The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
Michael Jackson, "Thriller" from Thriller (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: The King of Pop is dead, not merely a man—admittedly a profoundly strange man—but a huge part of the childhood of anyone who grew up in the 1980s.

"Darkness falls across the land,
The midnight hour is close at hand.
Creatures crawl in search of blood,
To terrorize your neighborhood.
And whomsoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down,
Must stand and face the hounds of Hell
And rot inside a corpse's shell.
…
The foulest stench is in the air,
The funk of forty thousand years,
And grisly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom.
And though you fight to stay alive,
Your body starts to shiver.
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the Thriller."

I will brook no mockery of the man, not here, not now. I turn thirty in a month, precisely one month, and 'tis no exaggeration to say Jackson towered like a colossus over the popular culture of the '80s, the decade that introduced my fellows and me to the world. We mourn not so much the man he was as the symbol, we mourn one more nail in the coffin at childhood's end. The King of Rock & Roll died before my peers and I were born and now the King of Pop is dead; I fear our culture has become so fragmented, so balkanized that we shall never see another King. It is nice, indeed so much more than nice, to have a pop cultural touchstone we all can share; even I, misanthropic, introverted I, can see we are all diminished by the lack of such a common touchstone. The King is dead. Long live the notion of the King.