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Posted
Friday, June 26, 2009 9:08 AM
| By
Samantha Henig
A friend told me last night the sort of thing that you only admit
when you’re standing in a bar where the entire room is grooving on the
18th song in a marathon of Michael: that recently, for no real reason,
he had read through a bunch of the coverage of Michael right after Thriller
was released. The general sentiment at the time, he told us, was awe at
what Michael’s music did to existing standards of “black” and “white”
music. Back then, Billboard had its top-10 mainstream chart, and a
separate “Black LPs” chart, and there was little overlap between the
two. Michael changed that.
I was less than born when Thriller came out in 1983, so for
me, it was strange last night to think of Michael as he once was:
someone who raised issues of race not by being some ever-changing
hybrid of black and white, but by being black. I remember ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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