the way you make me feel

If I'm going to be totally honest, I haven't had much use for Michael Jackson since at least the mid-90's. As far as I'm concerned, the last great piece of music that came out under his name was the AMAZING Brothers in Rhythm remix of "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" during the 'HIStory' campaign when remixers were given access to early masters to update them for the dance floor. [Though the Moby "Beat It"? No thanks.] And even then, that was an update of an at-that-point 10+ year old song. So let's just say anything past 'Dangerous' is kind of a waste of time.

Even more truthfully, we lost that Michael Jackson long ago. The past 20 years or so has seen a life fall apart in bizarre and often sad ways in a very public light, each event ruining a man more and more. Not that he did or didn't do alot of it to himself, but that's neither here nor there.

You really can't take away the brilliance of his early career. All that Jackson 5 stuff - amazing. A string of four of the biggest and best pop albums of all time - 'Off The Wall' and 'Thriller' are back to back brilliance, 'Bad' hasn't aged well [time has been particularly cruel to the title track] but ultimately is an amazing album, and while 'Dangerous' is one of the first examples of patchy pop albums created to take advantage of the longer running times of CDs it has some really bright shining moments: "Jam", "In The Closet", "Black or White", "Why You Wanna Trip On Me", "Heal The World", "She Drives Me Wild", "Remember The Time" - all incredible.

So at this time, I don't remember the man whose own nose literally fell off his face or who slowly became someone who bared no resemblance to the musical genius we grew up with. I remember the man who gave us this:



Best opening track to an album ever.

The world is certainly a different place without him.