Today, the curtains rise again. Not just in cinemas, but in memory, in muscle, in that involuntary twitch your legs do when a certain bassline enters the room like it owns the mortgage. The Michael movie is out, and suddenly the world remembers again that once upon a time, a man existed who made gravity look like a suggestion.
And I can’t help it. I’m thrown back into that soft, golden chaos called childhood, where Michael Jackson wasn’t just an artist. He was a ritual. A compulsory subject. A national anthem of growing up. Every millennial child, whether in Lagos, London, or some forgotten village where network bars come to die, has attempted the moonwalk at least once or a hundred reckless times on floors that did not consent.
Michael wasn’t just big. Big is what you call buildings and egos. Michael was scale-less. To me, as a child, he wasn’t even human in the ordinary sense. He was what humanity could look like if it stopped playing and decided to perfect itself. The peak. The prototype. The final draft God forgot to watermark.
He would appear on screen, and my brain, still under construction, would simply freeze. Not process. Not analyse. Just witness. Like stumbling into something sacred without permission. And the funny thing is growing older didn’t shrink that feeling. It sharpened it. Rewatching his work wasn’t nostalgia. It was revelation. If anything, younger me was underqualified for what he was seeing.
And Thriller. Let’s not lie to ourselves. That wasn’t just a music video. That was a cultural initiation. A rite of passage. The first time you watched it, something inside you rearranged itself permanently. It remains the best selling album of all time, casually sitting at the top like it signed a lifetime lease there and locked the door.
Michael was everything. Not in the exaggerated stan sense. Literally everything. Singer. Dancer. Writer. Producer. Performer. Philanthropist. Visionary. The man stacked his own vocals like he didn’t trust oxygen to carry them properly. Built choirs out of himself. Artists like Brandy later refined that technique, but Michael was the original factory.
Now let’s talk about the clothes, because even fabric behaved differently on this man. The single white glove was not just an accessory, it was a declaration. The red leather jacket from Thriller turned into a global uniform overnight. Military-style jackets, gold accents, armbands, loafers with white socks, fedora tilted like it knew secrets. Michael didn’t follow fashion. Fashion followed him like a loyal disciple. You could walk into any country on earth and find a version of that aesthetic stitched into somebody’s identity. From street dancers in Surulere to pop stars in Seoul, the DNA is traceable.
And then… the moonwalk.
Let’s slow down here, because history deserves proper pacing.
1983. Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever. A stage. A man. A fedora. A black jacket catching light like it had its own agenda. The music starts. Billie Jean. The crowd is already losing composure. Then it happens.
He steps back.
But he doesn’t move.
Or rather, he moves in a way the human eye had not negotiated with before.
The moonwalk was not just a dance move. It was a glitch in reality. A betrayal of physics broadcast live to millions. People screamed like they had just witnessed a miracle that refused to explain itself. Grown adults stood up involuntarily. Some laughed. Some shouted. Some simply froze, trying to process how a man could walk forward while moving backward like time itself had been bribed.
That moment didn’t just trend. It rewired performance forever. Overnight, every dancer on earth developed an urgent need to slide. Floors became testing grounds. Socks became equipment. Childhood became a training camp.
Back to the absurd facts that sound fictional until you realise they are not. This man sold out seven nights at Wembley Stadium with over 500,000 people attending. His Bad tour pulled in over 4.4 million fans globally. He has 13 Grammy Awards, including eight in one night, which is not an award show, that is a corporate acquisition.
Popularity. Let’s speak plainly. This was the closest thing to a global monarch without a throne. The only human you could reasonably argue stood in second place to Jesus Christ in terms of recognition. There are places on this planet where people don’t know what snow looks like, but they know Michael Jackson. The man was more familiar than weather patterns.
Influence. He didn’t just influence music. He rewired it. There is no country with a functioning speaker that doesn’t have at least one artist spiritually indebted to him. And then there is impersonation. Entire careers built on resemblance. People surgically negotiating with their own faces just to echo his existence.
Seventeen years gone, and the numbers still look alive. Billions of YouTube views. Streaming stats on various platforms casually competing with and surpassing industry giants. Thriller still reigning. His HIStory era had giant statues of him placed in cities like he was announcing a new world order.
He patented anti-gravity lean shoes for Smooth Criminal. Not satisfied with breaking dance, he went after physics itself. He turned a glove into a global symbol, made a silhouette more recognisable than most logos, and forced MTV to confront its own bias when Billie Jean broke through their resistance to Black artists.
And then the mythology starts to sound exaggerated until you realise it isn’t. Pablo Escobar plotting his kidnap just because he is a fan. Cartels acting as his security and keeping the peace in Rio also because they are fans. A Los Angeles Lakers game disrupted because one man walked in and suddenly sitting down became a group project nobody could complete. Crowds collapsing and even dying just from his stillness. Not performance. Presence. People fainting before the beat even dropped. Humans overwhelmed by spectacle.
And when he died, the world didn’t just mourn. It malfunctioned. I remember it clearly. School went quiet in a way silence had never been experienced before. Not discipline silence. Not fear. Just absence. Like someone removed a frequency we didn’t realise we depended on.
Being an MJ fan comes with the usual recycled accusations, served by people who treat headlines like scripture and research like optional coursework.
Your MJ turned white.
Vitiligo. Documented. Medical.
Your MJ molested kids.
Courtrooms exist. Verdicts exist. Acquittal exists.
What of the Leaving Neverland documentary?
Yes, the one collapsing under its own contradictions that had to even be taken down for false stories, please skip.
Didn’t he do drugs?
After a pyrotechnic accident during a Pepsi commercial burned his scalp, leading to chronic pain and insomnia.
Why was he always around kids?
Because he spent his life grieving a childhood he never had and tried to recreate it for others. Neverland wasn’t a gimmick. It was therapy built on land.
But really, none of this is surprising. History has a habit of resisting those who dare to rewrite it. Michael didn’t just enter the industry, he audited it. In a casual conversation with Paul McCartney, he asked what it would cost to own the The Beatles catalog. Paul joked. Michael didn’t. Forty million dollars later, he owned it. Add 50% of Sony/ATV, and suddenly he’s profiting off the very ecosystem that thought it owned him.
There were whispers; Marvel acquisitions, power moves stacking quietly. And then, like clockwork, the narrative shifted. Allegations appeared. Reputation got dragged through a media marathon. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.
But honestly, what do I care?
To me, Michael Jackson remains the peak of what a human can be when talent meets obsession and empathy refuses to be optional. A man who didn’t just sing about healing the world, he attempted it with his own resources.
He also holds a Guinness World Record for supporting the most charities by a pop star, over 30 organisations benefiting from his direct involvement. Not tweets. Not hashtags. Actual money, actual effort, actual impact.
Heal the World, Earth Song, We Are the World, They Don’t Care About Us, Black or White, Human Nature.
These weren’t just songs. They were instructions disguised as melody.
So no, you won’t catch me slandering Michael Jackson in this lifetime. If humanity had more of his kind, not his fame but his intention, we would be living in a very different world.
Rest in power, King.
And yes, maybe this movie is another machine monetising your name. But it proves something undeniable.
The world still remembers.
