Remember seeing the Black And White video on TOTP when I was about 7 and being blown away, I’d never hated music before but I hated that. Never understood why he was/is so revered musically. 1/5 and the 1 is for Dirty Diana. Always thought he was absolute shite.
Funkhouser has returned and brought the very maw of hell with him.
I was never a huge fan, although I do regard Billie Jean and Thriller as almost perfect pieces of music they stand mostly alone amongst the catalogue, Black or White is alright too I guess. Always found the rest overrated - Don’t Stop is one of the most annoying sounding things ever recorded and Man in the Mirror is just the most mawkish slab of cheese.
Putting on my most naive hat and saying “even if he didn’t do what he is accused of”, then he still had numerous weird creepy and innapropriate relationships with young boys which would have him rightly drummed out of any other profession and ostracised from society.
He can fuck off and die. Again.
2 for Billie Jean / Thriller
But of course it’s a fucking 1.
Might seem like an unnecessary or ‘strange’ choice of thread, and I’ve been trying to decide whether we should do this one since the start but I figured that any reassessment or comprehensive look at the big names in music history should include him, regardless of what the discussion points become or the nature of the thread. People really read too much into the name of these threads btw and try and analyse how it should affect their score. That’s silly imo, these threads were nearly called ‘Are They Shit’, just vote with your first instinct.
When I was a kid we had this video tape of his concert somewhere and my favourite bit was the fans fainting and trying to run onto the stage and security trying to stop them. His music was there a lot in my childhood and though I don’t listen to it anymore (not even that I’m forcibly stopping myself as well, it just doesn’t do much for me), think I picked ben because of the Simpsons, think it was the first celebrity cameo I was actually like “I know who this is” back in the 90s
