Re: How old was you when you started to listnening to Michael Jackson?
Sorry, bit of a story.
I would have been about 5/6 years old, it would have been around 1995. My Mother recorded one of MJ's concerts off the TV, it would have to have been a concert from the Dangerous tour, but not the one that's on DVD now, it was different to that. I remember being given the video and I was thrilled about it to begin with because I wasn't really into music videos, I liked action movies. I put it on anyway and I liked it. I remember being scared during Thriller because the zombies were dragging MJ to a coffin and being young I thought they were going to hurt him.
After that he was my favourite person in the world, my Mother said I used to sleep with his picture under my pillow and that I used to talk to the picture. I'm glad I was allowed to watch and listen to MJ, I'll bet by stepfather didn't like it, he had a bad opinion of MJ but I don't remember him saying anything negative to me. I suspect my Mother would have throttled him if he had.
I watched that concert video all the time and had a friend a year younger than me who also loved MJ. He had a large MJ poster on his bedroom wall and we used to talk MJ and watch the concert together. One night when I was about 7 I had a dream that MJ came to my house in a helicopter and tried to kidnap me. I'm not sure what led to a dream like this, maybe I heard someone say something negative and it buried itself in my subconscious, I'm not sure. It was a stupid dream but being a young child it scared me so I decided I didn't like him anymore and moved onto interests in other things.
I didn't think about MJ much after that for a number of years and I didn't know very much about him anymore. About a year or so before his death that stupid "MJ was my lover" documentary was on TV and I watched it with my Mother. I was probably in my mid teens at that stage and had no idea what the media was really like or that things in documentaries aren't true just because they're shown on TV. I thought what was said was true. My Mother said she felt sorry for MJ even though she believed it too. I took a view at that point that life had been tough for him and felt compassion even though I believed that crap.
That horrible day when I learned he'd died I was shocked, I'd just got up and was about to have a shower. I hoped it wasn't true, his death hadn't been confirmed yet. I cried in the shower which was a big thing for me, crying is something I rarely do even when very stressful or traumatic things are happening. Unbeknown to me I still had an emotional connection to MJ left over from my childhood, I just hadn't known it was still there. Usually I can detach myself a fair bit when deaths occur or are imminent, I did this with my Grandmother when we found out she had a couple of years to live. I was about 9 then.
Since I wasn't aware I still had a connection to MJ I didn't have the chance to put the guard up so I was blindsided by grief and emotion. I was confused because this was a man I'd never met and hardly knew anything about. I remember expressing my confusion to my Mother while we were in the car one day, and she said MJ was a big part of my life when I was a kid so it was natural that I'd be upset.
I can honestly say I've never grieved for anyone the way I did for MJ, not even any of the 26 people who's funerals I've attended in the last 8 years. It wasn't that I didn't care for any of those people, I'm just fairly closed off emotionally because I've had to be to survive. I relearned things about MJ after his death, I threw myself into intense research to find out about this man I was grieving for.
I was participating in discussions regularly on the main MJ facebook fan page when it still had a discussion board but it wasn't moderated and was full of haters. Fans were conversing with them and defending MJ and there were a handful providing information. All the discussion piqued my curiosity and I decided to research the allegations against MJ. To be honest, since I didn't know much about it and everything I'd heard and read via media was negative I was almost 100% sure I would find evidence of guilt.
I was 20 at the time and knew very little about how the media worked and what they could and couldn't get away with saying or doing. I knew they'd exaggerate their stories or get certain details wrong but had no idea of the extent. I read things from both perspectives and found the Vindicating Michael blog through the discussions on the MJ facebook page. I liked this site because documents and other pieces of evidence are provided so you can see for it yourself, it wasn't just someone's opinion. I learned about logical fallacies and critical thinking which enabled me to better understand the burden of proof and what it really requires to prove something.
I felt horrible as I was learning about it for a couple of reasons. One reason was that I felt guilty because I'd jumped to a conclusion without making sure I had my facts right first and that wasn't fair. I was disappointed in myself, and these days I hate it when people don't fact check before reaching a conclusion and opening their mouths but this doesn't just apply to MJ, it applies to everything, after all, it wouldn't be consistent not to apply it to everything. I love learning what I can about MJ and have learned about many interesting things that have helped me in everyday life. I'll be a hardcore fan until the day I die.
