Through the TV, one grew familiar with the many moves of Michael Jackson.
I still remember the time when my brother and I would rush to neighbourhood audiocassette shops with a list of songs, written on torn pages of notebooks with equally tacky handwriting, to get songs recorded — illegally, as one knows today — onto a blank T-Series cassette. Not surprisingly, most of the tracks — sometimes without us even realising it — were pop songs by Michael Jackson. Our initiation to “Western” music was first through Jackson, possibly because that was the name also familiar to my parents (who weren’t exactly into contemporary Western music themselves). And, with time, I realised that Jackson, who died of a heart attack on June 25, 2009, was a household name all over the world. His music and his moves were familiar to most middle-class families in India, and I still remember how everyone, including my grandparents, even relatives from my father’s village, was familiar with his name, if not his work.
It wasn’t surprising to see friends and little children copy that legendary moonwalk. For my part, I remember the iconic singer through his music and — mostly — through television. In the mid 1980s, for instance, Doordarshan (at 11 pm on Wednesdays and Fridays, if I remember correctly) showcased a programme that featured the best of international music. Though I remember watching it on a humble black-and-white television set, it was exhilarating to graduate to an Onida and watch the same show on a colour TV. That’s when I was introduced to Jackson; my father pointing to the TV screen that showed what I thought a very funny-looking man in dark glasses and awkward-looking leather outfits.
Later, in school, we learnt every line of We Are the World, singing it in the morning assembly meetings, at inter-school competitions and even in evenings, especially at times when there was no electricity and the entire school was plunged in darkness. We studied Jackson’s moves on a lone television set that used to be kept in our Common Room, an area in the hostel where we were allowed to spend only an hour every day. It was here that we went crazy observing the video of Black or White, especially because there was a tiny portion in the song’s video which featured Jackson doing a classic Bharatnatyam step. The world may be termed flat today, but back then, when cable television was just starting out, there was no concept of the Internet, no DVDs that were easily available and when one had to depend on NRI relatives to bring back such goodies, it meant a lot to watch Jackson’s music videos and songs on TV. We tried copying his moves, waited for his videos to be aired on television to try and remember which step we had missed out on previously.
Courtesy Jackson, many middle-class Indians stepped comfortably into the world of Western pop music culture. While we were in school, we got more and more familiar with his music, sincerely jotting down lyrics and picking up his songs. In college, though one still listened to him, many other names had started cropping up on our list of favourites. In fact, sometimes, it was even unfashionable to say that one enjoyed Jackson’s music. The truth, however, was that Jackson’s reach had transcended barriers and reached even the lanes and bylanes of not just metros but even cities and villages of India.
But television images of him dangling his baby in the balcony, his nervous glances in front of media cameras just before he went inside the court for the trial where he was accused of being paedophilic, his emaciated, pale white face when he spoke to Martin Bashir on the documentary Living with Michael, were a far cry from other images that I had grown up observing. Back in his heyday, TV cameras showed a confident Jackson who not only performed but even set trends as far as music and choreography were concerned. His music videos were a treat, and one simply understood why cameras showed fans fainting at the very sight of his live performances.
Farewell — and thank you — Jackson. Through you, I found another way to enjoy my television jaunts.
