It’s been nearly a month since Michael Jackson died and amazingly it’s taken nearly this long for me to really understand what we’ve lost and how I feel about it. When Jackson’s Thriller came out in 1982 [corrected, thanks Noel] I was a youngster pretty much fresh out of high school. The music of the eighties was the music of my generation and Jackson competed with other artists of the time such as Prince, Cameo, Terrance Trent D’Arby, and George Clinton. There were also jazz, rock and blues artists taking up my attention such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Police, Miles Davis and George Benson.

While I enjoyed the dancing and singing that Mike introduced to the MTV generation, I was way more into artists such as Prince who were more instrument oriented. I was also extremely turned off as Micheal started to bleach his skin and point his nose, which I saw as a rejection of his blackness. As he became stranger and stranger I stopped paying much attention to him, after all, I’d been listening to MJ since the early 70s…yawn.

But you never miss anything until it’s gone.

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