My sister and I had a Michael Jackson party tonight, which meant drinking wine and watching the horrible MTV coverage before switching to the video marathon on the ME channel, her dancing passably well, and me bruising my elbow while trying to do a flip off the couch to "Billie Jean."
ME was showing a lot of the full-length concept videos, which was kind of entertaining. I had forgotten about those--aside from "Thriller," they never get played on those Hey, You Guys, Do You Remember How it Used to be the 80s? retrospective shows.
The long videos are all vaguely arty, boring, and equal parts awesome and disturbing. Michael Jackson always plays some absolutely implausible character, like a football star or a 30s gangster or a prep school kid named Darryl. The setups have a lot of exposition and terse dialogue and no dramatic interest whatsoever until, finally, Michael reaches some sort of emotional breaking point and shows his enemies and detractors how very wrong they are and how extremely right he is through the persuasive power of choreographed dance.
I kept complaining about how none of them made any sense, and my sister kept pointing out that it didn't matter once everyone started dancing. She was right, of course; the dancing is tremendous, but in light of everything that happened, those videos seem pretty fucked up now. Also, it's sad and strange to see how very handsome and charming Michael Jackson really was during the Off the Wall era.
That's all I'm going to say about it, except that it was great to be in third grade when Thriller blew up, and also my elbow is still kind of sore.