We were absolutely crazy about Michael Jackson, my twin and I – 2 of the millions of his fans across the globe. Our first introduction to MJ was through “Off the Wall” in our teens - we went wild. It was the 80s – a time when there was very limited access to music videos or even visuals of celebrities, days of the audio cassette and SUN lyrics, and a decade before cable TV and Google. MJ almost constantly crooned from our bedroom and from our car stereo. He gazed down at us in his leather figure huggers from our bedroom walls and our wardrobe doors – we just couldn’t get enough of him. We rewound his tapes over and over trying to catch his lyrics – of course we hardly got a line here and there and then kept serenading ourselves with those precious few lines we caught. We never tired of watching videos of “Beat It” “Billie Jean” and “Thriller” a thousand times…..to this day, Thriller’s haunting background score remains one of the best pieces of music I’ve ever loved. Then came SUN (probably India’s first music magazine) and we religiously bought every issue and cut out every MJ photo, poster, news item, and song lyric that ever appeared on its pages. MJ had many great contemporaries in the 80s – Stevie Wonder, Kenny Loggins, Kenny Rogers, The Police, Prince, Madonna, Lionel Richie, Bruce Springsteen, Cindy Lauper – an endless galaxy of extremely talented musicians but he towered head and shoulders above them all with his outlandish and extravagant costumes, his mind-boggling videos, his impossible squeals which our dad said was the sound a pig would make falling off a building, (our dad also said of “Air Supply” that “they only supply air”) and boy did he have the moves!
As we grew older, our tastes matured – we realized there was life beyond MJ - but MJ was always the most comforting of our music collections; he was like the oldest thing in your wardrobe that you still wear because it’s the most comfortable piece of clothing. It became amusing to watch MJ refusing to grow up even as we grew up but no matter what he did and what people said about him, when he sang and he danced, he was our God. We fought for him, we defended him, we stopped talking to people who said “bad things” about him, we cried, we laughed, we ranted – all for MJ. Over the years, he faded gradually from our lives; we followed him on the news and every mention of MJ was nostalgic because it took us back to a time in our lives that would never be again. In him, the best years of our lives were preserved; he was the music world’s Peter Pan. He gave us unbelievable joy, his music touched our lives in a way that is impossible to describe. He taught us to love music passionately. He stayed a child forever.
