The first recollection I have of being aware of Michael Jackson’s existence is seeing the video (or film clip, as we called them back then) for “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” when it was released in 1979. This might seem odd considering that I was born in 1970 and Michael and his brothers had been releasing hit songs throughout my childhood, but it’s a measure of the rather sporadic relationship I had with pop music back then (and to some extent continue to have). I’m always bemused and slightly envious when I read the various serial commenters on Tom Ewing’s Popular give very precise recollections of their own experience and the public reception of any given pop single, up to and including what the drummer was wearing when it was performed on Top of the Pops. For one thing, my family was never allowed to watch Countdown (the Australian equivalent of TOTP and at least as influential on the rest of my generation), so I only got to hear music by accident or by occasionally tuning into AM radio (which was all there was).
Anyway, “Don’t Stop…” more or less instantly became one of my favourite songs and could easily have been included in this list. But I chose “Billie Jean” as the more life-changing track, even though I can’t remember whether or not I actually liked it when it was relased in 1983. (I was one of the few people in the world who didn’t shell out for the Thriller LP, I remember that much.) As a memory trigger the song has a melancholy edge; ‘83 was the year I started high school and “Billie Jean” is associated very clearly for me with the dancefloor at school socials, always a rather lonely place for me but also the place where I discovered I actually loved dancing, choosing to make a virtue of the fact I wasn’t dancing with anyone and experience it as a kind of dialectic between alienation and community. Hey, I was before my time! (NB my dancing exploits did not extend to any attempt to moonwalk; in any case I looked down on “prescribed” dance moves and communal dancing of any kind, groaning inwardly every time the strains of “Nutbush City Limits” started up…)
“Billie Jean” was an ideal soundtrack for dancefloor epiphanies because it is so downright ominous; and here I’m only talking about the music, this is one of those songs where I choose to completely ignore the lyrics, and indeed it was many years before I even realised what it was “about”. There’s the famous stalking bassline of course, but for me the really terrifying elements of the song are the staccato keyboard stabs that puntuate the whole thing, and the scintillating descending string line that comes in the second chorus (a brilliantly delayed moment; once you know the song well its absence creates a real tension in the first chorus).
I could go on and talk about how the downbeat tone of “Billie Jean” reveals Michael’s inner turmoil and prefigures the vicissitudes of his career, but nah, I’ll save that crap for when I talk about Karen Carpenter.
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