Quote:
Originally Posted by clutnuckle
Are you arguing that having money means that you cannot be oppressed by others? If anything, having money when you're young is bound to make people want to terrorize you more. And I'd rather a pop star sing about what they know than to regurgitate the whole "Love you, but we're from two different worlds, my lass!".
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Albeit, I agree with the last point 150%, I don't think anybody who Micheal Jackson didn't want to even be in the presence of, he had to be. It's hard to get bullied as a kid when you have security to escort the other kids out, and it's hard to have the cops kick the **** out of you when you have amazing lawyers, and are in the public eye.
Micheal Jackson definitely has been oppressed by the media, right, and by people, true. But only when he has to stick his neck out. The man essentially had a palace built for himself to isolate himself from any form of oppression. One could argue that it's because he had more oppression to avoid, but I feel that simply the fact he had that avenue of isolation is something that people really don't have.
Now, if he is to write a song about how it's difficult being famous, and isolated from the normal world, then fine. Nobody can jump on Elton John for writing Rocket Man by saying "Oh, he's not a real lonely cokehead!". However, this song is clearly trying to be MJ identifying himself as one of the "oppressed people" somehow, which is utterly ludicrous especially transposing himself among what looks to be starving children in a third world country.
The only link between Michael Jackson, and the very obviously hip-hop inspired formula of "protesting the man" that he's trying to pull off with this song is the fact he was, at one time, black. This is a very obvious a highly commercial attempt to capitalize off of the very legit, very serious feelings of black frustration that manifested in mainstream music at the time. It was obvious that throughout the eighties, and early nineties they were attempting to promote Micheal Jackson for some reason as an urban figure. It even went as far to have videos of him trashing a car with a baseball bat(Yeah, you sure show the man, Micheal, by trashing that car that you could probably afford to by the entire assembly line of for a week).
If Vanilla Ice gets flack for singing songs about being a ghetto tough thug who grew up around broken glass, and pain. I really think it's fair that MJ get the exact same for attempting to identify himself as an "oppressed people".