gaze up at the weirdness
Rich Juzwiak on Michael Jackson.
He was the kind of man who thought audiences would be “nourished” by the reinsertion of eight bars of “The Way You Make Me Feel” into its live arrangement, the kind of man who considered “love is important,” to be an “important” message to convey in his show, the kind of man who would wear a blazer with cartoonishly pointed shoulders over a T-shirt depicting an iced-out Popeye. It was a man so mired in weirdness, he had no idea how weird he was (I’ll never forget the astonished way he asked Martin Bashir, “You don’t climb trees?!?”). Except now, instead of rolling our eyes at that weirdness, we gaze up at it and sigh. It took a lot for us to come around, but I’m glad we did.