Date:27/06/2009 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2009/06/27/stories/2009062761310300.htm

Karnataka - Bangalore

A genius who will be remembered for long

Staff Reporter

BANGALORE: The world woke up on Friday to some heart-breaking news from the world of entertainment: the indisputable King of Pop had died of a heart attack.

Poised to revive his thrilling career with a much-awaited tour in July, this troubled soul joined, in his death, the likes of Elvis, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain whose lives ended in a tragically similar way. While netizens logged on to a slower and clogged world wide web, others simply let TV beam in endless Jackson visuals and sound bytes into their quietened homes, until well past noon. And popular Jackson numbers like Black or White, Billie Jean andThriller blared out of several shops, small and big, across the city.

In Jackson’s death the entertainment industry has lost a profoundly influential individual, who transcended barriers of race in the United States, and barriers of class even in a linguistically-diverse country like India, arguably so.

The neighbourhood “break dance/moonwalk competition”, the low-budget “Michael-special” troupe and his undeniable influence on Bollywood, not to mention the tremendous response to his 1996 show in Mumbai; these will now all be p

Thriller, which is the “first English cassette” for most people in the 80s, set the trend of music video art work going.

Nikhil Chinappa, MTV VJ from Bangalore, said: “He changed the way pop culture was perceived.”

Kannada writer and lyricist Jayant Kaikini agrees in spirit, and literally so, when he says Jackson’s image is difficult to fix in a gender or colour.

Says rock artiste Raghu Dixit: “Michael wasn’t just a singer, he was a complete performer.”

This probably explains why everybody who heard the news on Friday morning felt in them an inexplicable twang of sorrow.