Timmy84 said:

I've been constantly listening to that stuff for 6 years. I actually like talking about this stuff. I'm not one of those fans that get angry at the media for discussing it either.

On the Debbie thing, yes he paid her to not be in their lives. But I don't see how thats malicious, she is not the woman he wanted to spend his life with raising children. She was just a surrogate that he knew

mozfonky said:

What did Maureen say?

Swa said:

White people are out of touch and hypersensitive, that is why I pay no attention to those kinds of statements. As one of our best social critics Paul Mooney has said, "White people kill me with their sensitivity" and "I got over being called a n%**^ you'll get over it". that's where I generally leave it. Anyway, I hate making those statements because i know some dingbat will take offense at them. Call someone a bigot to hide the fact that things are fucked up in this country and that shows in our heroes and villains the most. Anyway, this will be my final words on the topic. I mean, it's just like americans to take a whole statement of opinions and get offended by the lightening rod of race, it only proves how far we haven't come.

mozfonky said:

If excluding my point of view just because I am white isn't racially disrespectful I would love to know what is?

Oh and for the record I am not American.

Disagree with me on my views by all means, challenge my thoughts as I welcome it, but just to dismiss me based on race is totally disrespectful.

Swa

WUDDENT NUTHIN CRAZY ABOUT MICHAEL JACKSON, WHAT'S CRAZY IS THE ORGSHIT THAT'S GOIN ON RYTE NAH!

THE MUSIC

I got asked the other day what my favourite Michael Jackson song was and it was truly tough to decide. Having been a fan since OFF THE WALL I am partial to the driving grove and vocal delivery of Working Day 'n' Night. Or maybe the smoothness of "I Can't Help it". But then immediately I hear "Billie Jean" with it's crawling bass and multitudes of hooks and reconsider. But what about "Stranger in Moscow" I wonder, with its stripped back pain and isolation evident in every line, or "Money" with its rolling beat and irreristible hook of a chorus. Or "Who Is It" or "Why you wanna Trip on me?" or "Butterflies" or "Break of Dawn" or his take on "Ain't No Sunshine" or the joyous enthusiasm of "I want you back" or the purity of "With A Child's Heart" or even the talent ready to take control on "Get it together".

Even putting an MJ playlist together for my ipod that reflects his career is a massive undertaking. Maybe I could do it with one track from each album, but then I know I would be missing out on some great gems.

It was almost easier to say what songs of Michael's I didn't like, and even then there were just a small handful of songs that I found to syrupy but others may love.

And that will always be the gift Michael has given. Beyond the hype, beyond the endless speculation and interrogation of his private life. Beyond the dancing. Beyond the videos. Beyond the larger than life performer. Beyond all that is simply some of the best music ever recorded.

Swa

DesireeNevermind said:

IN TEARS

THE MUSIC

I got asked the other day what my favourite Michael Jackson song was and it was truly tough to decide. Having been a fan since OFF THE WALL I am partial to the driving grove and vocal delivery of Working Day 'n' Night. Or maybe the smoothness of "I Can't Help it". But then immediately I hear "Billie Jean" with it's crawling bass and multitudes of hooks and reconsider. But what about "Stranger in Moscow" I wonder, with its stripped back pain and isolation evident in every line, or "Money" with its rolling beat and irreristible hook of a chorus. Or "Who Is It" or "Why you wanna Trip on me?" or "Butterflies" or "Break of Dawn" or his take on "Ain't No Sunshine" or the joyous enthusiasm of "I want you back" or the purity of "With A Child's Heart" or even the talent ready to take control on "Get it together".

Even putting an MJ playlist together for my ipod that reflects his career is a massive undertaking. Maybe I could do it with one track from each album, but then I know I would be missing out on some great gems.

It was almost easier to say what songs of Michael's I didn't like, and even then there were just a small handful of songs that I found to syrupy but others may love.

And that will always be the gift Michael has given. Beyond the hype, beyond the endless speculation and interrogation of his private life. Beyond the dancing. Beyond the videos. Beyond the larger than life performer. Beyond all that is simply some of the best music ever recorded.

Swa

http://www.hulu.com/watch/81767/michael-in-his-own-words-exclusive-ebonyjet-showcase-bad-interview

The above link is an interview with Michael about the Bad album. Tear jerker towards the end when talking about the Elephant Man.

Swa said:

Human Nature.

there are some songs that my brain tells me are much, much better, on a cerebral level (Stranger In Moscow, Butterflies, etc.) and the classic solo hits are undeniable (Billie Jean, Beat It, Wanna Be Startin' Somethin', The Way You Make Me Feel, Smooth Criminal, Man In The Mirror, Remember The Time, etc.) and the joy and exuberance of early J5 material can bring me to tears (I Want You Back, ABC, etc.)...

But only Human Nature has given me goosebumps EVERY TIME I've heard it in the 26 years since it came out. And I was 6 at the time. It sends me to a place... It makes me feel warm and comforted. It stirs and settles my soul at the same time.
[Edited 7/13/09 23:23pm]

errant said:

Human Nature is an unbelievable piece of music and vocal delivery. And yes it is a personal fave too. But this is THE song for you? I find I chop and change so much it's much easier to have a top 5 or top 10 than just the 1.

Swa

dreamfactory313 said:

This is really a great interview. Michael looks so good here and should have stopped with the plastic surgery. It shows what a sweet person he really was. I've never been into Michael Jackson that much, but have always enjoyed his music. Since his death though, I have been following him more which is kinda a shame that is what it took!!

You forgot this one Timmy...

This week, according to sources, “Good Morning America” paid Jackson around $200,000 for a series of interviews that commence tomorrow morning.

ABC says it’s done this as part of a deal for a one-hour documentary on the Jackson family.

At the same time, Jackson is said to be arriving in London tomorrow, the day that Michael was set to start his shows at the O2 Arena. Sources tell me that the British tabloids are paying Jackson at least $250,000 plus expenses to exploit Michael’s memory.


Damn Joe must be hurting for cash! Joe "Predator" Jackson, making his money by any means necessary...

But only Human Nature has given me goosebumps EVERY TIME I've heard it in the 26 years since it came out. And I was 6 at the time. It sends me to a place... It makes me feel warm and comforted. It stirs and settles my soul at the same time.

Michael Jackson, "Billie Jean"

Once upon a time, before the courtroom dramas, the serial plastic surgeries, and the play dates with Corey Feldman, Michael Jackson was just a run-of-the-mill 24-year-old musical genius, driving a burning Rolls-Royce with a melody stuck in his head.

It was the summer of 1982. Jackson was on Los Angeles’s Ventura Freeway, commuting home after a day in the recording studio, where he and producer Quincy Jones were working on the follow-up to the singer’s smash solo debut, Off the Wall. As Jackson recalled in his 1988 autobiography, he was "so absorbed by this tune floating around in my head" that he failed to notice the smoke billowing out from the undercarriage of his luxury sedan.

"We were getting off the freeway when a kid on a motorcycle pulls up to us and says, ‘Your car’s on fire.’ Suddenly we noticed the smoke and pulled over and the whole bottom of the Rolls-Royce was on fire. That kid probably saved our lives." But not even that brush with death could shake Jackson’s obsession with his work in progress. "Even while we were getting help and finding an alternate way to get where we were going, I was silently composing additional material."

The song was perhaps the most personal Jackson had ever written, a guilt- and fear-streaked paternity drama inspired by the singer’s run-ins with delusional female fans. Jackson had been working on it for months and was certain that he had something special on his hands.

"A musician knows hit material. Everything has to feel in place. It fulfills you and it makes you feel good", Jackson would recollect. "That’s how I felt about ‘Billie Jean.’ I knew it was going to be big when I was writing it."

Jackson was right: "Billie Jean" was, to say the least, hit material. Released in January 1983, the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks, held the No. 1 spot on the R&B chart for nine, sold more than a million singles and launched pop’s biggest-ever commercial juggernaut, Thriller, which has sold upwards of 47 million copies worldwide, more than any album before or since.

But the song’s place in history transcends mere numbers. "Billie Jean" shattered MTV’s color line and went a long way toward destroying the racial apartheid that had prevailed on commercial radio for decades. Ushering in the modern music-video era, the single also pioneered a new kind of sleek, post-soul pop music whose echoes can be heard to this day. Above all, "Billie Jean" marked a coming of age, the moment when a former kiddie singing star blossomed into a new generation’s equivalent of Elvis and the Beatles, the late 20th century’s preeminent pop icon.

Not bad for a song that, to this day, remains one of the most sonically eccentric, psychologically fraught, downright bizarre things ever to land on Top 40 radio. Jackson’s previous solo hits had been awash in the lush sounds of disco, but Billie Jean was almost frighteningly stark, with a pulsing, cat-on-the-prowl bass figure, whip-crack downbeat and eerie multi-tracked vocals ricocheting in the vast spaces between keyboards and strings. Over the years, listeners have grown used to Jackson’s idiosyncratic vocal style, the falsetto whoops, hee-hees, James-Brown-on-helium grunts and gonzo diction (the chair is not my son?) but in 1982 no one had ever heard anything quite like it, which only heightened the song’s unsettling effect, the sense that Billie Jean was a five-minute-long nervous breakdown, set to a beat.

This weirdness wasn’t accidental. Bruce Swedien, Jones’s longtime studio engineer, remembers: "When we recorded ‘Billie Jean’ Quincy told me, ‘Okay, this piece of music has to have the most unique sonic personality of anything that we have ever recorded.’ Jones had Jackson sing vocal overdubs through a six-foot-long cardboard tube, and brought in jazz saxophonist Tom Scott to play a rare instrument, the lyricon, a wind-controlled analog synthesizer whose sour, trumpet-like lines are subtly woven through the track. Bassist Louis Johnson ran through his part on every guitar he owned before Jackson settled on a Yamaha bass with an ideally thick and buzzing sound.

Swedien, meanwhile, turned his search for the perfect beat into an arts-and-crafts project, hiring carpenters to construct a special plywood drum platform, ordering a custom-made bass drum cover, using everything from cinder blocks to specially designed isolation flaps, all to capture just the right imaging on the snare and hi-hats. "See if you can think of any other piece of music where you can hear the first three drum beats and know what the song is," Swedien has said. "That’s what I call sonic personality."

A major component of that personality almost didn’t survive the final cut. Billie Jean opens with an unusually long bass-and-drums intro, Jackson doesn’t begin singing until the 0:29 mark, that Jones wanted to trim but Jackson vehemently insisted be kept.

"I said, ‘Michael we’ve got to cut that intro,’" Jones recalls. "He said, ‘But that’s the jelly!’" Jackson’s personal slang term for a funky beat is "smelly jelly" "‘That’s what makes me want to dance.’ And when Michael Jackson tells you, ‘That’s what makes me want to dance,’ well, the rest of us just have to shut up."

It was Jackson’s dancing, as much as his singing, that propelled the Billie Jean phenomenon. On May 16, 1983, more than 50 million viewers watched Jackson debut his famous moonwalk in a mesmerizing performance on the Motown 25 television special. Then there was the Billie Jean video, in which Jackson slinks and whirls through a fantasy cityscape, with a sidewalk that lights up like a disco floor underfoot. MTV rarely aired videos by black performers, and when they refused to show Billie Jean, CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff went ballistic. "I said to MTV, ‘I’m pulling everything we have off the air, all our product. I’m not going to give you any more videos. And I’m going to go public and fucking tell them about the fact you don’t want to play music by a black guy.’" Billie Jean was promptly put in heavy rotation, and neither Jackson nor MTV ever looked back.

Those video images have lodged permanently in the cultural memory. But it’s Jackson’s songwriting that makes Billie Jean such a riveting psychological drama, the real thriller on his landmark album. Few songs have provided so much fodder for armchair Freudians: paranoia, sexual terror, temptation and shame mingle in lyrics that lurch from outright denials (The kid is not my son) to seeming admissions of guilt (This happened much too soon/She called me to her room). Today, Billie Jean seems more than anything like a parable of the twisted relations between celebrities and their fans, a theme dramatized in the video, in which Jackson is pursued by a creepy gumshoe in a trench coat. Count on the most famous man in the world, a guy who has had audiences tearing at his clothes since he was 10 years old, to deliver the great artistic statement on celebrity stalking.

Whatever its larger autobiographical and historical significance, Billie Jean is first and foremost a dance track. Untold millions of radio and MTV plays have not reduced the power of a song that simply explodes out of the speakers.

‘Billie Jean’ is hot on every level, says Greg Phillinganes, a legendary L.A. session musician who played keyboards on the song. "It’s hot rhythmically. It’s hot sonically, because the instrumentation is so minimal, you can really hear everything. It’s hot melodically. It’s hot lyrically. It’s hot vocally. It affects you physically, emotionally, even spiritually. Twenty-three years on, Michael Jackson can rest assured: No one has made smellier jelly.

Michael looked so frail in this picture!

He does not look healthy at all.

Timmy84 said:

Aaaah yeah, The Voice....Michael was so blessed that his voice changed in the WAY that it did. Many popular child singers are terrified when their voice change because they lose the "magic" that they had. That simply was not the case with Michael. His voice changed but it STILL had that certain "magic" element and quality to it. That TONE that was so perfect for radio. His voice had went from that golden pure child "yelp" from "I Want You Back" and "I'll Be There" to a more polished but still golden pureness in my faves "Got To Be There" and "I Wanna Be Where You Are" to a tansitional vocal change such as "Get It Together" and his part on "I Am Love" to THIS. Once his vocal tone reached where it is like on this track, his voice was soooo natural and so smooth and so cool. He hadn't lost ANYTHING but gained soooo much more. He was capable of doing so many more TYPES of material because of the tone his voice. I know Berry and others were dreading that day of when Michael's voice changed but then they heard HOW it changed, then everything changed for Michael. And for the better.

Michael Jackson Remembered:
John Singleton on Challenging His Hero
Link

I've eaten the Jackson 5 cereal, I've played the 45 records,

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

I would have loved to at least met Michael but not looking frail like that! I probably would have gasped right in his face. How in the fuck could people think this sickly man could have done 50 shows!
[Edited 7/14/09 0:15am]

A While back...

Michael Jackson’s Face Collapsed When Son Hit Him
By Molly Celaschi - Posted on December 26th, 2007
Tagged: News
The bandage mystery is finally solved!

A few weeks ago we saw pictures of Michael Jackson with bandages all over his face while shopping at a bookstore.

Reports are saying that while Michael and his son Prince Michael II were play fighting, he accidentally hit his daddy in the face. The smack caused Michael’s upper lip to collapse!

“He was whacked in the face accidentally by his younger son Prince Michael II while playing around and part of Jackson’s upper lip collapsed.

“That mishap led a hysterical Jacko to make a beeline for the plastic surgeon for a bit of quickie repair work.

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.