ABSTRACT
Let me begin with a confession, one that carries a whiff of sacrilege in the giddy worshipping-of-all-things-Michael dawn of the AJ (after Jackson) era: I never liked “Thriller.” Even less the slick, over-wrought and cloying video. Like a car crash, though, you couldn’t avert your eyes from it in 1982. An alienated 19-year-old at the time, I recall repeated, passive viewings on MTV: my soul as submerged in the funk and lassitude of adolescent despair, as my body was sunk into my parents’ suburban, NJ couch. In the wake of Jackson’s recent, possibly drug-induced death, though, I have re-interpreted my early “Thriller” encounters—out of the fog of memory—as a kind of cultural OD’ing. The video’s glitzy, dizzying sense of too-muchness was like a drug: floating me into an apathetic, mindless trance.
