Michael Jackson

Sukumar Ranganathan — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:34:00 GMT

Michael Jackson is dead.
When I was in school in 1980s-Chennai, Michael Jackson was the man and Billie Jean was the song.
My neignbour, several years older, was supposedly studying engineering at Manipal and he had introduced me to such engineering school staples as Jethro Tull and Deep Purple (and also such oddities such as Tina Charles and Giorgio -- Manipal must have been a strange place in the 1980s) but I was still fascinated by Billie Jean.
Michael Jackson can be credited with making music videos more popular than the music itself, and while there weren't too many music videos to be seen in India of the 1980s -- that would come with the satellite television revolution of the early 1990s -- there was enough of Jackson to be seen on TV and pirated VHS tapes (remember the video libraries that sprouted across India in the 1980s -- well, all of them lived off pirated tapes). The moonwalk was imitated by schoolboys and movie stars alike (with varying degrees of success). And those who couldn't dance tries to dress like Jackson. Or sport his hairstyle.
In many ways, Michael Jackson was the first pop star to be truly recognised in India. Chennai has always had its share of jazz snobs and rock aficionados but Thriller was popular enough for local music shops to rip off recordings on cheap cassettes and sell them for Rs 20 a pop.
A few years later, I went to engineering school myself (not to Manipal, though), and discovered Pink Floyd, one of the presiding music deities at colleges to date. But Jackson still had a huge following. Two years into engineering college I interned at one of India's largest truck makers. One of my fellow interns was an IIT Delhi student called Kannan. Except, we called him Jacko. He looked like Michael Jackson, dressed like Michael Jackson, sported a hairdo like Jackson's, and walked like Michael Jackson. I lost touch with Kannan soon after the internship ended but I'd like to think that somewhere out there in the US -- where most IIT grads end up anyway -- in some underground hi-tech lab, he is mourning the death of the man he always wanted to be (although that man, in turn, wanted to be something else).
My musical tastes moved away from Jackson and Floyd fairly quickly, although in recent years I have rediscovered both through cover versions by jam band Umphrey's McGee.
And sure enough, they have a version of Billie Jean.

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A Daily Download : Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson