Comments on: A Rose for MJ

by: Ellyn Maholmes

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:31:28 +0000

I have begun to listen to MJ a lot lately. I wish i would have started that before he died . RIP

by: Pete Cenedella

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:19:25 +0000

Hey, point taken about parties, David, lol. And of course no sooner had I hit Submit then I started thinking about 80s pop that does signify for me in the 00s. I’m not counting the records that were my mainstays at the time like Husker Du and the Minutemen and the like. But Sheila E’s Glamorous Life and The Pretenders’ Back On The Chain Gang, both different responses to Reagan’s world, sound fantastic and equally smart now, as do, to my ears, Tears for Fears (Bob Mould’s British brothers beneath the synths, IMO), Til Tuesday, and Borderline (the single) and Like A Prayer (the whole damn album). And, weirdly, maybe everything that’s both yucky and strangely fascinating about 80s music can be found in the synth squiggles and cheese of the one single by Berry Gordy’s son: “I always feel like somebody’s watching me…”

As for Michael the narrative, I was equally alienated this week from the profuse tears and the mean-spirited, diffident jokes. I guess in the end I don’t consider myself one of the people (or part of the abstract culture of celebrity that you and Carl Wilson and many others have been discussing) who particularly delighted in his rise or reveled in his fall; don’t think I was one of the you and me’s who killed this particular Kennedy. I just shook my head years ago at the loss of that beautiful guy on the J5 album covers, with his disarmingly innocent face, his cool fro and chocolate skin. But then I moved on.

But I respect the sorrow, and the deep sense of connection, because I felt those things when Altman and Vonnegut died. And I know this: when Dylan goes, I’ll be a wailing fool.

by: David Cantwell

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:56:04 +0000

Alan…No, Miss Havisham doesn’t work primarily becuase she didn’t have a mass audience who sat back and enjoyed the show, delighting at each new titillating revalation. Miss Emily, on the other hand…

In an early draft I’d written “of course, this is culpability at a great remove,” then deleted it to save space as I figured the second hand nature of the responsibilty went without saying. Then again, cigarettes kill at second hand too. At any event, I think it’s very complicated…True enough about a lazy, image-driven media, but “we’ and “us” are implicated there as well. The Enquirer puts Jacko on the cover because it sells copies…The Most Trusted Name in News does the same thing. There is blame enough to go around: Michael’s family and especially his father, his physician apparently, and of course Michael himself all get included, I think, without saying.

(”cruel” doesn’t really enter to it, I don’t think, just as “greed” doesn’t explain the harsh human impact of free markets)

Of course, our desire for more records and our desire for destruction aren’t mutually exclusive. Certainly, when the records weren’t forthcoming we settled readily enough for the destruction we were offered. As people will…

by: Alan

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:59:29 +0000

I was thinking more Miss Havisham, David.
An excellent piece, as always. I especially enjoy your evocation of the Jackson 5 highlights. Those songs fizz with a pleasure that everything post-”Off the Wall” lacks. Even a bouyant hit like “The Way You Make Me Feel” has a strain about it — instead of a balloon lifting free, it’s a balloon manned with all the hardwork of the ones in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade.
You lay some collective blame, though, that I’m not quite buying. Our fascination with his “illness” is less the responsibility of some cruel *us* than it is of a lazy, image-driven media. I’ve enjoyed my share of Jacko jokes over the years, but I’ve never enjoyed them as much as I have even a somewhat laborious later hit like “Smooth Criminal,” and I fail to see what sins of passive fans like me or my mother might have fed this sad man’s public flame-out. We wanted more records, not destruction!

by: David Cantwell

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:30:38 +0000

And I can’t believe that no one has latched on to how obviously I’m ripping off/using Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily here… !!!!

by: David Cantwell

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:29:34 +0000

Peter, Thanks for writing such a thoughtful note. We’ll have to disagree about the 80s, generally, particularly the notion that they were “all about skimming the surface looking for a party.” (Not that there is anything wrong with parties, particulalry if we’re after humanistic generosity and meaning.) There are too many exceptions for that to make much sense to my experience then, though of course in many instances you are exactly right. As for the sound of Thriller, what I meant was that while Thriller sounds like an 80s record, for sure, it doesn’t sound dated, similar to the way those 70s records you mention certainly sound like the 70s but are still listenable today. Whereas Sgt. Peppers have very nearly gotten to the point, I think, where it exisits only as a signifier of that time, unlike so much of the rest of Beatles records.

by: Rene S. Saller

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:27:17 +0000

I think that might be the best, most worthwhile MJ assessment I have read thus far (and god knows there have been a lot of them). Just beautiful, David.

by: Rick Hellman

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:54:56 +0000

Nice to read you again, David!

by: Danny Alexander

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:34:09 +0000

Both great commentaries, David and Steve. David, that loneliness comes through so strong here, and it’s right on. And, Steve, you’ve made me appreciate Thriller in a new way. In both cases, I see a story I thought I knew, I kind of did know, with new eyes.

by: Pete Cenedella

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:37:20 +0000

Thanks for a thoughtful, well-writen (as ever) and heartfelt piece, David. We are virtually the same age (I’m 46) and so I Want You Back, The Love You Save (every bit the equal as a 45 of I Want You Back, in my estimation), ABC and I’ll Be There, Mama’s Pearl and Goin’ Back to Indiana and Ben and Rockin’ Robin were all indispensable, perfect defining moments to me too. And, because we are that age, we hear the precise sort of move into unwanted complexity and weirdness across the unusually long arc of MJ’s storied career. But critical lines are often drawn in maters like these precisely at some personal point where the music ceased to make sense and connect to the critic’s life. For me, I was a punk rocker by the time Thriller came out, and though I was not an ideologue as punks went, Thriller struck me as a load of over-produced rhythm tracks trying desperately to signify, with a hollowness at the core. In that sense it sits for me as a template for all that is wrong with the music of the 1980s.

So I take issue with the idea that Thriller transcends the “sound of the 1980s”… I would argue it defines it to a large degree, maybe it’s the ur-80s record that was followed from here to England and back again — often imitated never duplicated, as Captain Lou Albano used to say.

But to my ears — still, as objectively as one can use them — the sound of the 80s is a hollow one. Lots of flash up top, lots of compression and busy-ness. And rarely a good idea, a great composition, a warm and inviting record that works the pop narcotic into the pleasure centers of the human soul. The J5 had that quality as much as any of the greatest hitmakers of all time. You evoked the diference between the late60’s/70s and the 80s perfectly when you ran down the honor roll of great warm humanistic pop-soul 45s in this piece — I’d add What’s Going On and Freddy’s Dead, People Get Ready and any number of Al Green tracks, but, you know — Yeah. And the 80s will be defined by creepy sounding records filled with paranoid trifles in the lyrics and synthetic drums, hyper-compressed high end and tempos almost invariably too fast (coke vs. weed among the producers, artists and engineers is the simplest explanation there). The 70s sound like a deep, wide, warm, expanse of generosity and questing for meaning; the 80s were all about skimming the surface looking for a party.