I’m watching “Michael Jackson’s This Is It,” the documentary cobbled together out of rehearsal footage from Michael’s farewell concert series (which, of course, was cancelled due to a sudden onset of death).
I could spend this whole post describing the strange contradiction that Michael represented. He was a certified weirdo, made even weirder by an unlimited spending account; a freakish and very public example of body dysmorphic disorder; and if not a pedophile, certainly a man who didn’t have a typical notion of how to behave around kids.
And yet. And yet! Watching him prance around onstage, in his skinny pants and oddball jackets, I was involuntarily sucked into the performance. Michael had infinite stage presence and wrote timeless pop songs that were totally unlike anyone else’s. As Chris Rock so elegantly put it:
“How much do we love Michael Jackson? We love Michael so much, we let the first kid SLIDE!”