Deane Ogden: Michael Jackson, R.I.P.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, Michael Jackson died today in Los Angeles.

If film composers are musicians that put music to film, then Michael Jackson was a musician who put film to music. In addition to his obvious contributions to the world of pop music, Michael Jackson produced some of the most innovative pieces of visual imagery in the form of the world’s first long-play music videos.

As a child of the 80′s, I was fascinated to see what Michael Jackson would do next. I would just as eagerly anticipate the MTV countdown of a Michael Jackson World Premiere video as I would the next installment of the Indiana Jones series or the next Jim Cameron film. His sense of cinematic payoff was astounding, even up to his later videos of the 1990′s and on into the new millennium.

It has always been sad to me, and maybe a mark of where we’ve fallen down a bit as a people group, that we condemn those who we perceive as having done something before we are sure they did. I do not know what demons haunted Michael Jackson in his life, and for that matter, I don’t know that any did. I just know the man that brought Thriller to my turntable, Bad to my mental production thoughtscape, and Dangerous to a musically clueless generation.

That is how I will remember the man.