Don’t Go Around Breakin’ Young Girls’ Hearts

It would seem that I’m a little late to the party, but it’s just taken me most of the weekend to get my thoughts together. It’s hard to write when you’re spontaneously bursting into tears.

Like most youngsters who were born between, say, 1975 and 1995, there were four years of my life where Michael Jackson was the single most important person to me. I worshipped him; I listened to my tapes (Bad, Dangerous, HIStory) and my dad’s records (Off The Wall, Thriller) all day long, never making time for anyone or anything else, I kept MTV on as much as possible so I wouldn’t miss a video, I practiced his dance moves with my sister.I wanted to marry him, and I wanted to be him. And while, in subsequent years, my passion waned, my tapes got relaced by metal CDs, and the attractive 20-something I’d initially fallen in love with moved further and further away from my present, he was always there in the back of my mind and in the muscles of my hips, which were always ready to weave and shimy whenever any of his songs came on the radio, the party mix, or the dj’s turntable.

I was born in 1984, the year of Thriller; I have never known a world without Michael Jackson. In some ways I never thought I would. I could see him, 90 years old, receiving another lifetime achievement award, and pulling himself out of his wheelchair (hoverchair?) to moonwalk for us again. I have never gotten to see him live, but I always thought there would be time for that. I never thought he would leave us, and now he’s gone.

These random crying jags of the last three days are stupid — I didn’t know the man, he wasn’t a friend or anything like that — but they can’t be helped. It wasn’t just Michael Jackson that died on Thursday afternoon, it was a large and sparkling part of my youth, a time so vivid and alive and innocent, when all that mattered was music and dance and life was no more complicated than that. When he died, that died with him… and I’ll never ever get it back.

But we’re lucky, because he left us a body of work so large it justifies two channels playing it on loops 24 hours a day for a whole weekend. And, in the end, he’ll never quite leave us because we’ll always have those amazing music videos, the living testaments to his incredible, unmatchable talent. We are all so lucky that he decided to share his entire life with us, to dedicate himself to our entertainment and our pleasure. I will miss him so very, very much.

I’m gonna end this post with how I want to remember Michael, the video I consider to be his badass-est of a giant catalogue of badass videos: