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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Michael was the ultimate heartthrob to my '70s high school girlfriends. But my teenage daughter sees him as only a scary freak who can't stand living with skin the color of hers.
Jun 7, 2004 | I'm driving with my 14-year-old daughter and scanning radio stations when I hear a mellow love song. "That sounds like what we used to listen to in the '80s," I say. It's the muffled electronic drums and smooth, soft R&B rhythm of the '80s, the light floaty voice like DeBarge or Switch, but an echo of someone else.
"It's a Michael Jackson song," my daughter says, rolling her eyes. "He sounds like he's choking on a peanut or something."
She leans forward to poke the button. "Don't change it," I say, listening more closely. I have never heard this particular song, but the shadow of the beat takes me back -- back to when Michael Jackson was the sexy yet innocent soul singer with Milky-Way skin and huge Afro who ruled the girls in my neighborhood.
This week, Jackson was cleared of allegations that he molested a boy in Los Angeles in the late 1980s -- but still awaits trial in Santa Barbara on charges of molestation of a child at his Neverland ranch. But we're listening to the Michael Jackson of my own youth, his voice spiraling into the car windows.
In my Southern California city, and all over America back then, in racially mixed working-class neighborhoods like mine, millions of young girls watched him on television as he clutched the microphone to his chest and bent over with the weight of his love for us, throwing out his brown fingers, pulling the air toward him and moaning, "I want you back!" Thousands of girls screamed and swooned the way others -- white girls -- did for the Beatles or the Monkees. But Michael Jackson and his brothers, as the Jackson Five, were the dreamboats of black America.
Now I look over at my daughter, my oldest, and can't figure out how to tell her that in 1978, in these orange groves we're passing just a few blocks outside my old neighborhood, her father and I used to park his sister's beat-up Pinto and kiss for hours while Michael crooned from the cheap speakers in the door. "Let me show you the way to go," Michael sang, his voice growling deep, catching with emotion. "I'll never let you down, put your hand in mine ..."
"Mom, can I change it now? I don't want to hear this." I glance over at my daughter's lovely caramel face, her long black hair resting in curls on her shoulders. Her mouth has curled in more than disgust at the whispery voice.
"This song is crap," my daughter says impatiently, "Nobody listens to anything by him." She looks out the window. "Everybody hates him."
For my younger daughters, 12 and 8, who never knew him as brown like them, as a singer and dancer who could captivate an audience of adults and children alike, he has always been a figure of shivery fear. Whenever we see the first ghostly shadows of his face on television news shows, someone turns the channel very quickly, sometimes even looking away until Michael Jackson is gone.
But my oldest daughter feels a more intense dislike, because she remembers when Michael Jackson looked something like her. Not his childhood or teen self; he resembled her in his early adult years, circa-"Off The Wall," as he started to become lighter, with long wavy hair and toast-colored skin and that sparkly jacket. My daughter liked sparkly clothes then, too; she was in preschool.
