Guest post by Anthony Green of VOICEbook in Italy“Hey come in here quick, Caroline! Come in here, Judith!
Wow, just look at these kids’ hair, can you believe they’re our age too!”
My younger sisters and I sat wide-eyed in front of the black-and-white television, enthralled by the verve of the Jackson Five, but when it came to choosing our favourite there was no contest – it just had to be the youngest, the lead singer in the group, Michael, with his
impish smile and seemingly inexhaustible lust for life.
We wished we could be as cool as them, though at the time we had nothing physically in common with them: we were typical fair-haired English kids with slightly pointed noses and they were typical Afro-American kids from Indiana.
The Michael who died last week, was a shadow of his former self, the energy gone, his Afro-American features distorted forever by his reliance on plastic surgery – his nose was now the same shape as mine
for goodness’ sake, and to think it was me who wanted to be like him, not the other way round!
A poor little rich kid who had been so successful that money had completely lost all meaning. How many of us would have exchanged our lives with his in the last ten years? Very few, I imagine.
That's what makes his life story so sad. He had everything he could possibly have wanted and yet apparently he had nothing.
When he was the young man he had reinvented himself in the early 1980s, just as we were trying to do at the same time, with a string of outstanding dance hits like “
Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough”, “
Beat It, “
Billie Jean” and the simply incomparable “
Thriller”, which took the music video into a completely new realm for us.
On Saturday nights, in front of our friends or even hidden away on weekdays in our bedrooms in front of the mirror, we all tried but miserably failed to be as cool a dancer as he was.
His hits still sound vibrant today (or maybe that is just my age and my
nostalgia talking!), and it brings back memories of many a romantic encounter which I thought I had forgotten, the 21st birthday parties when the sun apparently never stopped shining, lying outside on a hot day listening to Michael on the coolest gadget of the time, the Sony Walkman (remember those?).
A few years ago, Michael came to London and took part in an interview which we used for an interactive listening programme known as VOICEbooks.
If you can understand this story but you have problems when listening to English, get
Michael to train your ear.
1. Download and install the interactive VOICEbook Player from
http://www.voicebook.com/vbplayer.phpthen
2. install the Michael Jackson VOICEbook from
http://www.voicebook.com/vpk/3cf739282f013b1b8da0907ac36ce12d/jacko.vpk3. Open the Michael Jackson VOICEbook in the VOICEbook Player by selecting
File-Open, then listen and type in what you hear. The interactive Player will tell you what is right and what is wrong as you're typing.
4. If you like the Michael Jackson VOICEbook, sign up on the www.voicebook.com website at
http://www.voicebook.com/registeruser.php and then download some other VOICEbooks from the catalog at
http://www.voicebook.com/catalog.phpBut before you go, what do you remember of Michael Jackson's life?
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