You forgot this one Timmy...

babynoz said:

I'm focusing on post-Motown Jacksons tonight.

Copycat said:

Ha ha, my first J5 record was from the back of a cereal box.

Jackie, Marlon AND Michael singing lead!

Timmy84 said:

Okay, I'll do Motown.

Brooke Shields on King of Pop's "Pure Soul"
July 2009


"Everybody was always confused by our relationship. Nobody got it, and I didn't really care. My mom was always very positive in a sweet way about him, and he loved my mom. My mom would joke with him and rib him like he was a little kid, so he always got a kick out of her. He used to say, "It's great you can be that close with your mom," because she was also my manager at the time, where he had a very different relationship with his father, and I think he envied that.

We maintained our relationship for so long because it was never not real. People expect anything in entertainment or Hollywood to be transient, and it's not as interesting a story for us to have been lifelong friends. People want sordid details or they want big blowups, and the truth of the matter is, from the time we met when I was 13, we understood each other and became very good friends, and that was it, we didn't need to make it into anything else. I went to high school and college and I forced that into my life, and he didn't have that luxury. He would laugh, I would tell him about whatever happened at college or high school, and I think he just always felt it was too unattainable for him, so vicariously, I would share with him football games or cheerleading.

What did I think of his marriage to Lisa Marie? I think we're not dealing with convention, so somebody like Michael, he's not going to just fall in love with somebody and get married. I think there were a few people that he could identify with, and what I know about Lisa Marie, she was very sweet, she could identify with him, they could talk about things that I'm sure she understood with regards to her father. So I think he tried to create a convention for himself. There were times when he would ask me to marry him, and I would say, "You have me for the rest of your life, you don't need to marry me, I'm going to go on and do my own life and have my own marriage and my own kids, and you'll always have me."

He never actually formally proposed to me, though. He would sort of say, "Why don't we adopt a child together? The way your heart works is what I want in my life," and I said to him, "You're always going to have my heart, we don't need to adopt a baby, and I think it's wonderful that you want to have children, adopt a child." I wanted to fall in love and get married and have my own babies, and I said, "I don't think that you need to necessarily do that." This was just before he married Lisa Marie in the Nineties, I guess. He had discussed it with me, and I said, "I don't think that's the best thing to do for me." I was just out of college, and wanting to fall in love and have a fairy tale, I was holding on to that. He just felt so bad that there were so many little children in Romania in these orphanages, and he wanted to try to give them homes, and I really wanted to be able to do that with him, but it would have divided my life too much.

I hope when you write this, it doesn't sound freakish. What it was was a young man who kept reaching to try to find happiness. I think he wanted to take his resources and make a difference to other people in their lives, and he knew that I wanted to do that in the world, too, so he would reach out to someone like me and say, "How can we make a difference, it's easier to adopt a child if you're two people." He never said, formally, "Will you marry me," it was never that for me, he never was that definitive, but I think he was a guy who kept searching for happiness.

The problem is when you try to bring that out and in this society, it turns into a tabloid sentence, which is, "He wanted Brooke Shields to live with him and adopt babies," and it sounds ridiculous. And it never was that clear-cut. He found people he loved in his life and he didn't want to let go of them and he wanted them all to live together because he didn't want to go out into the outside world, which was so cruel and too much to handle, and it makes sense. I've seen many people in this position where they try to bring people into their circle, because going out of their life, just walking outside on the street is too much for them. That's why he created Neverland, because he wanted to bring people in so that he didn't have to leave and he could feel their happiness and he could somehow regain something that he felt he'd lost. So of course I was going to be one of the people he was going to call.

I can't really guess why his last years were so challenging. I think just cumulatively, when you distance yourself that much for that long, and if you don't have the healthy outlet creatively, because there was a period of time when I think his music was his strength, and that was where he could filter and pour himself into it, and it was clear, and he knew what to expect and he could make it what he wanted. His life, I think, was very hard to grasp, and I don't know if the people around him were helping at all.

I don't think he was surrounded by healthy people. I think he just created a world that he felt safe in, and we went out to dinner a lot less. We used to go out to restaurants — it was madness, but at least we could get to a restaurant and be at a table. Entering and leaving the restaurant was a mess, but we could at least do that, and slowly but surely, he stopped going out to restaurants. And he got thinner and thinner ... at first, he made fun of me because when I was in college, there would be keg parties or whatever, and he was like, "I can't believe you were drinking," and I would say, "It's college, that's what you do in college, you drink, you get sick, and you don't want to drink anymore, that's the way it happens," and he swore off all alcohol and he swore off everything, and he was so clean. He would make fun of me because I wasn't as healthy.

My heart broke for him because once he felt the need to run — I felt like he ran. I was worried about him financially, I was worried about the kids, I was worried about his health. I always worried about his health, because I thought he was just too skinny. He would make fun of me, especially when I was in college, because I gained weight in college — what freshman doesn't gain the freshman 15? — and I'd say, "I know you're going to think I'm fat, but ..." and it was a joke, but he also became very, very conscious of everything, and I used to say, "I think you've lost too much weight." So I started worrying about his health from the thin standpoint.

I saw him less and less as our lives became different. At every major event in my life, he reached out to me, whether if it was when my dad died, when I had my first daughter, and had severe post-partum, we'd speak, and then it got more and more difficult to reach him, and some of the people in his life that I could call to get him, they were fired or they left or they went away, and in the last few years, it was harder to get the right number to get through to him.

I like to think that I was a good friend to him. That's the way it always was, and our friendship never altered, it just stayed the course. No matter what was happening, the one thing that whenever we got on the phone with each other, he would just giggle or laugh and say, "Oh, Brooke," and I was consistent, and I think that was important for both of us. I wanted him to know my kids, but it became harder to take him out and bring him into ... it was just a trauma. I feel like he shouldn't have gone that way. I've always maintained what a pure soul he was."


Link

Pure disco pre-Shake Your Body:

Wow, this is the 50th page of the 7th thread since Michael died. Its been a roller coaster of a ride recalling memories, triumphs, and tribulations in his life and even our own. This has served, dare I say, as therapy for his fans on this forum. Im thankful for it.

It's actually 3:55 but the video for some reason has it at seven minutes. And it's from Goin' Places too.

OK, I'll cheat but it's still older teenage MJ anyways from his final Motown days:



I was trying to find this to post for Part 6 but it closed before I got a chance to do it. I could tell he was a fan of the Carpenters with this song, lol.
[Edited 7/13/09 18:58pm]

King Michael
Thriller was Michael Jackson's masterpiece. It was also his curse.
By Jody Rosen

Michael Jackson started calling himself the King of Pop around 1991, shortly before his monarchy was symbolically deposed. On Jan. 11, 1992, Jackson's Dangerous album was knocked from the top spot in the Billboard 200 by Nirvana's Nevermind, marking the end of Jackson's reign and bringing down the curtain on the era of pop consensus he represented. Today, the popular-music landscape has crumbled into bits and bytes, splintered into hundreds of market niches, subgenres, and microgenres. Though the occasional huge hit collapses the distance between audiences, we will never again experience a moment like Jackson's 1980s apotheosis, when Thriller seemed to shrink the world. Weeping for Michael, we are also mourning the musical monoculture—the passing of a time when we could imagine that the whole country, the whole planet, was listening to the same song.


Thriller (1982) was Jackson's masterpiece; it was also his curse. It won him unprecedented adoration: No one—not Frank Sinatra, not Elvis Presley, not the Beatles—commanded as large a global audience. But it was also a commercial and artistic milestone that Jackson spent the rest of his life trying in vain to repeat.

His albums remained compelling. Bad (1987) was a masterpiece in its own right, and Dangerous (1991), HIStory (1995), and Invincible (2001) were mesmerizing in spots. Increasingly, though, Jackson's music was warped by megalomania: huge production budgets, Wagnerian ballads, songs that swung wildly between self-pity and grandiosity. "Heal the World," he sang, but his own face, rent by plastic surgery, revealed the sickness within. At the 1995 Brit Awards (the U.K. equivalent of the Grammys), Jackson sang "Earth Song" surrounded by a worshipful children's choir and an actor dressed as a rabbi, whom Jackson "blessed." The performance was interrupted by the arrival on stage of Jarvis Cocker, the lead singer of the Britpop band Pulp, who shook his butt at the audience while Jackson rose toward the rafters on a hydraulic lift. ("My actions were a form of protest at the way Michael Jackson sees himself as some kind of Christlike figure with the power of healing," Cocker said.)


The bombast was embarrassing as spectacle and also a catastrophic musical miscalculation. Beneath their sumptuous production, Jackson's best songs were models of small-bore rigor. Listening to "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," "Billie Jean," "Wanna Be Startin' Something," and "The Way You Make Me Feel," you are reminded that the greatest pop star of his generation was also a songwriter nonpareil. The grandeur of his best records was an old-fashioned architectural kind: based in the symmetries of classical pop songcraft that Jackson absorbed while serving his apprenticeship in the Motown hit factory. Let's not forget that the Jackson 5's debut single, recorded when Michael was just 11, is the greatest bubblegum pop record of all time.

For those of us who grew up during Jackson's heyday, it's astonishing to realize how long it has been since he ruled the Billboard charts. Jackson had just two Top 40 hits in the 2000s. His last No. 1 single, "You Are Not Alone," was 14 years ago. An entire pop generation has come of age without Jackson—but not without Jackson-ism. His influence is unmistakable in the music of today's biggest acts, from the unabashed would-be Michaels Justin Timberlake and Usher, to pop divas like Beyoncé and Rihanna, whose singing takes in the speedy cadences of Jackson hits like "Smooth Criminal" and whose performances aim for Jackson-esque high-showbiz dazzle. Historians will look back on the last quarter-century as the period in which R&B became the defining American music, and this is Jackson's achievement more than anyone's. Today's Top 40 operates on the template set by Jackson in the 1980s, when he dismantled radio and MTV's de facto racial segregation.

If there is a silver lining to Jackson's untimely death, at age 50, it's how we've been snapped out of our fixation on Jackson's lurid life to concentrate again on his art. Watching his indelible performance on the 1983 Motown 25 television special, you recall that this fixture of 21st-century tabloid culture was, as an entertainer, a throwback. He was a song-and-dance man who strove, in every performance, to bowl over audiences with aggressive displays of talent and charisma: a show-off of the early 20th-century vaudevillian model.

Yet as tempting as it is to separate "Wacko Jacko" from Michael Jackson, it can't be done. Jackson was a confessional artist; he always started with the man in the mirror.

Though he aimed bigger and broader than any pop star before or since—he wanted every single person in the world to buy his records—he never compromised. His music is the strangest and darkest ever to achieve blockbuster success; by comparison, Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, and Madonna are positively milquetoast. Consider some song titles: "Bad," "Dangerous," "Leave Me Alone," "Blood on the Dance Floor," "Scream," "In the Closet," "Cry," "The Lost Children," "Threatened." Repulsion, sexual anxiety, implacable sadness, violence, terror, celebrity stalking—these were his great themes. When you dance to "Wanna Be Startin' Something" this weekend, don't forget to listen to the lyrics: "It's too high to get over/ Too low to get under/ You're stuck in the middle/ And the pain is thunder/ You're a vegetable/ Still they hate you .../ You're just a buffet/ They eat off of you."

Whether or not Jackson was in fact "wacko," his music surely is—it is joyfully, painfully, transcendently nuts. "C'mon and groove," he sang 30 years ago in "Off the Wall," "Let the madness in the music get to you."

http://www.slate.com/id/2221482/

Written by brother Jackie.

Timmy84 said:

Thanks for the great clips! It is good to get a reminder of what the RIP thread should be instead of it just repeating the tabloid headlines.

dreamfactory313 said:

Good point...me too.

This has gotta be the longest thread in org history.
[Edited 7/13/09 19:06pm]

Entertainment Tonight is talking about MJ now. They're talking about Paris' gift to MJ. Paris said something like "I'll wear one half of daddy forever"

Later remade as "Can't Get Outta the Rain", the b-side to "The Girl is Mine".

babynoz said:

He sure did. He did a perfect job articulating the whole deal.

Entertainment Tonight is talking about how they found blood on his underwear dring the investigation a few years back. Now theyre talking about Depravan(sp)?. There is no crypt built in NEVERLAND. Cement trucks at Neverland were there because they were building a sub-division on the ranch

Hearing this again, I can actually see it being part of the Off the Wall sessions.

kalelvisj said:

Well there is the other thread which is about the music. People are going to want to discuss the circumstances and articles also, so there is room for both.

The LONG unedited version.

Timmy84 said:

So Sunset Driver is an OTW outtake? I heard it was an outtake from Destiny

whatsgoingon said:

I believe that Michael asked Brooke to marry him, she was sporting a huge diamond ring at that time on Arsenio Hall show.

ViintageJunkiie said:

It's around that time frame (Destiny/Off the Wall/Triumph).