... writing his HIStory from a different persepctive.

"It's not that I don't like what I have," I said to my mom on the way to piano practice, "it's just that I'd like something more real." I would have been about, I dunno, 9 or 10 at the time and was bemoaning the fact that I didn't have any REAL albums, just compilations and Mini Pops types. Yes, even then my aversion to "playlists" started. "I mean, I don't know, I just think it's time to move up, like to something like Thriller."

I had my typical painful piano lesson as Miss Wright's (I never could really enjoy the piano as much as I wanted to. I guess that made me a, what do you call it, "kid") and when mom's car pulled up on the road I ran up the little hill her driveway was on and jumped in the car. Mom had a bunch of bags from the Minto Steadman's and said "Look in this one". And there it was, the cassette of Thriller. I was excited and anxious all at one. It was my first REAL album, my first piece of "adult" music. I was also scared to death. I was scared that the album wasn't going to live up to my expectations. And it's a problem I've had all my life. I must have stared at my first copy of Dark Side of the Moon for hours before I dared to put it on, worried that the experience inside the sleeve was never going to compare to the experience outside of it.

Okay, so I put on Thriller. I liked it. How couldn't you at that time? The music was everywhere, and it was catchy. It had dance music ("Wanna be starting something", "Thriller"), classic pop songs ("The Girl is Mine"), rock ("Beat It") and new and urban stuff you just didn't hear in central New Brunswick ("Billy Jean", "Human Nature", the latter being a song that haunted me for many years.) Since I liked it, I started getting braver with albums. Today I'd laugh at most of them (Really, Sports?), but it was my first experience with Thriller that introduced me to Michael Jackson.

I had heard him years before. My brother had what could be considered, I would only recognize....too late for lack of a better cliche, eclectic tastes in music. Sure there was AC/DC and some other heavy metal albums whose covers I was actually scared to look at, but he also had a bunch of K-Tel compilations. He probably also had a copy of Off The Wall, and I loved listening to "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough." I couldn't then, and still can't, understand a word in the song. I used to lie on his bed and ask him to tell me when it was going to come around again on the 8-Track because I loved to sit there and make up my own stories about what he was saying in the song and the little party sound effects in the bridge. I used to call "Don't Get off, at the Bus Stop", and when I hear that song I still image those are the words.

I want to break here. I know I'm not often serious here, but I am about this: I don't ever want to know the words. I don't want people to post them, or send me to a link. I've been on the Internet since 1992, I've looked up things about the Amish, Scientology, planets in Star Wars, trivia about commericals, how stars are formed, how magic tricks are done, why bumblebees fly. I've never looked up the lyrics to "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough." It's very very VERY important to me that they always stay the same...that they always exist in my brother's room, his models on the wall, me being scared of the big books he'd bring back from school, the weird little strobe light thing he had hooked up to his stereo... I NEED that memory more than anyone will ever know.

Just gimme a minute.

Okay.

I didn't plan for this, so I'm going to stop now.

I had more I was going to write, but I'm not going to. I had all these points about how as I got older I never liked Jackson's music, that his peak was so high that no matter what he did it was going to be circling the drain. About how the tragedy was that he never got to be an adult, his mind was sick and so he never learnt that there were consequences and optics to his actions, and that a grown up was going to clean things up. I had planned to write all of that.

But I can't.

I can't because just thinking of that one song, and where it's tied into my life, and how in a weird way everything about that moment above is the fulcrum around which my life has pivoted. Not to be all inside jokey, but those who know me have a pretty good idea why a moment like that would really imprint itself on my mind, and how it would tie in to a lot of other things that I still feel and still cannot understand even today.

Maybe that's the best way to remember Jackson, and any other artist: how much they penetrated their own time, how much what they did became the fabric of the experiences we wear today.

My mom gave me the most popular album of all time after a miserable piano lesson, and today I'm lost without my iPod.

She gave me the an album by the most popular artist of two decades who I used to listen to with my brother. And I've lost my brother.

I got nothin else to say. Goodnight.