrato, and the amazing control you had over every note you ever sang. You sang disco, soul, rock, r&b, pop and ballads and you did it all effortlessly.
As I sit here and write this, I can feel the tears starting to fall again. I miss you more than I ever imagined I could miss a person I do not know, and have never met. I feel shattered. My heart is breaking. I am too young to remember a world where you weren't a major star. I don't know what the world is supposed to be like without you in it.
I have spent this whole weekend dancing in your memory. My feet hurt, my legs ache, but my heart will sing your songs forever. You are eternal.
Michael Jackson Forever. Long live the King.
