Jerry Okungu
2 July 2009
column
Kampala — AN EAST AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE
THE death of Michael Jackson invokes many fond memories of the 1970s and 80s when his music career was peaking. This is the generation I belong to. I, like my generation, grew up with MJ's action-packed music that has remained as danceable as ever.
I remember some years back when I was travelling with my two young daughters from Detroit to Nairobi.
As we waited to connect to Amsterdam, there was this shop playing old Motown music of the Temptations, the Jackson Fives and others of that era. Before I realised it, the girls had dashed to the shop and were dancing to those old tunes to the amusement of the shop attendants and other shoppers.
For their efforts they got mugs with MJ and The Temptations signatures. I couldn't believe that nearly 30 years later, my daughters were responding to the same music the way I did as a young man in my 20s.
Just last Saturday, a day after MJ died, the same little girl who danced in Detroit was visibly upset on learning that Michael had died. Despite her tender age of 12 at the time Michael died, the first thing she asked me was if she could call her friends in the US to tell them about Michael's death!
This reaction just goes to show how Michael's music will transcend all ages for generations to come. And maybe through his music, he has conquered death because he will still be singing for humanity many years after.
As I ravaged the papers and TV channels to get everything I needed to know about MJ, my memory went back in time. Flashes of past events and people related to the Jackson era came alive in my mind.
I realised that it was difficult to think about Michael Jackson without remembering the tumultuous years of the '60s, '70s and '80s when his contemporary entertainers such as Prince, Smokey Robinson, Lionel Richie, The Temptations, Isaac Hayes, and Millie Jackson controlled our airwaves.
I remembered Teddy Pendergrass, Curtis Mayfield, Barry White, Billy Ocean and Freddie Jackson.
Also in my mind were poet Nikki Giovanni, revolutionaries Angela Davis, Stockley Carmichael and Eldrige Cleaver, author James Baldwin and actor Jim Brown.
The reason these images kept coming up was simple. The American cultural domination of the world was at its peak. Black actors and political activists were emerging in their droves to claim a stake in the American society and in the process; they were asserting their Black consciousness in a racist American system.
It was the age of Black beauty, afro- hairstyle where defiance of White Western culture was the in-thing. This era of Black consciousness united us with every Black movement across the globe from South Africa through Bob Marley's Jamaica to the struggles of Black Panther members in North America.
When Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were assassinated, we wept for them like they were our own brothers. It was the same feeling we had when Bob Marley and Steve Biko died thousands of miles apart. Led by Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Brown, Angela Davis, Stockley Carmichael and a host of other Black radicals, we in Africa readily identified with voices of conscience in all forms of art wherever they might be.
We identified with similar struggles in Walter Rodney's Caribbean Islands, South Africa's apartheid and Ian Smith's present Zimbabwe.
As we innocently imbibed anything American especially if it came from Black brothers, we in Africa had our own music in Lwambo Makiadi ( Franco), Tabu Ley, Manu Dibangu, Yvonne Chakachaka, Samba Mapangala, Fella Kuti and Osibisa to celebrate. This was the era that Black American art dominated our part of the world.
We watched Jim Brown's movies because they depicted racial struggle between Blacks and Whites in America. We listened to the lyrics of Isaac Hayes, The mighty Temptations and Millie Jackson because they were social commentators with messages we could easily identify with.
If Isaac Hayes talked of a father who never had a fixed abode, Millie liberated women from male domination through her defiant sex messages that were until then considered taboo.
For Michael Jackson, it was the power of his youth, probably the youngest star at the time that propelled him into the adult arena. He was our wonder kid at the time. And as one of his friends, Sean Combs said following his death, "Michael changed the world."
This dancing machine was a product of the Boogie and the disco music generation. But MJ was ahead of his time. He used technology to thrill his fans for four decades all over the world like no other musician. Listening to songs like Thriller and I'll be There, one realises that MJ wrote songs with simple themes for the ordinary people. Perhaps this is the reason he has left the world that was moved by his greatness and charm.
In Thriller, one could detect a person obsessed with the weird underworld that he desired to conquer. Dancing with ghost-like characters on stage gave him the feeling that his music could control the universe. In so doing, MJ lived in fantasy world yet his music was real and enduring.
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