I catch dinosaurs
I make love to Elizabeth Taylor . . .
Catch hell from Richard Burton!

Fuckin’ hell, it’s Liz Taylor (as Half Man Half Bisucit might put it).

RIP.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMhnFoq0TpE

http://www.blurt-online.com/blogs/view/2494/

The tragicomedy, the fact the story of his life now begins with demise, the long twilight of the presciption drug hermit… I think Elvis much the greater figure but the Citizen Kane scale of the two lives and deaths are remarkably similar. The classic American pop life. As such, I’m another born again, fiendishly collecting all he post Off The Wall 45s I never bought at the time. .

But back to the aside…it must have been almost a year after BJ’s release that I came across a reggae compilation tape (the title of which escapes me) and on it was a track by Shinehead “Billie Jean/Mamma Used To Say”. It’s a stripped out halfway house between dub and ska. The 2 songs segued together over a simple drum machine and electric piano. Parenthesised by Shinehead whistling “The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly”, he sings a much slowed down version of both songs in a wonderfully haunting, melancholic way. It was the first time that I could distinguish all the lyrics from BJ. I never had that trouble with the lyrics from Junior’s track. For a while I wondered why Shinehead had chosen those 2 tracks, but then it struck me that both songs are based on received wisdom. The listener recieves MJ’s advice, and Junior passing on his own mother’s advice.

Billie Jean, I have heard many times since. Mamma Used To Say, less so.
But it’s the Shinehead version that gives me chills.

But it was those waves of passion which led Jackson into his own shadow; here he is being pursued by someone whose child may or may not be his – and the tension is made uncomfortable (and therefore generated) by the knowledge that, despite his would-be assertive denials in the chorus, he suspects that he is likely to be the father; witness the anguished howl of “People always told me, be careful what you do!” or the quivering “oh no” which responds to “his eyes were like mine.” He is shitting himself.

The surface, however, has to stay as smooth as possible; he moonwalks perhaps to avoid his bowels and bile spilling out onto the video’s neon Yellow Brick Road. On a musical level, despite Quincy Jones’ usual, sublime deployment of space and echo – and the string synth exclamation marks in the second and third choruses may betray an early Lexicon Of Love acknowledgement – “Billie Jean” is maybe the blackest of all Jackson’s number ones, and in all senses; its circumferential catwalk of a bassline, its forceful, decisive, dead-on beat, its recoiling handclaps present a new dynamic to pop sonics, but its primeval fear…and that tom-tom beat, buried amid the gloss but still at the song’s centre…connect it directly to “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” In addition, Jackson’s glaring, epileptic, wracked vocal is an exemplary portrait of someone on the crown point of falling apart.

It’s always easy to get complacent about Thriller, but if you listen through the entire album, even for the three hundredth time, its hidden strengths repeatedly reveal themselves; it did get a bad press at the time of its release, probably because of not being Off The Wall, and because of the admittedly irredeemable “The Girl Is Mine” being its lead single, as well as the various hammy cameos, but go beyond all of that and rediscover the serene silicon bleeps of “Human Nature” or seldom-praised gems like “Baby Be Mine” and “The Lady In My Life”…Jackson at this stage still has a firm, acute and astute grasp on both soul and pop. Likewise, “Billie Jean” climbed relatively slowly up the chart (at least before the video was unveiled and the Motown 25th Anniversary performance witnessed) but it was a grower and is growing and electrifying still.

What was depressing was this was someone younger than me.

But I really am interested in how he’ll be seen by upcoming generations, as something to model after or to push against, the way Elvis was for the 60s and 70s. (It’s a perceptive analogy, though certainly not original with Moyles.) The unambiguous love he gets from most (American) pop stars today is a little worrying — don’t they know they’re supposed to kill the buddha? — but it may not have been long enough yet. Chuck D came thirty years after the fact.

But in amongst the tributes to Michael Jackson the day after he died Chris Moyles was quoted as saying words to the effect of “Michael Jackson was our generation’s Elvis Presley and I imagine we feel about him what older generations felt about Elvis”.

I thought that was very true and amongst all the other tributes about the best I heard. Still never thought I’d be biggin up Chris Moyles on here or anyway else for that matter…

PS Since then I’ve heard the same thing said by some celebrity in America (cant think who).
But pretty bang on anyway.