MJ...every song was so good...

I wouldn't have had this epiphany if I hadn't seen Dr. Chaudhry's awesome violation of MJ's Beat It. I settled down in my seat, gleefully waiting to hear the good doctor's latest musical blasphemy, when the jangling opening chords of Beat It coaxed some deep, deep memories.

Then it started. The beat. The freewheeling guitar riff, then the jagged progression, and suddenly, I wasn't hearing Dr. Chaudhry's abominable voice, but MJ begging his negro brethren to just beat it, beat it, beat it.

When we were kids, my brother and I heard only Michael Jackson. We didn't like any other foreign music. It took too much getting used to. We listened to all the Tamil songs, in those days they would release the casette before the movie, and we would buy MJ too. I remember throwing a tantrum in Bangalor and getting two MJ casettes for behaving like a spoilt brat.

Not a single song was bad in those casettes. You hear them even now, the Bad, Dangerous and Thriller albums. Every song is eminently worth hearing and most are unforgettable. Who can forget the way the first side of the Dangerous casette would start with Jam, that awesome song? And Jam wasn't even the title song.

Every song was good. Every song was fresh. As kids we didn't know that other albums had mediocre songs, remixes to buffer the weak second side, that more often than not the title song was a chartbuster, and thats it. As kids, we thought we got our value for money only when every song was good, which was the case only with MJ.

Can you imagine, for a moment, how great an achievement that is? Two TamBrahm kids, waking up listening to suprabhatham or the kandasashti kavacham. A vague folk-music tradition in school. Some weekly violin classes for me. The phenomenon of AR Rahman and the legend that was Ilaiyaraja. This was our musical background. MJ had no way to get in based on our previous liking, MJ had no way to draw on any ancient folk memories ingrained in us. Let me clarify. Listen to say, any song like naka muka. It relies on the fact that since childhood most Tamilians in Madras have heard the blank verse, atonal naka muka chants. Vijay Anthony merely needs to add a few chords and it becomes a vigourous song. MJ couldn't do that.

Or if you are AR Rahman. Set in a melody clear and lucid like glass, shifting carnatic rhythms. If you are Ilaiyaraja, depend heavily on rich melodies from carnatic music. If you are a carnatic singer, do not expect to lure children unless the parents have educated the taste.

I am sure something similar applies to every Indian, a mixture of folk, cinema and high culture music. MJ had nothing like that by which to appeal to us. Yet, we found each, each song good. How? I don't know.

I shut Chaudhry's latest act of innocent vandalism and opened MJ's Stranger in Moscow. It had been one of my favourite MJ songs, meditative, very moving, with its melody gliding over each syllable like a stream through pebbles. I thought I would find it cliched now. Nothing of that sort. The lyrics struck me this time (who among us can claim to understand foreign lyrics when they were kids?)

Kremlin's shadow is belittling me....
Stalin's tomb won't let me be.

I was surprised to see a small bunch of lyrics by Bob Dylan included in a poetry anthology I was reading. I was pretty shocked. I didn't find his lyrics too moving, I felt forced to appreciate something lauded by many scholars, plenty of normal US folk, and several others. But hey, I didn't buy Dylan's casettes as a kid. I wouldn't have liked him as a kid.

I think a lot of us will remember the same things about MJ's music, and sadly, the same things about his later life.

I listen mostly to jazz or western classical, or indian classical now. I can still listen to MJ, but somehow its not the same thing. Because unlike the other things I discovered, MJ didn't change me, his music just helped me have a great time. The other things changed me, and made me what I am, which unfortunately left out music like MJ's. But maybe that should change, because if MJ could do that kind of music, maybe its not so dumb after all. Was Earth Song dumb? Was Black or White lame? Was Jam uninspired? They were all so vigourous and so unbelievably, effortlessly good! I had to do no thinking. No listening twice, thrice until I had it figured out. No trying to appreciate a song because a friend was into it (this happens a lot with Jazz...where each song is dangerously easy to ignore, and dangerously easy to get addicted to).

His music will live forever because children will listen to it easily. Adults will not. Adults won't because they will contextualise it, see in it traces of Western Classical Masters, or just go on to the next fad (I don't even know who the current rock star is). But I bet you, give a kid a casette of Dangerous, and he'll be hooked.

RIP MJ. Your music is truly immortal.