My first memories regarding Michael Jackson are those I recorded when I was five. I had this Fisher Price cassette player that I lugged around constantly. It had a microphone and recording capability, so I spent a lot of time conducting captivating interviews with my dog and singing loudly to the point of distortion, which, you know, was NOT ANNOYING AT ALL.  Anyway, I have tapes and tapes of audio footage containing nothing but me watching TV. Commenting on what I was watching on TV.  Does that surprise you? It was basically my first blog –  even at five, I had opinions on things, and assumed that people needed to know about them.  One morning, after I sang along to the opening theme of Fraggle Rock and screamed devoutly, “I LOOOOOVE FRAGGLE ROCK!”, an ad came on for a Jackson 5 greatest hits album.  There, gleaming in innocence and youth, was the 70s Michael Jackson.

It’s important to note that it was 1987, Bad-era Michael Jackson.

This recording makes it apparent that my five-year-old brain could not connect the two. “Who is that?” I asked my mother. “That’s Michael Jackson,” you can hear my mom say from the back of the room.  Confused, I stutter “But…but she looks like a boy!”  [Oh, to have seen my mother's face.] “Well…He is a boy. That’s him, when he was little.”  In the silence that follows you can hear my little mind getting blown. From my understanding — long hair + high voice = woman.  Michael Jackson was a woman, a woman named Michael, which yeah, is weird, but no weirder than “Raffi” or “Ringo.”  It’s also possible that I had been confusing him with Janet Jackson that whole time.  When I had been bugging my parents for a new “compact disc,” it’s plausible that I really just wanted a copy of Control.

But on my sixth birthday, she bought me a copy of Bad, instead. Pretty sure I kept forgetting that Michael was a dude, but it didn’t matter –  that album kicked my kindergartner ass. I never went back to Raffi after that.

To Part II