Indonesia. Probably a really nice place. Probably full of great food, native culture that does not involve rhythm’s or instruments and great folk tales. That’s what I thought when I woke up, before toying with getting a ticket to Japan (the island nation, not the band, because clearly if I got a ticket to the band the band would not last long enough for me to stand on them. I hate Japan.)
However as soon as I left the hotel the country around me faded away. There, slap bang in the middle of the city, was an eyesore of remarkable dimensions. Forty storeys high, forty storeys wide, casting a malevolent shadow over the entire city. If I were not a strong woman it would have driven me mad straight away. I am not a woman taken easily to fear, but even I had to take a moment before shielding my eyes and commanding the nearest taxi driver to take me to the station.
I ran in, throwing money at the sales desk for any flight, anywhere out of this monstrous town. How could they do it I ask? What was the motivation to sell themselves to some sort of Satan. A ticket was passed to me as I ran for customs, just to get away from that landmark of lousiness.
“What made them do it?” I asked the stewardess as we left. “How could they do that?”
The woman behind replied, shocked at my disrespectful tone to her countries national monument.
“Do you not like it? Everybody likes it.”
“It is a sin against human nature, an affront to all right-thinking mankind.”
“No, it is just the Thriller in Manila.”
As if a forty storey representation of the worlds best selling album was a good thing.
THRILLER – Michael Jackson
I don’t know what school of genre studies Mr Jackson went to, but surely he has made a mistake. Any video where humans turn into werewolves, zombies and have a creepy Vincent Price voiceover would be described as a Horror movie, not a Thriller. Thrillers are exciting chase movies, tense spy stories and on the whole entertainments which whilst far fetched never verge into the fantastical.
Mind you, its a bit pointless lecturing Michael “DANGEROUS” Jackson on the meaning of words. He is dangerous only if you are an original part of his own body.
Thriller is often thought of as where the rot set in (it was certainly after Thriller that Michael set about his own face with such gusto). I disagree. Yes Billie Jean, Beat It and PYT are PY(ss)Poor. But ABC by the Jackson’s always set my teeth on edge. But there is no denying the catalogue of poverty that exists on Thriller. So here , for the first time, is Tanya Headon’s track-by-track guide to the rubbish on Thriller:
1: Wanna be Startin’ Somethin’: No, actually I’m quite keen on stopping something. This album. Now.
2: Baby Be Mine : Comment removed after legal advice and Jackson’s acquittal.
3: The Girl Is Mine: Imagine Michael Jackson and Paul MacCartney fighting over a girl. Then imagine the girl. No, that’s right, those are chains you are imagining.
4: Thriller: No. Horror.
5: Beat It: In the colloquial sense, as in FUCK OFF MICHAEL.
6: Billie Jean: Not your lover eh? Just “some girl”. I think you protest too much.
7: Human Nature: Not an excuse in a court of law for shitting all over this track.
8: PYT (Pretty Young Thing): Pretty Young always equals too young in my book.
9: Lady In My Life: Good lord, this track is so poor it barely signifies. It is rubbish though.
10: Someone In The Dark: Michael Jackson clearly trying to live out the “fun guy to be” with gag, but feeding himself shit.