Michael Jackson
The king of pop
If you lived above it, you may have found
yourself awake at 3 A.M., listening to a song you knew by heart: that
familiar thump, that familiar chant. As Jackson and Dibango and millions
of listeners discovered, you can't escape "Thriller." But, then, why
would you want to ?
The news of Michael Jackson's death arrived late on Thursday
afternoon, and the great outpouring of celebrity eulogies began
immediately. Steven Spielberg: "His talent, his wonderment, and his
mystery make him legend." Beyonc‚: "He was magic." John Mayer: "I truly
hope he is memorialized as the '83 moonwalking, MTV-owning, mesmerizing,
unstoppable, invincible Michael Jackson." And, from France, a gracious
statement came from Manu Dibango, the 75 - year-old African pop pioneer.
He mourned the loss of "un artiste exceptionnel, le plus talentueux et
ing‚nieux" (no translation necessary).
Dibango was one of countless people whose lives were changed by
Jackson's music, although in Dibango's case the changing was mutual. He
was born and reared in Cameroon, and was already a local favorite when
he recorded a song for the Cameroon soccer team.
The result was a 1972 single called "Mouvement Ewondo," but it was
the B side-"Soul Makossa," a honking, galloping funk track-that was the
real hit, in Africa, in Europe, and in America, where it came to be seen
as one of the first disco records.
A generation of disk jockeys learned to wield the power of the song's
famous introduction: a hard beat, a single guitar chord, and Dibango's
low growl. He named his song after the makossa, a Cameroonian dance, but
he stretched the word out, played with it: "Ma-mako, ma-ma-ssa,
mako-makossa."
About a decade later, Dibango was in Paris, listening to the radio at
his apartment, when he heard something familiar: those same syllables,
more or less, in a very different context.
The d.j. was playing "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," the
unconventional first song from "Thriller." It is more than six minutes
long, and although the music is exuberant throughout, the lyrics aren't
as silly as they first sound: paranoia ("Still they hate you, you're a
vegetable/You're just a buffet, you're a vegetable") gives way to
exhortation ("If you can't feed your baby, then don't have a baby") and,
eventually, inspiration ("I believe in me/So you believe in you").
The galloping rhythm sounds a bit like "Soul Makossa," and near the
end Jackson acknowledges the debt by singing words that many listeners
mistook for nonsense: "Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa." Soon,
Dibango's phone started ringing. Friends and relatives were calling to
offer their congratulations: Michael Jackson was singing his song! But
Dibango's pride turned to puzzlement when he bought the album, only to
find that the song was credited to Michael Jackson and no one else.
Dibango eventually worked out a financial agreement with Jackson, and
he made his peace with "Thriller," which might be (depending on how you
keep score) the most popular album of all time. Jackson seemed to have
made his peace with "Thriller," too.
Although he released four more albums of new music in his lifetime,
all multimillion sellers, and although he also had a lifetime's worth of
great songs that predated "Thriller," he didn't seem resentful about the
album that came to define him.
If "Thriller" sometimes obscured his lesser achievements, it also
upstaged his greatest disasters: despite the noise from the
child-molestation scandals, his mutating appearance, and his escalating
eccentricity, those nine songs-almost all of which were released as
singles-were louder.
Jackson gradually withdrew from the Top Forty scrum, but his songs
never did. In 2007, the pop singer Rihanna had a hit with "Don't Stop
the Music," which was based on "Wanna Be Startin' Something." She sings
along with the old syllables: "Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa." Once
again, Dibango heard his chant on the radio, and, once again, he noticed
that he wasn't given credit. (Jackson is listed as a co-songwriter, but
not Dibango.) And so the process started anew.
When Jackson died, Dibango was still waiting for a French court to
decide whether he was owed damages for Rihanna's use of Jackson's
version of Dibango's chant.
When he was asked about this, Dibango replied, through his manager,
that it didn't seem right to talk about it just now. His relationship
with Jackson may have been complicated, but his reaction to Jackson's
death wasn't: he was, he said, "very sad."
Thursday night in New York was hot-after weeks of rain, it was one of
the first real summer nights of the year.
Car windows were open all over the city, and just about every station
on the radio dial had switched to an all-Michael Jackson format; for the
first (and, for all we know, the last) time, it felt as if absolutely
everyone was listening to the same songs.
Later that night, at least one bar in Brooklyn continued the
celebration into the early hours of Friday. If you lived above it, you
may have found yourself awake at 3 A.M., listening to a song you knew by
heart: that familiar thump, that familiar chant.
As Jackson and Dibango and millions of listeners discovered, you
can't escape "Thriller." But, then, why would you want to?
Courtesy: The New Yorker
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