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The peculiar thing about Fantom Island is that it is but a mirage – an Imaginary oasis isolated in the confines of our brainwaves. We shall gradually reveal morsels of our folklore here, so please visit often. To return, simply bring your Imagination as your passport.
Fantom Island
I Was Basically Michael Jackson's Chinese Lovechild: A Thrilling Memoir, by the drizzletron.
*i know i’ve been posting forever amounts of michael jackson stuff, and i realize it’s been my way to mourn. wahhh! let me be!!
I must admit, I wasn’t the biggest Michael Jackson fan. In fact, for the majority of my life, I thought about Michael the same way I thought about most other musicians that my parents would play on their oldies stations in the minivan — Phil Collins, The Carpenters, that “Circles in the Sand” song… The first Michael Jackson tape I ever owned didn’t even have him singing on it…it was an MJ cover tape by Alvin and the Chipmunks, and when I was 8 I’d spend hours meandering the hallways of my house with my Sesame Street bus boombox and “Man in the Mirror” on knock.
But even with that memory, I can’t say I was necessarily a fan. Like many other 80′s babies, I didn’t have the mental capacity to appreciate Thriller — the universe’s biggest album ever — as a shriveled fetus. Thriller dropped November 30, 1982. I was born on May 24, nine months later. Yes, there’s a 1 in 9 chance I was conceived to “Human Nature.”
(yikes that means there’s a i in 9 chance i was conceived to “thriller”…yikes i don’t want to talk about this anymore)
With a million copies sold per week, I’m sure my embryo self heard enough “P.Y.T.” to P.U.K.E. all over its umbilical cord (isn’t it strange how we refer to our embryos like they’re pets we used to have? or is that just me? sorry, i’m a distracted person). My transformation into a human being was soundtracked not by soft-playing headphones of Mozart, but by Michael playing in the background while my newly-wed parents moved into their first home. I was born a month after the first moonwalk.
So actually, I thought about Michael the way I thought about most things that I was born into –muffins, fire hydrants, love. Michael Jackson was just always around. His music was on every playlist, every mixtape, video countdown, and car ride that lasted more than 9 songs deep. My memories of big family gatherings consist of a large television screen either playing Chinese soap operas or Moonwalker.He was like the Dalai Lama. Or the Pope. He might eventually reincarnate as another chosen Michael Jackson, but he’d never die.
The Mortality of Mike
I once asked my mom how old Michael Jackson was, and she answered, “Around my age.” From then on I imagined Michael Jackson and my mom celebrating their birthdays together, blowing cake candles and unwrapping boxes of sparkly gloves. In many ways the rubric she made up never lost its accuracy. Mom stays looking young because of her Chinese lady genes, and Michael Jackson stays looking young because he’s Michael Jackson. From that point on, Michael stayed in my life. And my growth grew inversely with his reputation. My first steps when his hair caught on fire. My first words when his rumors spread about skin-bleaching. I began middle school when his first sex charges came out. I reached puberty when he started having white babies. By the time Michael reached his awkward “yikes, I’m in between surguries…” phase, I was a fully-blossomed college freshman douchebag giggling as I clicked my mouse over reloads of Michael Jackson’s decaying face in the form of an animated gif.
I was never really into the Michael Jackson jokes. I never got into enough light-hearted conversations about child molestation to be able to bring them up (“hey, speaking of child molestation, did you hear about the one where Michael…”) but my distaste for them was attributed not to my empathy for Michael, but rather my annoyance at the thought of entertaining something as cliche as another Michael Jackson joke.
In the meantime, the Gemini twin to my college freshman douchebag self was my “I’m on my own for the first time and allowing my geekiness to roam freeeeee I’m going to listing to ALL the music ever” self. And so on the day Invincible came out, I was the one in the dorm building that was knocking on doors at 8am screaming “THE NEW MICHAEL’S OUT!!!!!” Lucky for me that no one hacked into my WinAmp to find out that the only Michael Jackson album I had was disc one of History. Yes, I was blasphemous, a hypocrite, I completely made a big deal of his album, ran to Tower to buy it (I got the blue cover), listened to it for all of two days, spilled my Jamba Juice on the CD booklet and shoved it into my shelf never to be spun again. After all, I was my new college “explore all the great music of the past” self, and I was going to listen to things of the past like Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald and Nirvana. Michael Jackson wasn’t of the past, and I’d have all the time in the world to listen to him later.
Wanna Be Like Mike
i have this faint memory. it’s a michael jackson concert on television. it was huge, in that he was broken down enough to make it so that the fact that he was seen in public was a big deal. i couldn’t see walls in the auditorium, if it were one. from the stage camera looking out into the crowd, it is an endless sea of people. i don’t remember if i watched this as a baby, or high schooler, or in college, and it might just be a fantasy that i blended together with fragments of all the michael jackson footage i’ve ever seen…a perfect magnificent menagerie of every great thing that would make a live michael jackson show the greatest thing ever. i remember this memory as the moment i decided that i wanted to be a performer.
The Morality of Mike
The more I wanted to be famous, the less funny the Michael Jackson jokes got. It became an old wives’ tale for young college artists…a name-association game iLL-Lit would play while sitting at hotelroom patios soaking in memories of the future.
I’d want to be big like Marley but not like Cobain. Like Jay-Z but not Elvis. Like Stevie but not Michael.
We’d hopscotch these names and measure how thin the line is between praise and pity. The artists who all ended tragically because their fame ate them, chewed them up, and spit them back out. That fame that belonged to artists we didn’t want to be like, they had all died tragically, except Michael. Good ol Michael, hanging out at Neverland, like always and forever. And so besides the Chipmunks album, and multiple viewings of Captain Eo, I didn’t really reach fan status. Amidst my hard-drive-killing music library I have maybe 3 full Michael albums. I eventually learned his songs by the default of going out a lot. When he announced that he was coming out with a new album, I smuggly blogged that I had given up on him, as a sidenote at the end of a reflection on Lauryn Hill. Throughout two decades of watching Michael maimed and dangled by the media, I had finally lost hope. Seeing him in the news was like looking at a lion in a zoo. Unable to even look at the screen for long enough, whether it was a tabloid photo or a more recent music video. There was nothing I could do, and I could only wish him the best, if I ever were to even stop to think about it for long enough in the first place.
Missing Michael
Michael Jackson’s death has saddened me more deeply than I ever would’ve thought. It’s actually shocked me how sad I am…the past few days have been somber, and in the studio we all had to keep on working on music because every time we stopped we’d just end up talking about Michael. It makes me question if I understand the capacity of dealing with death yet. It baffles me how many Michael Jackson memories I’ve had throughout my life, and each time I shed a new one, I regress into sadness. Because I had to come to terms with the truth of the matter, which is that I slept on Michael Jackson.
Had I looked beyond hotbox conversations and actually attempted to listen to the fellow artist speak, it would be so much clearer that we were witnessing the institutional oppression of a single human being. And he knew exactly what was going on.
And others as well.
The first few days after Michael passed, I felt a deep swell of guilt, that we as humans pushed a person so deeply, it killed him. Can you imagine, having your entire species turn against you? Just because you outsold the powers that be’s favorite artists? My regret truly comes from the understanding that I was co-opted to, at the very least, disregard him.
I’m sure that there’s some moral that I lost somewhere amidst my long-windedness. Probably something about not taking other humans for granted, and there was this analogy like after a firefighter puts out a fire you don’t say “your hose spraying sucked!” so why do you do that to artists? but it made wayyyy much more sense in my head. I just needed to make my peace. May the best be yet to come.
