Janet’s new single, “Nothing”, will have a VIDEO (which is great news). It is also a very, very lovely song which will be my #1 this coming Monday and which is totally classic Janet and which will appeal to nobody but The Core Fanbase.

But there is a simple way to increase the appeal of the single. Instead of using this cover:

…my Slightly Redesigned version needs to be used:

Here, I fixed that for you. No need to thank me…

Jackson’s opening night setlist for ‘This Is It’;
“Billie Jean” (Video Introduction)
“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”
“The Way You Make Me Feel”
“You Rock My World”
“Smooth Criminal” (rumoured to be the song Timberlake wanted to appear in)
“Dirty Diana”
“Blood On The Dancefloor” (Video Interlude)
“Black Or White”
“You Are Not Alone”
“Beat It”
“Man In The Mirror”
“The Girl Is Mine”
“They Don’t Care About Us” (Video Interlude)
“Scream” (with Janet Jackson)
“Bad”
“Dangerous”
“Heal The World”
“Earth Song”
“The Story” (Video Montage)
“Rock With You”
“Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”
Jackson 5 Medley (as the Jackson 5): “I Want You Back”, “I’ll Be There”, “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)”, “Can You Feel It”
“Thriller”
“Billie Jean”

When I was going to sleep last night, Michael Jackson was just taken into hospital with cardiac arrest. Some people’s reaction to that was “oh yeah? Liar! I demand a refund!” Those people will forever remain the ones who, when they heard about Michael Jackson’s death, thought first about 50 quid they spent on “This Is It” tickets.

I thought: how low have the mighty fallen. For Michael Jackson was, basically, god. Alien god from the planet of dance and music previously unknown to man. And then he was the black guy who turned himself into a white lady. And then he was a child molester. (While the court cleared him of all the charges, people never stopped referring to him that way, in fact, on the Polish news portal’s elegy to Michael Jackson page half the comments seem to contain the word “pedophile”.) And then he was a near-bankrupt in need of lung transplants. Not many people remembered he was also a very lonely human being forced to work since the age of 5.

Music-wise, I was always a fan of Janet rather than Michael, but I have, strangely, rediscovered him only recently when the This Is It tour has been announced. I put together an 80 minute playlist which I am listening to right now. Perfect from start to end. It goes: Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’/Leave Me Alone/They Don’t Care About Us/The Way You Make Me Feel/Black Or White/Stranger In Moscow/In The Closet/Thriller/Remember The Time/Blood On The Dance Floor/Unbreakable/Another Part Of Me/Scream/Bad/Jam/Beat It/Liberian Girl. And those 17 songs — not allegations, bankruptcies and rubber noses falling off in unexpected moments — are why I am sitting here and typing this, shaking my head in disbelief, tears in my eyes.

It is easy to forget, years and years after Michael Jackson released anything listenable for the last time, that he is responsible for some truly incredible music. I only bought Thriller a year ago and I couldn’t get over how perfect it was; then I started thinking about buying Dangerous and Off The Wall but never quite got there so far.

Popjustice forums tend to discuss the topic from time to time and the answer to the “can he ever make a comeback” question always seems to be “no, he’s a fucked-up weirdo beaver with a nose that sticks in place using chewing gum”. This is, of course, true. But while 2001’s Invincible was a pile of tosh, everything until and including HiStory was pretty much flawless — with the exception of ballads.

When Jarvis Cocker jumped on the stage and wiggled his bum at Jackson because he couldn’t stand the twattery of the aforementioned Jackson being pretentious and saving the world via a steaming pile of dung called Earth Song, I could only applaud. Earth Song was awful. It wasn’t as bad as Heal The World though (which was second only to We Are The World in its pure evil, and that one also featured Michael Jackson — more songs like those and I would have to start polluting the environment just because they told me not to). Or You Are Not Alone (for aaaah belieeeve in youuuuuuu, sang Jackson, and the world shuddered in horror). When Jackson danced, so did we. When Jackson got syrupy, we shuffled uncomfortably in our seats with visions of thirteen year olds being fed Jesus Juice appearing in our heads for no apparent reason.

Stranger in Moscow, as embedded above (it was very difficult to find an embeddable version — I will never understand why labels believe if you can put a YouTube clip on your page it might decrease sales — I almost gave up on writing this post because I couldn’t find an embeddable version and I don’t see how NOT writing it would have promoted Jackson better) is more or less the only Jackson ballad post-1990 that I like. It isn’t about saving the world and it isn’t about Jackson making beautiful love to the ladies. It is about Kremlin’s shadow belittling him and Stalin’s tomb not going to let him be. (What exactly is Stalin’s tomb doing to Jackson remains a mystery we might perhaps not want to solve.) It is about Michael being lonely and isolated and going crazy because of the accusations of paedophilia. It’s got a KGB agent voiceover going on in Russian — trying to force someone to admit their guilt. It’s got an amazing production — it still sounds like nothing else ever produced. It’s got a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful video with raindrops in slow motion. And it had a 3 CD release with a grand total of 21 remixes, about 16 of them by Todd Terry and not a single one listenable.

When the video was released to MTV — back in the time they still played music — I didn’t have cable at home. I’ve had a few days off, though, and I spent those days at my aunt’s, flicking through four music channels — MTV, Viva, Viva II and VH1. They kept on playing three videos non-stop — Stranger in Moscow, Pet Shop Boys’ Before and George Michael’s Spinning The Wheel. I loved all of them –  they spent, in order, two, six and one week at number one of my chart — and they were played so often that sometimes the same video would be played on two of the four TV channels. That was one of the best weeks of my life — doing nothing but sitting in front of the TV and skipping between three videos on four TV channels and being thrilled that three absolutely incredible songs were being loved by what seemed to be all of humanity as much as by me. “Stranger in Moscow” eventually reached #4 in the UK and #91 in the US. That was a bit less love than Michael was used to.

13 years from those days Michael Jackson seems to have drifted into insignificance, plagued by paedophilia stories and lawsuits, bankruptcy warnings, indifference from record label execs and music fans alike, deluding himself that his new album — which he has been working on for the last eight years — will be any good. (Judging by the godawful remixes on Thriller 25 and the fact Will.I.Am has been enlisted as a producer… erm… no.) His constant health problems make it difficult to imagine a possibility of a tour. But whatever people say about him, his nose and his countless encounters with a surgical knife, this man has made some of the best music ever, and this song, while not his biggest hit, is just one of the many, many proofs of his — perhaps former — genius.