From Psalm 37 to the King of Pop: Where Else Can You Find This Kind of Variety?

OK, I’ll just come right out and say it. I was a Michael Jackson fan. I am a true product of 1980’s teen culture—I’ve got the senior picture to prove it—and the Thriller album was our soundtrack. It was the first cassette tape I bought with my own money. (I nodded at this quote from Wikipedia: “At some point, Thriller stopped selling like a leisure item—like a magazine, a toy, tickets to a hit movie—and started selling like a household staple.”)

I got my Thriller tape the summer between sixth and seventh grades. Those were pinnacle years of my youth, spent in a little town in southwestern Oklahoma. We were about as far off the cultural radar screen as a town could be, but Thriller still managed to find us. I will never forget watching the video debut on MTV, a marvel of modern technology that had made its way to the sticks. I sat around the TV with a room full of pubescent girls. We screamed. We cried. We watched over and over again, sometimes in slow motion. We formed a Michael Jackson fan club on the spot. No matter that it was slightly creepy and we were clueless about the historical impact of a video full of African-Americans appearing on MTV for the first time. We just thought it was cool.

Up to that point, I’d never actually known a black person. I’m not even sure I knew Michael Jackson was black (and he still was in the early 80s). It didn’t matter if I did. I’d never heard of the Jackson Five, Motown, or the Apollo theater. I thought Paul McCartney was just that funny old guy who sang along on Michael’s song “The Girl Is Mine.” My world was small, but I knew every word to “We Are the World,” how to fake the moonwalk, how to strut my stuff to “Beat It” in my polyester cheerleading skirt.

By the time I got to college in the ’90s, my childhood crush was gone, and Michael was well on his way to becoming Wacko Jacko. Still, one night at a square dance at my very, very white Christian college, I watched a group of very, very white college students break out into Thriller dance moves, totally in sync, totally from memory. No one who grew up in the ’80s escaped its influence.

I bet I wasn’t the only middle-aged mom who shed a few tears last week as I watched tributes to one who so powerfully shaped my generation. I was in seventh grade all over again, remembering who I was with and what I was wearing (ee-gads!) when those Michael Jackson songs played continually on every boom box. I sat my kids down for a two-minute tutorial on this man whose death is all over the news. I didn’t try to explain how a black man becomes white or the freaky behavior or his unprecedented cultural influence. I just told them that when I think of Michael Jackson, I remember a lot of really good days, big hair and all.