mj

I've always been a massive Michael Jackson fan. So I wanted to post something short and sweet about the impact his music had on me, and how I think he as a person/brand/postmodern phenomenon affected the world. (I find it a bit odd that lots of the creative and planning blogs I follow don't talk about people...just ideas and work. Which is ironic when you consider that brands really spend a lot of their time aspiring to be people these days.) Except that I realised that lots of my favourite tracks of his have less great videos. And lots of the great videos are for songs I favour a bit less. And where there's an overlap in the Venn diagram, embeds have been disabled. What's more, the music's pretty ubiquitous at the moment. You're all probably listening to it on Spotify anyway. So for demonstrating impact, these two do it nicely. You've almost certainly seen them before. The first is the Filipino prisoners doing Thriller. I'm not even sure I need to say anything about it. The second is Ian Brown's cover of Billie Jean. I think this comes close to the ultimate expression of artistic fandom. The song's simply too good not to cover; at the same time he knows that he simply can't reach the level of the original, so much so that he's almost celebrating that fact, paying homage. Sorry the video's a bit rubbish.