Another tribute to Michael Jackson from CEBU prison
June 27, 2009
Less appreciated Michael Jackson music
June 27, 2009
One good thing I hope Michael Jackson’s passing will result in is that less hardcore fans will rediscover some of his music – not the massive hits that everyone knows, but rather the other songs that didn’t get enough credit.
More specifically, I’m thinking about two songs that were on the ‘Invincible’ album.
The first one is the song ‘Whatever Happens’, which was a song he performed with Carlos Santana.
Then there is this one, a beautiful song that makes me cry almost every single time I listen to it (and obviously it made me cry today). It was written for all the lost children in the world, wishing them home safe and sound. While an official video clip was never produced, someone put together a collage of pictures of missing children, which makes the video all the more poignant. Someone else also created a video putting this song to the video clip of Michael Jackson’s song ‘Childhood’ and I found it beautiful, too… So I put them both up.
Warning: before playing this song, I suggest having a box of Kleenex’ around. Or two.
From the Guardian: ‘For all Michael Jackson’s flaws he was the greatest entertainer of his age’
June 26, 2009
By Richard Williams
Michael Jackson may have spent his last years mutating into an ever more freakish version of himself, eventually becoming a prize exhibit in the celebrity zoo, but under the outlandish surface was a singer who had come by his fame not via mere eccentricity or a stroke of luck, but through a genuinely remarkable talent that deserved to conquer the world.
For all his tragic flaws as a human being, Jackson could legitimately be seen as the greatest entertainer of his generation, the natural successor to Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley.
Soul music was the idiom from which he emerged, and disco was the vehicle that powered his solo career, but he was more than that suggests. The slender young man in spats who danced to the whip-smart rhythms of Billie Jean and Beat It, and crooned tear-stained ballads such as She’s Out Of My Life, seemed to span the modern equivalents of many timeless idioms, from vaudeville to torch songs.
First and last, however, he was a great singer. When the Jackson 5 burst on to the music scene at the beginning of the 1970s, Jackson was barely out of short trousers and his singing on I Want You Back, ABC and The Love You Save, their first hits, was that of a hyperactive juvenile lead. Listening to I’ll Be There, a quiet ballad that gave them their fourth hit, however, it was possible to detect the signs of something extraordinary.
His careful phrasing, and in particular his terminal vibrato, showed a maturity extraordinary for a boy barely into his teenage years.
Read the rest of this article here.
Sony Comments on the Passing of Michael Jackson
June 26, 2009
NEW YORK, NY – June 25, 2009 – Michael Jackson, one of the most widely beloved entertainers and profoundly influential artists of all-time, leaves an indelible imprint on popular music and culture.
Commenting on his passing, Sir Howard Stringer, Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation, said: “Michael Jackson was a brilliant troubadour for his generation, a genius whose music reflected the passion and creativity of an era. His artistry and magnetism changed the music landscape forever. We have been profoundly affected by his originality, creativity and amazing body of work. The entire Sony family extends our deepest condolences to his family and to the millions of fans around the world who loved him.”
Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, CEO, Sony Music Entertainment, said: “Michael Jackson’s unsurpassed artistry and beloved music brought joy to every corner of the world. We join today with his millions of fans in expressing our profound sadness and we offer our deepest condolences to his family and loved ones. It was a true privilege for all of us in the Sony Music family to work with one of the most talented superstars in the history of music. We will miss him greatly.”
Martin Bandier, Chairman & CEO of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, said: “Michael was the kind of amazing talent that comes along once in a lifetime. He was an incredible recording artist, an insightful businessman, an unmatched performer, and a true icon. To all of us at Sony/ATV Music Publishing, he was also a trusted and passionate partner, who was very proud of our accomplishments. He will be dearly missed. We wish his children and entire family our deepest condolences.”
Five of Jackson’s solo albums – “Off the Wall,” “Thriller,” “Bad,” “Dangerous” and “HIStory,” all with Epic Records, a Sony Music label – are among the top-sellers of all time. During his extraordinary career, he sold an estimated 750 million records worldwide, released 13 No.1 singles and became one of a handful of artists to be inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Guinness Book of World Records recognized Jackson as the Most Successful Entertainer of All Time and “Thriller” as the Biggest Selling Album of All Time. Jackson won 13 Grammy Awards and received the American Music Award’s Artist of the Century Award.
Michael Jackson started in the music business at the age of 11 with his brothers as a member of the Jackson 5. In the early 1980s, he defined the art form of music video with such ground-breaking videos as “Billie Jean,” “Beat It” and the epic “Thriller.” Jackson’s sound, style and dance moves inspired subsequent generations of pop, soul, R&B and hip-hop artists.
Probably no celebrity has been as revered and reviled over the past 40 years as Jackson, 50, who died Thursday in Los Angeles, according to the Associated Press. The troubled, reclusive star was rushed to UCLA Medical Center by paramedics responding to a call from his home at about 12:30 p.m.
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Jackson had been scheduled next month to begin the first of 50 sold-out concerts at London’s O2 Arena, a testament to his enduring popularity with fans around the world, a love affair that reached a peak on that March evening 26 years ago.
The occasion was the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today and Forever television special that celebrated a milestone for the legendary label, but it was also a seminal moment for the King of Pop. A then-record 47 million people watched in awe as Jackson unveiled the moonwalk with an electrifying performance. Other Motown greats performed that night and Jackson himself had reunited with brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Randy for a walk down memory lane with the Jackson 5.
But in that moment, Jackson stood alone in the spotlight, a singular figure riding a wave of popularity rarely seen anywhere. His groundbreaking Thriller— still the biggest selling album of all time — was dominating the charts and Jackson was in the process of reshaping the musical landscape with his videos and celebrity. There were still millions of records to be sold, acclaimed videos to be filmed and record-shattering concert tours to be undertaken.
Read the rest of the article here.
By Rachel Giese, October 31st 2007
“I’m not like other guys.” Who knew just how prophetic that line was back in 1983, when Michael Jackson uttered it in the opening scene of his groundbreaking Thriller video? MJ was still a musical genius then — not yet a punchline, a baby dangler and a cosmetic-surgery victim — and his second solo album, Thriller, released in 1982, was a hit beyond all expectations. It topped Billboard’s album chart for more than two years, launched seven singles and sold 51 million copies worldwide. The video for the song Billie Jean was the first one by a black artist to get into MTV’s regular rotation.
But it was the release of the video for the single Thriller in 1983 that changed everything. Widely considered the best video ever made, it was the first to get a scheduled television launch — on Dec. 1, exactly one year after the release of the album. The 14-minute mini-movie directed by John Landis (Animal House, Trading Places) was a brilliantly produced homage/parody of horror movies and blaxploitation flicks. It had a then-unheard-of budget of $800,000 US and featured a spoken-word rap by Vincent Price. Its climax, a Broadway-style dance number featuring Jackson as a Cat Monster flanked by a chorus of zombies, has been re-enacted, celebrated and spoofed thousands of times since.
In honour of Halloween and the 25th anniversary of the album, we at CBCNews.ca offer some of our favourite tributes and ripoffs of the video “no mere mortal can resist.”
Wedding dance
An Oklahoma groom gamely recreated the video for his bride at their 2006 wedding. It went viral earlier this year on YouTube and now more than two million people have watched the wedding party do the zombie dance.
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13 Going on 30
In this 2004 rom-com, Jennifer Garner, a 1980s teen fast-forwarded to adulthood Freaky Friday-style, got the party started with Thriller.
Music videos
Nods to Thriller have shown up in videos by Fatboy Slim, Fall Out BoyGnarls Barkley. Two of the most overt shout-outs were in Bob Sinclar and Cutee B’s video for Rock This Party (Everybody Dance Now) and Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz. and
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Global thrills
A television show in Japan was one of the first to spoof the video in a comedy sketch that features a young woman freaking out when her young boyfriend is transformed into a dumpy old man. In German comedian Otto Waalkes’s movie Otto Der Film, his parody replaced the zombies with kitschy folk singer Heino. German a cappella group Wise Guys performed their jokey version – a tribute to 18th-century author Friedrich von Schiller – on German TV last year. But the two best international Thriller re-enactments are the Bollywood version and the performance by a group of Filipino inmates at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Centre.
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Lego stop-motion Thriller
If you build them, they will dance.
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The original
And the one that inspired them all.
Read the full article here.
CBC: ‘Michael Jackson dies at 50′
June 26, 2009
Legendary performer Michael Jackson, whose groundbreaking music and dance moves earned him the nickname the “King of Pop,” died in Los Angeles on Thursday after apparently going into cardiac arrest. He was 50.
In a brief news conference, the performer’s brother, Jermaine Jackson, said he was pronounced dead in hospital at 2:26 p.m. PT. It’s believed Jackson suffered cardiac arrest at his home, but Jermaine Jackson said an autopsy will be conducted to confirm the cause of death.
The autopsy is expected to be performed Friday.
Paramedics had responded to a call at Jackson’s rented mansion in Holmby Hills about 12:30 p.m. PT, but Jackson was not breathing when they arrived.
Jermaine Jackson said his brother’s personal doctor, who was in the house at the time, and paramedics had tried to resuscitate him.
Paramedics continued to perform CPR as Jackson was rushed to UCLA Medical Center, Jermaine Jackson said.
“Upon arriving at the hospital at approximately 1:14 p.m., a team of doctors, including emergency physicians and cardiologists, attempted to resuscitate him for a period of more than one hour, but they were unsuccessful,” he said.
“My family request that the media please respect our privacy during this time, and may all love be with you, Michael, always. We love you.”
Jackson had been preparing and rehearsing hard for what was to be his greatest comeback. He was scheduled for an unprecedented 50 shows at London’s O2 arena, with the first set for July 13.
Frank DiLeo, Jackson’s manager, told the Los Angeles Times that at the end of a rehearsal the night before his death, Jackson departed the stage very happy about the progress of the show.
“He just told me how happy he was and that things were finally working out the way he wanted,” he said.
Read the rest of this article here.
LA Times: “Ann Powers on Michael Jackson: A performer who kept transcending boundaries”
June 26, 2009
By Ann Powers
Michael Jackson was not of this world. He always seemed to defy gravity, as a dancer whose signature move was so incomprehensibly graceful that it earned the extraterrestrial title “the Moonwalk,” a singer whose tenor was high but strong, a rhythmic instrument that went as sweet and tender as a clarinet on the long notes — and as a man whose physical presence was first androgynous and then seemingly cyborgian, forcing his astounded public to puzzle over their assumptions about race, gender and age.
He was the boy who knew too much, bursting upon the pop scene in the 1970s as the neon-bright center of his family group the Jackson 5, singing songs that communicated emotions that should have been beyond the grasp of a prepubescent boy. For the cameras, he danced in a newsboy cap to childlike rhymes — A,B,C, simple as 1,2,3 — but the children and teens who were his primary audience loved him because his voice went beyond the guilelessness of playground games.
Read the rest of the article here.
By David Bidini
Maybe it’s just as well. Lots of pain suffered. Lots of pain inflicted. With the late King of Pop, that shopworn cliche about finding peace in death is probably one that applies.
For the first thirty years of his life, Michael Jackson didn’t stop moving. For the last 20, he hardly moved at all. He devoured the world of popular music with three, possibly four, voracious recordings — Off the Wall, Thriller, Bad, and, maybe, Dangerous — but, afterwards, he was bled of all sunshine, trailing dark shadows in every aspect of his strange and troubled life.
In the end, he suffered like a lot of child genuises whose comet tail absorbs them like a lit fuse, his astounding fame and success eclipsing whatever effort he made to approximate normalcy in his life. But Michael’s version of normal was always pretty different than most: jungle animals as pets, children from indeterminate sources, a fantasyland as homestead, and a coterie of ageing Hollywood stars that he relied on as friends.
As a young boy, he toured the chitlin circuit as a singing member of the Jackson family. Tommy Chong performed alongside them and remembers Michael doing a naughty bit where he lifted up women’s skirts while singing, trading in the joy and folly of an eight-year-old’s life for some abusive nightclub shtick.
Michael was on the road a lot, gigging hard under the glowering auspices of Joe Jackson, his dad, who wanted more than anything for the world to rest at his brilliant son’s feet. And that it did. When he danced – heck, even when he walked to the point on Dinah Shore or Mike Douglas or Johnny Carson’s stage where he was about to dance – he moved as if other-worldly, bones clicking together in a pose before, micro-seconds later, unhinging to create another. And his voice: as high and shimmering and innocent-sounding as the girl who sings lead in her high school production of Fame, yet, in some cases, as visceral and manly as Otis Redding or James Brown.
There was a kind of aural androgyny to MJ’s voice that allowed everyone to hear themselves in equal quantities. The vocal recording of his most famous song, “Billie Jean,” is a 48 track-plus tour de voice, a mosaic of breathing, panting, yelping, shouting, screaming, tweeing, oooohing, crooning and hollering. It’s a supernova of vocal genius landed on the head of a pin by Quincy Jones’ crystalline production. The rest of the album only gets better, and more interesting.
Read the rest of the article here.
Some Sahar’s Blog readers have already sent me emails about Michael Jackson’s passing, which I have been given permission to share (I corrected a couple of your grammatical mistakes and took out the swear words, sorry guys!):
“I was in high school when Thriller came out, and one of my favorite MJ related memories is doing the routine almost every day in school with my friends. Our principal, who also loved the song, put it on the loudspeakers one Friday morning, and just like that, everyone was doing the routine in the hall. I’m pretty sure everyone attending my school that year is remembering that today.”
“I find it insulting that he is only being remembered as only a performer; doesn’t anyone care about all the causes he was involved in? It’s like they only remember the music and the weird stuff. Stupid.”
“I’m more in shock at the horrid things some people are writing in various forums about Michael than the actual death – come on, people! What the heck is wrong with you?”
“I was looking forward to going to the concert in London; I hadn’t seen Michael perform live since 1993 – I’m absolutely devastated by his passing.”
