Thrill me now

Billy Jean is not my lover.
In fact, when Michael Jackson sang those words 25 years ago, I blushed the blush of the truly innocent. I couldn’t sing along. Speaking such words aloud was verboten in my mother’s household.
That was then.
Driving from Ronan to Mission the other night, I flipped on NPR for some aural culture. The announcer said Michael Jackson’s album Thriller was 25 years old.
My first response was, “Gee, does that mean I’m old, too?”
When Thriller first hit the charts (it’s still the second best selling album of all time), I was a freshman in college. My dance teacher liked the tracks, for trying to teach us jazz steps and movements.
Being the cloistered white girl I was, let’s just say the rhythm escaped me. But I listened to the words.
Always a geek, I loved Shakespeare and London and Emerson for the crafting of their words. They expressed ideas with clarity like thinnest ice. And here, blasted through speakers in a public gym, were songs “off the street,” to my sheltered ears.
Songs about a man whose not-girlfriend turns up with a baby she says is his. Songs like Paul McCartney’s duet with Jackson, “The Doggone Girl is Mine,” which reached into the hidden places of America with the notion that segregation was, indeed, dead.
It wasn’t many years before that I stood with a group of students in an emergency assembly when our school was threatened by a White Power gang. Never mind that I was white. I didn’t know to make that distinction.
Now Jackson was singing with pop idol McCartney, dickering politely over a single girl. It was a testament to the progress of the civil rights movement that these two singers, from different colored worlds, shared a hit song. It was as if they were announcing to the larger world, “Hey! This is America! We’ve grown up!” It was as if that racial disparity of the decade before had been, not just set aside, but obliterated.
(All this insight because I couldn’t learn some dance steps, so I had to go and psychoanalyze a song.)
The music I grew up listening to was colorblind as well. Bill Withers lamented “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone,” while the Carpenters sat on top of the world and Johnny Cash fell into a burning ring of fire. There weren’t as many distinctions between style, color, or format on the radio those days. After all, there was AM, and that was about it.
But Michael Jackson was always part of “soul music.”
In fourth grade, my music teacher asked the class to name their favorite singing family. Of a class of thirty, almost everyone said “The Jackson Five.” My penchant for literalness kept me from speaking up for the Partridge Family.
After all, the singing group known for pop harmonies and happy-feel beats was a fiction, a TV group invented for the media. But they were my favorite.
Maybe it was just that rhythm thing. I couldn’t keep up to the Jackson Five’s beat.
Now Thriller is 25, and I’m 25 years older. Still a little sheltered. Still can’t do the steps. But in the larger music world those tunes that I found so radical seem innocent and benign.
I can goof along to “Billy Jean.” I can laugh as my kids discover funk.
“Hey mom! Listen to this new song!” They said last weekend, dancing along to Rick James and the Commodores and Peaches and Herb, all on a mix CD they’d gotten from their dad.
It’s far more innocuous than what they might find on the FM dial.
When Michael Jackson re-releases Thriller, as a 25 year special remix this coming February, I just might have to buy it — for the first time.