Billie Jean

Y’all know that thing when you’re a kid, and you notice there’s this really cool, fashionable thing all the other kids are wearing at school, and you go home and ask your folks for the fashionable, exciting thing so you can be cool?

But then your folks buy you the thing that looks sorta like the fashionable, awesome thing, but is very obviously not that?

Let’s just say the parachute pants I requested were not parachute pants.

Eh, I got over it.

Our nextdoor neighbors had “Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller” on something called Selectavision. Us kids would go over there and watch it all the time. They also had Dark Night of the Scarecrow. I think they owned like five SelectaVision discs in total, so there was not a lot to choose from. But holy shit, I never got tired of watching John Landis and Michael Jackson collaborate on that video.

I was almost as curious about the SelectaVision.

They looked like giant flat 8-track cassettes to me, and I had no idea how they worked. These weren’t laser discs. They were a competing format that had come out earlier. The SelectaVision discs were packaged inside a giant plastic case (like a big 3.5” floppy disk). These Capacitance Electronic Discs (CEDs) were developed by RCA as an updated analog format. They worked very similarly to vinyl records. From Wikipedia:

“First conceived in 1964, the CED system was widely seen as a technological success which was able to increase the density of a long-playing record by two orders of magnitude. Despite this achievement, the CED system fell victim to poor planning, various conflicts with RCA management, and several technical difficulties that slowed development and stalled production of the system for 17 years—until 1981, by which time it had already been made obsolete by laser videodisc (DiscoVision, later called LaserVision and LaserDisc) as well as Betamax and VHS video cassette formats.”

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, Billie Jean is one of the best songs of all time. Like maybe top five. Certainly top 10. His performance of the song on network TV was like a Gen X Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan moment. And while we’d all learn more about Michael Jackson than we ever wanted to, all 1983 me knew about 1983 Michael Jackson was that he was the coolest human alive.

Of course, that was right before I learned about Prince.

Fave Lyrics:

For forty days and for forty nights, law was on her side But who can stand when she's in demand? Her schemes and plans 'Cause we danced on the floor in the round So take my strong advice Just remember to always think twice