The day I knew Michael Jackson

Ever since Michael Jackson left our world five months ago on June 25, I have been reminiscing a lot of stuffs about him.

Of how beautiful his voice was, and how captivating his music videos and dances were, but more importantly, how greatly he has inspired me through nearly 20 years of my life.

To others, he might just be a outdated artist, criticized too often for his weird transformations and mannerism, but to me, Michael Jackson was, and will always be my inspiration, my friend who accompanied me on my life journey with his songs and gentle soul.

A pity and pain to know that this journey I will have to travel alone knowing everyday that I will no longer hear him sing or speak, except from his past albums and footages.

I still remember the day I first knew or heard about Michael was during my primary school days back in 1991. Then he just released his album Dangerous. The album has a very artistic cover art that I find really amazing.

The King Of Pop was the his second name in those days. Dangerous is truly an extraordinary pop album with extremely original musical style. There were also many great music videos, as one could expect from the man, released for several songs on the album.

But as a child then, I couldn't quite appreciate his deep talent and inspiring aura as an music artist even though I really enjoyed his MVs like Remember The Time with Eddie Murphy, Black or White (with Tyra Banks though I only knew recently hehe), Jam with Michael Jordan and so many more.

Man, as I typed this now, the sadness of him already gone hit me hard once again...

It was when he released History, the album after Dangerous in 1995 that I realized how talented and creative he was, not only as a singer, but also as a dancer and choreographer. For that album, his past works were highly promoted. Thanks to that, I was able to catch a glimpse of some of his greatest MTVs produced in the 70's and 80's.

The video that totally captivated me was Thriller released in 1983 (coincidentally my birth year), where he danced in sync with a pack of zombies. The idea and creativity of it was just so cool and awesome for its time, perhaps even now. Indeed he was the man who reshaped the idea of MTVs, injecting the spirit of artistic story and message in them which inspired many down the road.

From there on, my curiosity of Michael grew. And together with my sister, we combed the video and CD stores for his other works and albums. We rented several of his laser discs, including Moonwalker and his History Greatest Hits Videos.

Gradually we began to see a different side of him, and came to love his old songs so much that we bought all of his solo albums and three Jackson Five albums in one night! Great times those were.

Most of the songs we heard them from the retrospective introduction from Moonwalker, which is highly recommended for all who haven't and wish to know more about the man himself as a singer before the common famous side of him we are so overfed with by the common media, which always sought to cast a bad light on him.

We were so sad when we have to return the laser discs to the store.

But eventually, we bought them, not Moonwalker however as it was too expensive then and History Greatest Hits Videos was the more logical choice as it contained much more of his music videos than Moonwalker, which has some of our most favourite MTVs like Speed Demon, Leave Me Alone and Smooth Criminal, not to mention Man in the Mirror at the opening.

Somewhen in 1996, October I think it was, his second World Tour was to be held.

We were so excited that he was actually coming to Singapore!! As we missed his first, we told ourselves that no matter what, we must go see him live! And yes we did.

I will talk more about the evening of MJ's History concert in the next entry. I hope somewhere out there, someone is reading this story and will start to see a different side of Michael Jackson as me and my sister did back then and come to appreciate him as the bubbly and warm hearted little prince who shape the history of music and dance.

R.I.P Michael Jackson
-Alvin