Michael Joseph Jackson was an American recording artist, dancer, singer songwriter, musician, and philanthropist. Referred to as the King of Pop, Jackson is recognized as the most successful entertainer of all time by Guinness World Records. His contribution to music, dance, and fashion, along with a much publicized personal life, made him a global figure in popular culture for over four decades. On June 25, 2009, Jackson died while in his bed at his rented mansion at 100 North Carolwood Drive in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles. Attempts at resuscitating him by Conrad Murray, his personal physician, were unsuccessful. Jackson's death triggered a global outpouring of grief. The news spread quickly online, causing websites to slow down and crash from user overload. Both TMZ and the Los Angeles Times suffered outages. Google initially believed that the input from millions of people searching for "Michael Jackson" meant that the search engine was under DDoS attack. After his death, Jackson became the best selling albums artist of 2009 in the United States selling over 8.2 million albums in the U.S. and a total of 35 million albums worldwide in the 12 months that followed his death.
As long as there are appreciators of great music, Michael Jackson will continue to live on. He has grown to become larger than a phenomenon and more like myth. It is a shrine to the man who thanks to Elizabeth Taylor became known to the world as The King of Pop. The site has a plethora of facts, lyrics, pictures, videos, merchandise, and just about anything else from Michael that a fan can dream of. Every song from Michael Jackson’s solo career and every one of his short films is available to listen to and watch for free.
What stood out to me is the amount of love that his fans showed to him, these are real fans. In the photo galleries are hand drawn and computer rendered pieces of art that are inspired by Michael, one of his songs, or recreations of him. They are crafted with the love that he tried to show everyone in the world through music that often contained messages of hope and inspirations to fight a struggle. Through most of Michael’s career he fought a struggle. A struggle deep from within that manifested itself in an ever changing face and a retreat into his inner child. That lifestyle garnered national attention, everyone raised an eyebrow… Except for a Michael Jackson fan. Quincy Jones once said that the one thing that every one of Michael’s songs were autobiographical. If there was any truth to this then the fans knew Michael through his music. The fans knew that there was no way possible Michael would ever do the things that he was accused of. This was the beginning of Michael’s fall from grace in the United States in the eyes of everyone… Except for a Michael Jackson fan.
A fan will view this as justice; I view it as a tragic irony, Evan Chandler committed suicide shortly after Michael’s death. Evan is the father of Jordan Chandler; the two of them together accused Michael of child molestation in 1993. It has been rumored a multitude of times that Jordan has openly admitted to people close to him that he was forced to go along with it and that nothing improper had ever actually taken place. Michael Jackson fans believe this. Michael was the type of artist that thrived off of being able to make others happy, once he fell from hard from fame, he felt he had lost everything, so he retreated. So did the nation, and again that excludes Michael Jackson fans. Since the release of the first posthumous album called Michael, there have been three new videos, oddly enough without Michael in them. The first was from the duet song Hold My Hand with Akon. The video featured Akon with historical clips of Michael. The second was from the song Hollywood Tonight and told an interesting story about a girl much like the one described in the song and the last just released is from the song Behind the Mask. The thing that these videos share in common is that they are feature either largely or completely consist of fans.
A fan will view this as justice; I view it as a tragic irony, Evan Chandler committed suicide shortly after Michael’s death. Evan is the father of Jordan Chandler; the two of them together accused Michael of child molestation in 1993. It has been rumored a multitude of times that Jordan has openly admitted to people close to him that he was forced to go along with it and that nothing improper had ever actually taken place. Michael Jackson fans believe this. Michael was the type of artist that thrived off of being able to make others happy, once he fell from hard from fame, he felt he had lost everything, so he retreated. So did the nation, and again that excludes Michael Jackson fans. Since the release of the first posthumous album called Michael, there have been three new videos, oddly enough without Michael in them. The first was from the duet song Hold My Hand with Akon. The video featured Akon with historical clips of Michael. The second was from the song Hollywood Tonight and told an interesting story about a girl much like the one described in the song and the last just released is from the song Behind the Mask. The thing that these videos share in common is that they are feature either largely or completely consist of fans.
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