Tuesday, July 7, 2009

The Summer of Michael Jackson Fever


I remember vividly the Michael Jackson fever of the early 1980s. One summer afternoon in 1983, when I was eleven, I had gone to play with the neighbor girl, Paula. Paula was the first on our block to have cable, and whenever I went to her house, all I ever wanted to do was watch TV. So Paula and I were sitting there on the carpet in front of her dad’s console TV set when the new video for “Beat It” came pounding onto the screen and Michael Jackson entered my world for the first time. I was completely captivated by the movement of Michael's feline body, his panting, and his falsetto yelps. I remember wanting to see that video again and again, as I had never seen anything like it before.

My country cousins were also fascinated by Michael Jackson and had the poster of him in Jheri curls and a yellow sweater hanging on their bedroom wall. When they came to stay in the summer of 1983, we borrowed the album Thriller on vinyl from the neighbor girl and, as we lay four across the bed in the half-dark, we made a cassette from it, which we then duplicated three times so we could each have a copy. I accidentally asked my cousin, “Are you asleep?” while the tape was recording, so our copies had my whispered voice in it.

In the weeks that followed, I remember lying in my parents’ camper where we stayed on my grandparents’ farm, stretched out on the mattress with my little boom box, rewinding “Billie Jean” over and over again. I especially loved the part where he sang, about the baby in question, “his eyes were like mine.” I had not had my period yet and sex remained at that time much of a mystery to me, but there in the lyrics of that song, some of the mystery was revealed.

I thought my Michael Jackson fever was just the childish fascination of a girl on the verge of adolescence, but today, the day they are burying the icon of the eighties, I have watched Michael Jackson’s Motown 25 performance of “Billie Jean” at least ten times, and I have not gotten tired of it.