Michael Jackson is "evil"

My son's third-grade class did a cute Halloween dance to "Thriller" and. Um. I am sorry but.
yeah my kid's class did the same thing ... it seems pretty uncomfortable to me. surely there's some other song to do a fun halloween dance to?

i hear no less mj out and about than i ever have. heard pyt in the mall recently, the local jack fm station still plays him etc.

surely there's some other song to do a fun halloween dance to?

― tylerw, Friday, November 8, 2019 11:03 AM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah bring back the monster mash

I'm imagining a classroom of third-graders doing a dance routine to Everyday is Halloween now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8NaEtxw6hM

People have more cognitive dissonance about jackson than other celebrities discovered to be abusers

I have more cognitive dissonance over Woody Allen than I do about MJ

I don't care about MJ anymore, I only want to make sure his victims are able to move on with their lives and get past what he did to them. As a person he has been dead to me; his music is something I am going to have to listen to because it's part of the fabric of society but I don't have to subject myself to it voluntarily.

of course i googled this morning to make sure Safechuck was doing ok and found this
Safechuck told Vanity Fair in February that he can't even listen to a Jackson song in public without feeling overwhelmed. "It's still really hard for me. And I don't think a day goes by where I don't hear a song," he said. "You go out to have a drink with your friend, you're trying to relax and let everything go, and he'll come on. Every time. It's hard. It gets easier, but it's still hard."

which led me to the VF article, which I haven't read because I need a break atm. still the headline says it all: "Michael is Everywhere"
In the doc, Safechuck's pronoun usage (frequently deferring to "you" when discussing what happened to himself, rather than saying me/I) led me to believe everything is still quite raw for him. :( but he does seem to be doing ok.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/02/michael-jackson-accusers-explain-speaking-out-hbo-leaving-neverland

I can still listen to his music but fault no one who can't.

and, yeah, I hear his music in the wild often, less so on quiet storm R&B, formally a redoubt.

I still hear his stuff all the time and yeah it just sounds different to me now, can't separate them out anymore. of course this stuff was all out there well before the documentary but there was juuuust enough plausible deniability that I figured, hmmm maybe you don't need to think about this every time Billie Jean comes on. but yeah at this point I'm too creeped out by it

funny enough I just got back from a restaurant where the first song I heard was "I Believe I Can Fly"...someone didn't get the memo I guess

idk how anyone can hear "PYT" and not think "hmmm, child fucking"

oddly the Thriller single I've most heard in the wild

that's the thing with some of these #metoo/cancel culture moments - when the stuff is front and center in the work (see also: R. Kelly, "Manhattan", a bunch of Gary Glitter songs) it's just impossible to get around. For me, anyway.

"Billie Jean is not my lover. But the kid is not my son."

yuck.

Glitter in particular is tough for me cuz the *sound* of those singles is so great but then you get to something like the "I'm the man who put the bang in gang!" line and I'm just like... ok, I'm done

after seeing this doc i can't even think about the word "bad" without feeling his unwanted presence

i read the vanity fair interview; there is a lot of interesting stuff about why the filmmakers did the doc the way they did, how much Robson and Safechuck were able to talk before they saw the film (one meeting, supervised) and how grateful they were for each other's presence. interestingly for me, they also talk about dissociation.

I thought the documentary a shoddy piece of work, but it did what it was supposed to, although not enough. I haven't read about what Robson and Safechuck are up to.

there was one point in the doc when i was like "can we please stop talking about the dad?!" and i think that could have been cut out probably, though i can see why they included it to show what was going on with their family dynamic. and it was sad, though not esp relevant to the larger arc.

One of the things I thought most interesting about the VF piece was learning that Robson didn't know what his family had said, or how deeply the relationship w MJ had torn up his family until they all sat down to watch the movie together and their interviews were on screen for the whole world to see. As for Safechuck's quiet demeanor, he seemed like he had been mildly sedated to me. Not in a bad way, like he was fucked up but to keep himself from wigging out on camera. :( can you imagine how hard it was to say all that stuff to a camera and then watch it in a room full of people? i wish him nothing but peace.

ime reporting on someone due in court who suddenly has health issues that preclude travel, or a previously unheralded condition, or injury, that lead to them arriving at court hours or days or years past their scheduled dates, clad in hospital attire or carrying oxygen tanks, in front of cameras, never ends up with that person being a sweet blameless angel

eg from Skase to Pell

hey I got this one in under the wire

and in other "kept going to court very late in wheelchairs and oxygen tanks in order to somehow prove they couldn't be child molesters" news, Dragoncon founder Ed Kramer lasted two months out of his 5-year house arrest before getting caught photographing a child in a doctor's office

https://i.imgur.com/807omva.jpg