THE MAN, THE MUSIC AND THE LEGEND

Besides basketball, music played a big part of my life. I basically grew up with the music of the early 70s starting off as early as my first grade. And one of the most influential artist whose music I grew up with is no other than Michael Jackson.

It would really be a mortal sin for people from all walks of life during 70s not to recognize a line or two from Michael’s early hits such as “Happy”, “I’ll Be There” and “Ben” (the last which was the theme song of a rat movie with the same title).

I can still recall The Jackson 5’s first Manila visit in 1976. Even though I just saw them on their rounds of various Philippine TV shows during that time, I was caught widely-eyed as an eleven year old boy. It brings shiver to my bones as I recalled him sung “One Day in Your Life” in the then leading noontime show “Student Canteen”. In that same show, they held the grand finals of the “Michael Jackson Sing Alike” contest in which Bobby Dulay won handily with his rendition of MJ’s “Rockin’ Robin”. During the ‘76 Manila tour, Michael and his brothers even played an exhibition basketball game against a local celebrity group.

The Jacksons likewise strongly influenced a Filipino family singing group during the said decade in which they pattern their music with. And I’m referring to Toto and his Children. And who could forget Boy Mondragon, who was singing style resembles that of the King of Pop.

Late in the 1970’s MJ launched his solo album entitled “Off the Wall” which featured all-time great hits like “Off the Wall”, “Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough”, “I Wanna Rock with You” and the emotionally-driven “She’s Out of My Life”. During the 1978 World Basketball Championships in Manila, the USA team, which was represented by the bible-group Athletes in Action even paraded a player by the name of Michael Jackson.

During my early years in college, MJ struck the music world once more in 1983 as his album “Thriller” became the best-selling album of all-time. In that set includes the legendary hits “Beat It”, “Billie Jean”, “PYT (Pretty Young Thing”), “The Girl is Mine” (with the co-legend Paul McCartney) and “Human Nature”. I can still vividly remember how proud and crazy I was during that time when my sister Sonia bought me a cassette tape of “Thriller” from the States (DVDs and CDs were still alien words during that era). It was almost the same time local singer Gary Valenciano entered the music scene. Valenciano became widely-known as the local version of MJ. It was very evident that during Gary V’s early years, his style of singing and dancing is a copycat of the legend from Gary, Indiana. Popular teen dance group during that decade were the “Tigers” featuring Jojo Alejar and his gang of UST glamour boys. The group became famous with their dance steps to the tunes of PYT, Off the Wall and other MJ hits in the popular weekly Sunday night TV show “Penthouse Seven” (which later became Penthouse Live) co-hosted by Martin Nievera and Pops Fernandez. Later in the decade and early 90’s, MJ recorded more record breaking hits such as “Black and White”, “Bad”, the critically-acclaimed “Man in the Mirror” and “Dirty Diana”. There were several more Michael Jackson hits like “Smooth Criminal” and others which I can not recall at this moment but just as the same considered as immortal classics.

What is admirable and unique about Michael is his love for children. This was clearly defined in his song, “Heal the World”. And to rephrase a line from that beautiful song, it goes “Heal the world, make it a better place. For you and for me and the entire human race”.

It was really a great fifty years which Michael Jackson spent on earth. Forever, his music will be entrenched in our hearts and mind. Thank you very much Michael and just like the title of one of your hits in 1990 “Gone Too Soon”, we bade you goodbye and sincerely thank you for greatly touching our lives.

The Man, The Music and The Legend lives on.