(See Usher, Ne-Yo, Justin Timberlake, any boy band.) Two albums he made with Quincy Jones—“Off The Wall” (my favorite), and “Thriller”—redefined so many different kinds of music. Why couldn't a pop song also contain an enormous, ...
From: www.newyorker.com
“Michael died today.” That was James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, paraphrasing the opening of Camus’s “The Stranger”—“Mother died yesterday. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” I was in Laurel Canyon yesterday, sitting with Murphy, his personal assistant, his publicist, and the musician Al Doyle, who also plays in Hot Chip. We were in the living room of a large, dark wooden Gothic house where LCD Soundsystem is recording its new record. Rick Rubin owns the building, which functions largely as a studio and a residence for whoever is recording there. (Rubin was not with us; he lives mostly in Malibu.)
I am here in Los Angeles to see Murphy, but from the moment Michael Jackson died, I’ve been unable to talk or think about anything else. Professionally and environmentally, the world is saying: react, react, react.
Fifteen minutes before I arrived at the house in Laurel Canyon, a friend texted me, “Michael is dead.” My radio was tuned to KCRW and I was listening to Matthew Dickman read a poem about flirting, called “Slow Dance,” on
Michael Silverblatt’s literary radio show, “Bookworm.” Traffic slowed to the pace of molasses, and—without thinking about what it meant—I turned the radio off and started checking Twitter on my phone. Every post had switched over to rumor, shock, one-liners. Michael had stopped breathing, but was he already dead? Was TMZ trying to one-up the mainstream media? Did the stress of the upcoming concerts at the 02 Arena get to Jackson?
At the Laurel Canyon house, we sat facing an enormous TV. Nobody even suggested turning it on. Everyone had laptops open, cells in hand. Murphy went for a quick swim and returned to say, “It’s like the Butthole Surfers song—‘Strangers Die Every Day.’ That sounds callous, man, but I really only know the music. Who knows which of these eight billion stories are true?”
And that is the challenge of facing Michael Jackson’s death: what haven’t we already heard and what do we really know? In many ways, we know everything. He was possibly the most perfect pop entertainer of all time. In 1975, Vince Aletti wrote about seeing The Jackson Five perform at Radio City Music Hall. He closed with a paragraph that goes beyond prescient: