Good peeps, it's not very often that I ask something of you. But today, I am.

Perhaps some of you are still wondering what the hell The Daily Dose is all about (because we STILL can't figure out how to get our app to show up on our Facebook Fan Page. Argh. It is NOT easy).

The deal is this: wine, cheese and music. New music. Old music. Stuff I can't live without. And together, it's kind of like George Costanzas' TV/sex/food thing... a perfect trifecta.

The hope is to get other people to dig it as much as me and hopefully, you. Every bit counts. So, to all of you who've e-mailed the link around your friends, asked them to join us on Facebook, embedded the widget on blogs, retweeted our tweets [...]


A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentation of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

Punk rock and a rainbow flag: a conversation with Pansy Division founder Jon Ginoli

Since the late 70's there have been endless debates about what is and what is not Punk Rock.

You could certainly argue that Punk Rock IS being openly gay in an all gay band in the early 90's and playing clubs through the South and Midwest, singing songs about hooking up with dudes. In comparison, putting on a dog collar and playing songs of rebellion inside NY's CBGBs doesn't seem all that dangerous.

For nearly 20 years, Jon Ginoli, founder of the world's first gay pop punk band Pansy Division, has been waving the punk rock flag high. The band has just finished a documentary ("Life in a Gay Rock Band") and released their sixth album "That's So Gay," both on Alternative Tentacles. Ginoli also just wrapped up a book tour supporting his memoir Deflowered: My Life in Pansy Division, a frank and often laugh-out-loud look at the band's early days.

Ginoli took some time recently to answer a few questions, talking about everything from bad decisions to never fully being embraced by the gay community.

So what made you decide to finally write a book about your experience?
The realization that a lot of what seemed to be visible in the 90s was now becoming invisible and forgotten.
 
You touched on this a bit in the book, but looking back, what are your biggest regrets about the band and decisions you guys made?
When we stopped touring, we weren't making enough money to continue. I wished we had made the effort to get a new booking agent and tried to play more colleges, which paid better. It might have made it easier, but on the other hand it might have made us breakup. Who knows?
 
In the book, you mentioned the rainbow flag sticker you keep on you van, saying "even though we're not big fans of what the flag has become." Can you explain that a little?
There was a time, before the mid 90s, when companies and corporations were afraid of being associated with gay events. Since then, they'll slap the rainbow flag to promote anything. So it's an acknowledgment that progress is a double-edged sword.
 
You also talked about not feeling fully embraced by the gay community because you didn't listen to bad disco and Whitney Houston. Do you think the gay community has finally started to listen to better music?
Hell no!

If you were just now starting Pansy Division, how do you think the band would be received by the fans and the music business?
If we were starting just now it would be at a time when there were already lots of out queer musicians, so it would be completely different.
 
You talked a lot about the generosity of bands like Green Day. Do you still keep in touch with them?
 No, not directly, but I know how to get a message to them if I need to.
 
I know you just got back home, but what's next for the band?
We just did a tour of the East Coast and Midwest, and are doing the West Coast in September. At some point we'll start looking at songs for the next album. Since all four members live in four different cities on both coasts, it's a process.
 
       
So you just finished the tour and the book, what's next for you specifically?
Good question! I quit my job to do months of my book tour and band tours, so I have to figure that out soon. What we do isn't a living; it's just a bit of money now and then.
 
So what have you been listening to lately?
 Jarvis Cocker, Bratmobile, Bruce Springsteen, The Shoes, Nick Cave, some old country, The dB's, ‘60s soul compilations, ‘60s-era Bee Gees (pre-disco!), The Wave Pictures, Bunker Hill, Vampire Weekend, The Wipers. Among other things.



 

I'm a Baby Boomer.....not particularly proud of that fact but it's the truth. I don't own a cell phone, hell, I didn't even know what a "blog" was until I started writing here. At one time I was young and idealistic....now I'm old and realistic, the guy who embarrasses his kids in front of their friends with "Dad Jokes", random references to Roky Erickson and stories of drugs and hitchhiking. (That's right kids, I had to hitchhike to school in the snow...stoned....uphill....BOTH WAYS!!!).

So I thought I was going to impress the youngsters when I told them I was writing a blog for Blurt. I figured it would buy me a some credibility.....some skreet cred with the young'uns....after all this was Blurt, not some lame ass rag like Rolling Stone.. Instead I got "No one wants to read your old man stories"...and was dismissed as if I had just suggested we light sparklers for the 4th of July instead of setting off some M-80's. I'll show them, I thought....people will enjoy my old man stories....well, at least maybe some of the older folks will.  

I was wrong!

After 3 months of posting I have received two comments.....TWO.....to put it into perspective during that same time I have received 5 solicitation phone calls about buying funeral arrangements, 7 notifications that I have possibly won money from the now deceased Ed McMahon and 3 traffic tickets!! TWO FRIGGIN COMMENTS!! And my kids are laughing their asses off. at me....."What you gonna write about this month Dad?"....."The time you saw Peter Townsend pass out while sucking his thumb?". It's become a standard joke in my home and I have to fight back!

So I asked my kids for some advice....what should I write about? "Do what Rolling Stone does, just write a scathing article about GWB or the Republican Party" they told me "People never get tired of bashing Conservatives". Hmmm...how hard could it be to write about Sarah Palin having an IQ lower than an iceberg or why Donald Rumsfeld wears camouflage adult diapers. But then it hit me, this is a MUSIC blog, on a Music website, not KOS. So to tie it all together I decided to spout some embarrassing Dad jokes with that hip Rolling Stone political perspective.


THE TOP TEN HITS OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION

10) "I Fought Al Gore, And Al Gore Won" The Chad Fuller Four

 9) "Cheney's Got A Gun" Aerosmith & Wesson

 8) "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" Al Queda & His Tali Band

 7) "Wipe Out" N. Ron Hubbard

 6) "Born On The Bayou" Katrina Backwater Survival

 5) "Getting Hot In Here" The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Control

 4) "Papa Was A Skull & Bones" The Bohemian Temptations

 3) "All My Lexus Are In Texas" The UAW Singers

 2) "Screwing Up The War" The Dick Armey

1)    "Mow The Lawn" The Bush Girls

You know the drill... taking our cue from Seth Godin with the idea that what unites us is more than music -- basically, if we share the same taste in music, we likely share the same taste in other stuff, as seemingly useless as it occasionally may be. Hence, this month's compendium:

5 Freakin' Fascinating Ways to Waste Time at Work This Week

Oh, the painstaking research that's gone into this. But really, every last one of these is worth the on-the-clock-dilly-dally.

1. Auto-Tune the News

Prepare for your pretty little heads to be blown away. Seriously. Who has the time?



2. The Mystical Power of the Wolf-T

Lo and behold. It's more than just a T-shirt. Who knew? They could be onto something.

"I admit it, I'm a ladies' man. And when you put this shirt on a ladies' man, it's like giving an AK-47 to a ninja...." You know you want to read more. And you should. Be sure to scroll down to Customer Reviews [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentation of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

Hungover and shoppin' in  Disneyland with Thoroughly Modern Minnie.

By Coco Hames

I don't know how I could get so drunk sipping wine with civilized adults at Jem's dad's 60th birthday party in California.  Everything is fine, I am behaving and engaging in fine, normal conversation with the elderly, and then, bam.  Black-out drunk.  I woke up on the couch.  Not where I belong.  I am hungry, but all I can do is scowl at the refrigerator, and think vaguely of fish tacos.  I had some Sprite and am now fadoodling around the Internet, Googling Macau, and pretend shopping.

Pretendshopping is going on fancy websites and selecting everything I think should be in my wardrobe.  If I had a wardrobe, that is, and not a battered rolling suitcase which acts ascloset, medicine cabinet, library and general store (Oxford commas... I don't use them, I don't think).  One time I so thoroughly pretend shopped that the total was $22,000.  It was a lot of stuff, but stuff I'd use.  Really good boots, high quality sweaters, etc.  And then, you know, a puce Alexander McQueen ball gown fashioned entirely out of feathers.  

I do not enjoy shopping, as in regular-style shopping, as in going to the mall or trying on clothes.  I get VERY tired, very quickly.  I am far too sensitive for shopping.  All the marketing ads, the colors, the shapes, the chaos.  Pass.  I do my shopping safely from my computer.  And then, bonus, stuff arrives in the mail for me!  Christmas! 

There is a song that always pops into my head when I must consider replacing worn out sailor shirts and ripped up jeans.  I'm pretty sure the song is called "Shoppin'" but I'll have to look it up.  It's from 1987's Totally Minnie, a piece I remember being a television special?  Not a movie, not a series, just a one-off Disney thing?  I guess it's pretty obscure, but I think I remember owning a VHS copy of it?  Or one that we'd taped from TV?  Here's what I remember: the main character is the lead nerd guy from Revenge of the Nerds, Susanne Somers is involved, and Elton John does "Don't Go Breakin' My Heart" with an animated Minnie Mouse.

Here is how Totally Minnie writer Joie Albrecht describes it on imdb.com:

"This live action film features a Nerd who, in desperation, goes to the "Minnie Mouse Center for the totally un-hip". There he learns how to dress, dance, and most importantly - be himself. The film features an original music video with Minnie Mouse, in new animation, integrated into live action footage with Elton John singing "Don't Go Breakin' My Heart."

Anyway, the number that goes down in "Shoppin'" (which I'm watching on YouTube right now) is exactly how I feel if I ever have to go shopping.  Insane.  Stuff and stuff and crazy girls going crazy everywhere.  And the song, by the way, makes no sense to me.  It didn't in 1987, and it doesn't now.  Not lyrically, not musically, not structurally, no way, no how.  "Shoppin'" helped me learn how to shop like "Donald in Mathmagicland" helped me learn math.  In that, it didn't.  At all.

Interesting piece of trivia: It was during the recording session of this special that Wayne Allwine (Mickey's official voice since 1983) met his wife, Russi Taylor (Minnie's official voice since 1985).  That's cute and you know it.  Aw, Wayne Allwine passed away just recently, in May.  R.I.P. and sincere condolences to Russi.  Oh my God, Russi and I have the same birthday!  And Wayne's is the same as my mom's!

Now I'm just clicking on everyone who was in Totally Minnie.  People are so weird.  People, not me.  This is a perfectly acceptable way to fight a hangover, a completely reasonable expenditure of my time.

***

Blurt "co-co-editor" Coco Hames fronts The Ettes - Hames on guitar, Jem Cohen on bass and Poni Silver on drums - whose album Look At Life Again Soon and EP, Danger Is, were released by Take Root. Their new Greg Cartwright-produced album Do You Want Power hits stores Sept. 29, and you bet we're gonna have a big feature on the band in our next issue!

Running amuck (adrift, actually...) in the magical Land of Oz with a big-boobed, coke-sniffin' bimbo and assorted loonies.

By Johnny Mnemonic

I am a man adrift.

Prior to my current existential state of affairs, however, I was a staff writer for what I presume most people considered to be highly-regarded national music magazine. I hasten to emphasize my phrasing being in the past tense, as the publication recently folded, the victim of all those things you've been reading lately, with alarming frequency, about music magazines (and the print world in general). I won't bore you with all the mundane details of my dismissal and its demise - yet - other than to say the basic law of the jungle was in effect: if a business ceases to continue making money, and this goes on for month after month despite (or owing to) the regular influx of meddling new investors, hapless new editors and inane new marketing strategies, etc., soon enough, something's gotta give.

Ergo, I am a man adrift, with no immediate, regular source of income. I will certainly be offering up my freelance skills to other highly-regarded national music magazines, perhaps even the one whose website you are reading this very moment, but the terms "freelance writer" and "regular income" remain mutually exclusive. So while I drift, in between resume-mailing, LinkedIn networking and Velvet Rope-lurking, in order to keep my mind from atrophying from a steady diet of satellite TV and internet porn I've accepted an invitation from the editors of Blurt to author this blog.

"Music Journalism 101" is to be part-memoir, part-exposé and part cautionary tale. On that first count, I'll draw upon my experiences as a music writer and introduce you to assorted denizens of the musician community ranging from the sweet to the sour, from the supremely gifted to the astonishingly clueless, and from the types who help make the world a better place with their artistry to the walking/talking chunks of human feces who in a sane, just world would be lined up next to a mass burial site in some godforsaken corner of what used to be Yugoslavia and summarily shot and tossed into the pit. As far as the exposé part is concerned, don't necessarily take that term literally (don't want to get your hopes up), although I will be tugging the curtain back to give you glimpses of what goes on in the lives of music writers, their editors and publishers, their peers and significant others, their hookups and drug dealers, etc. Just to give you a teaser: for a week in 1989 I joined the touring entourage of a former college rock band-turned-MTV-darling - for the purposes of this blog, I'll refer to them as "Dream Response" - in order to do an on-the-road profile. This gave me access to the after-show activities, although there was an unspoken understanding that I'd use discretion in reporting any behavior that might prove upsetting to the quartet's fairly vanilla fanbase, or for that matter, to the members' wives. From the band's point of view, that unspoken understanding probably served them well when it came time for me to file my report. I quite diligently did not recount the scene in which I wandered into one of their hotel suites' bathrooms only to find the lead singer - let's call him "Frothy Bryson," after his unnerving habit for literally foaming at the mouth in the middle of one of his onstage "poetic" rants - ankle-deep in the chunky, dark-haired, big-boobed local radio personality who'd turned up at the show to record station I.D.s and was invited to stick around for the party. After a few healthy toots of Peruvian weasel dust and three or four stiff vodka-and-7-Ups, she'd apparently been ready to take more than just airchecks from the group. I can still hear her horsey-like, pack-a-day wheeze of a laugh (how do these obnoxious gals get their radio gigs? oh, right...) as she was grabbing for the straw... and if I squint my mind's eye just right, I can still see - no, please God, not again - Frothy's hairy, boil-studded ass.

But don't think that life in the music journalism business is a merry old yellow brick road stroll into the Emerald City, where vials of coke dangle from trees like sugarplums and nubile munchkin lasses beckon seductively from shop windows like Amsterdam hookers. This is where the cautionary tale aspect comes in. "The biz" has a boundless supply of headaches, frustrations, diva- and asshole-like personalities, and just out-and-out lunacy, not to mention a deadeningly mundane side to it (you know, hours upon hours trapped in a cubicle pounding away at a keyboard while your head pounds from all that free booze you swilled the night before at the Metallica album listening party at Arlene's Grocery). It's not all that different from used car sales, actually. So my hope is that after reading this blog, at least one aspiring music journalist out there, having gotten a sense of how the sausages are made, so to speak, will plot a beeline straight to his or her college counselor and switch majors to, say, Astronomy, or perhaps Botany - any discipline where one's native talents can be nurtured and turned into a bankable commodity in the employment marketplace. Because if you believe being a rock critic is a viable career path, I have some stock shares in Madoff, Inc. I want to sell you. At this juncture in life, it's probably too late for me, but it's not too late to prevent one of you from making a huge mistake. Don't wake up one morning to learn that the business you've chosen to work for is sinking faster than a GM truck with cinderblocks chained to each axle, and that you have no tenure, no seniority, no job security, no marketable skills, no nothing, really, plus the additional stress of a pending loss of health insurance benefits when your COBRA coverage expires. Now's the time to consider that offer from your father about taking up the family business, in other words.

Above I mentioned that the editors of Blurt invited me to become one of their bloggers. Technically, I approached them with the idea. (I could swear I detected a shrug on the other end of the telephone, but as the answer was "sure," that's good enough for me.) Still, my ego can only take so much battering in a compressed period of time - losing that highly-regarded national music magazine gig and all - so it does me good to create this fantasy in my mind that my arch prose remains in demand by my peers and, hopefully, will be admired by Blurt readers. I may be a man adrift, but that doesn't mean I can't still spout off with the best of ‘em.

My friends tell me I'm actually quite good at spouting off, especially after a couple of whiskey sours. (I know, I know, a girlie-girl drink, but - and here's the first of what will be many fascinating insider tips from the world of music journalism - you can casually sip whiskey sours all night without getting too plastered, which greatly enhances your chances of getting some juicy backstage or behind the scenes stories, since the bands themselves tend to really bring it on, post-gig; I think we already covered that part three paragraphs earlier.) I promise to write most of these entries in a relatively sober state of mind, of course. Well, that is unless I feel, in the interests of accurately recounting some of those juicy stories culled from my fabulous career in music journalism, I simply must recreate the semi-sober state of mind I was experiencing at the time of the original incident.

Did I mention that my friends also tell me I have a pretty fucking spot-on memory? I may be a man adrift. But I know where the bodies are buried.

Guarantee: many of the names, places and entities outlined in this blog will be changed to protect the innocent along with the not-so-innocent. And also to ensure I don't burn so many bridges I can't get hired again by some highly-regarded national music magazine. Not that there are any left.

***

Johnny Mnemonic is the pseudonym of a "highly-regarded" national writer with, he advises us, over two decades' experience working as a music critic, reporter and editor. We've never met him face-to-face, and he further advises he will be delivering his blogs to us via the "double blind drop-box method," whatever that is, to ensure his anonymity.

Think about it like this. Not only are you competing with a bijillion other musicians out there --- both established and off the couch --- but now, thanks to Twitter and Facebook (MySpace is soooooooo last century) you're competing with my mom. Seriously. If her micro-blogging content is more compelling than yours, you're screwed.

After all, fans are semi-limited. There's only so much room we have in our hearts. And only so much time in the day. And only so much money to give/spend. And we are hella choosy [...]

Please vote.


Let's consider who deserves to be on the Mt. Rushmore of Funk.
That's Four Faces of Funk, etched on a monument somewhere suitably funky.

That could be a debate right there; where to put this monument to the monumentally funky. Memphis, New Orleans, Detroit? James Brown's front yard? And what are we going to call it? Mt Funkmore? The Funk Rock?

We could also cheat a little and perhaps add a Fifth Face of Funk. As I'm hoping to make this a collective effort, I hope you will jump in with an opinion and an argument.

The criteria would have to be that they are a true founding father and inventor, not just an innovator--we're talking about the building blocks, the very Fabric of Funk. It's not enough to just be an icon to make it to Mt. Rushmore; they have to be a master, a member of a small and select circle that is the well-spring of everything funky that came after them.  

So. It seems pretty irrefutable that James Brown and George Clinton deserve two of the slots. Is this even debatable? Between the two of them they pretty much represent the two major rivers of funk of the last forty + years. Brown is the sine qua non of funk, the original master that took R&B, dropped the 4/4 in favor of an off beat and presto! bingo! originated funk as we know it. The popping or slapping bass, chunky guitar, horn charts that jump in and out and call and response vocals are still being worked out today. Brown produced a body of work, on record and in performance both, that will most likely remain untouchable in it's quality, quantity and influence. So, there's one.

George Clinton took Brown's R&B generated funk and turned it on its ear, then inside out and back again. P-funk sometimes sounds like funk in slow-mo, other times in like funk in a mescaline and steroid frenzy, or Sesame Street with huge hair and shoes and synths doubling the crazy Space Bass line while a whole extended families of vocalists and players jump in for a never ending interstellar houseparty. Clinton and his cohorts in Parliament, Funkadelic, Brides of Funkenstein, etc. brought the Freak to Funk. The musical landscape will never be the same. I say there's two. You may say different.

Where do we go from there? Consider the candidates: Sly Stone, Issac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Bootsy Collins, Fela, The Meters (groups are problematic for Mt Rushmore), Prince and...who? No women? Does Miles Davis qualify due to his mind-blowing early 70s recordings? How about the producers (Norman Whitfield, Willie Hutch, etc.)? Can we nominate Stax Records as a whole (including the MGs), or the Funk Bros., or the whole city of New Orleans? Was Thriller a funk album? How about Madonna's bubble-gum funk? Or Latin Funk? Are there any Brits or Jamaican's that qualify? Any DJs? Hip hop artists?

I'm going with Sly Stone for the third spot. His biggest hits are both true funk classics and true cultural signifiers, his performances (Woodstock!) the stuff of legend and his mixture of rock and funk smashed thru a boundary desperately in need of smashing. He also had hits - lots of them. I say Sly qualifies for the number three spot.

It's gets pretty complex from here and will naturally devolve into personal taste. You could certainly make arguments for Hayes, Mayfield, Wonder Fela and Prince. "Shaft" was such monster that it practically qualifies Hayes by itself, but spotty quality control and a propensity for ballads dilutes Hayes funk factor. Curtis Mayfield qualifies with an abundance of great songs and an intelligence and social conscience that perfectly mirrors the revolutionary times he was recording in. Ditto Stevie Wonder, who revolutionized the sound of funk in a peerless series of hits in the 70s that also had the social consciousness down. Fela's influence and world-wide popularity are hard for American's to fathom, but he really was an funk ambassador to the world. And Prince? Well, he brought funk into the modern world, sexed it up to a delirious degree and blew through all the boundaries between rock, pop, funk, soul, R&B, and hip hop.

One peer has already made an impassioned argument for Bootsy Collins. Who have we missed? Who deserves to be up there with the Godfather?

If you please, vote with your opinion on who the Four Figures of Funk might be - or a fifth, if it pleases you. I'm leaving the fourth spot open, and hoping for a Funk Epiphany.  

You can leave comments below or e-mail them to me directly at modmedia@theriver.com. 

Carl Hanni is a music writer, music publicist, disc jockey and vinyl archivist living in Tucson, AZ. He  hosts the vinyl-only Scratchy Record Show every Tuesday night at the Red Room in downtown Tucson, and spins records wherever and whenever he can. He believes that in a better (all analog) world all records would be released on vinyl, but takes good music from wherever he finds it--even on CD. His feature piece on legendary bass player/record producer Harvey Brooks was recently published in Goldmine.

Guest post this week from an astounding singer-songwriter, Peter Mulvey, whose new record Letters from a Flying Machine streets this August: "Eight songs, interspersed with four prose pieces over music, framed as letters to my various nieces and nephews written on airplanes. The first one sets the place and the theme and they go from there." Brilliant.

Hear Peter reading the below letter here. Hear the song that goes with it here.

17th of June 2009
Over the Great Lakes

Dear Edgar-

Last week your father and I hooked up trailers behind our bicycles, and trundled you and your sister into them over your initial strident protests. Then we all rode twelve miles along the Hank Aaron trail, down by the ballpark and through the Menominee River valley. As we rode along, I marveled, as I often do, at these extraordinary machines, which allowed us to cover the distance at a brisk but relaxed clip in a little over an hour.

But that is nothing: courtesy of a very different machine, I am at this moment hurtling Eastward, eight miles over Ontario -- over land, and water, and little herds of cumulus clouds far below.

Further, I am writing this letter with yet another machine; a mechanical pencil that would have flipped DaVinci’s wig. And who knows what he would have made of the pocket-sized computer that is currently playing a Bach sonata through tiny speakers hidden in my ears...

Oh, the gadgetry! To make this recording, these amazing sounds must have leapt from an Italian violin, into a German microphone, to be rendered as ones and zeros somewhere in the dark of a Japanese hard drive.

And I wonder, did Bach write these notes down with a goose quill? With ink made from [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentation of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

It's been a long time since Michael Jackson penned a hit song, but he did write one last nationwide sensation: the script the mainstream media has followed since his death. Jackson, we're told, was the "king of pop," who had "the biggest selling album of all time," and "broke MTV's color line." Every one of these dubious factoids was devised by Jackson or his agents.

In 1979 Jackson commenced a great solo run, starting with Off the Wall and on through 1991's Dangerous. The latter was knocked off by Nirvana's Nevermind, and henceforth Jacko was a "legacy" act, working his back catalogue-when he was working at all. (Speaking of that back catalogue, the singer's Motown-era solo albums - 1972's Got to Be There, 1972's Ben, 1973's Music & Me and 1975's Forever, Michael - yielded a sprinkling of hits, including a #1 in '72, "Ben," although all four records were wildly inconsistent. Hip-O Select has just reissued them, along with bonus and unreleased tracks, as a deluxe, limited-to-7000 copies three-CD set titled Hello World: The Motown Solo Collection.)

The first pedophilia charge came in 1993, and for the next 16 years Jackson was an object of scorn, horror, and ridicule: His music was upstaged by financial reversals, phony marriages, children by surrogates, and skin whitening and plastic surgery. So it's no small triumph that obituary and appreciation writers now hail Jackson as a culture-shaping luminary rather than a nose-mutilating freak.

I yield to no one in my admiration of "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" and "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," and I don't doubt Jackson's talent. Lots of people want to remember the guy as the King of Pop, or whatever, which is their right. But then many other people love the Jonas Brothers, Phish, or Slipknot. In their time, Pat Boone and Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass enjoyed chart-dominating epochs. None of them changed society, and neither did Jacko.

MJ did take credit for the three best numbers on Thriller, including "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," a song that's heavily indebted to Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa." (According to the New Yorker's Kelefa Sanneh, the two musicians eventually reached a "financial agreement.") But the most of the album is unlistenable, and today would be extremely vulnerable to single-track downloads.

Jackson was primarily an impresario, not a musician, and his instincts soon failed him. Even with only one act in his stable - himself - he couldn't keep on track. By 1995's HIStory: Past, Present, and Future, Book I, Jackson the image-builder was portraying Michael the music-maker as both an abused child and a totalitarian dictator. He sent a 60-foot plaster statue of his Michaelness to tour major European cities.

 
Such weirdness continued for many years, yet has been largely excluded from the career recaps. This is partly because the non-trash media-from op-ed pages to Sunday morning talk shows-have to justify the amount of coverage their newspapers or networks have given Jacko. If he's just dance-pop's equivalent of a brain-damaged professional wrestler, the attention is unjustified. So MJ must have been significant.

This yields such straw-grasping punditry as the claim that "we" all identified with Jackson because he blurred racial and gender identity. But he did so in a way that was creepy, not inspiring, and revealed self-loathing, not self- acceptance. Anyone who seriously identified with the latter-day Jackson should seek professional help.

To some mainstream eulogists, Jackson's momentousness is all in a large and charmingly tidy number: 100 million. That's the supposed worldwide sales figure for Thriller, which very well could be the best-selling album of all time. But the international numbers are speculation, and in the U.S. Thriller was overcome by The Eagles' Greatest Hits almost 20 years ago.

In his essential blog, Hitsville, Bill Wyman questions the 100 million total. He thinks it likely that "this bogus figure comes from Jackson, who learned early at Motown that it was OK to out-and-out lie to the press about anything and everything. (If it came from Sony it would raise immediate questions from the Jackson camp about royalties, right?)"

But music sales are a matter of longstanding mystery to the establishment press, which equates big numbers with widespread cultural influence, and seldom checks to see if either truly exists. (Thus newspaper hacks regularly proclaim hip-hop the country's top-selling musical genre, which it never has been.) "Best-selling album of all time" authenticates Jackson's place in the universe-and therefore on the front page - so best not to check its accuracy.

Repeating the "king of pop" tag is even lazier. It makes for a succinct headline, but its source is Jackson himself, who adopted it in 1991, just before it became undeniably false. If Jacko had named himself "Lord Protector of Jupiter," would that also feature in the obits? Probably not, because Jupiter belongs to the "Science" section, which insists on facts. But pop music is the province of "Life" or "Arts," whose truths are squishier.

On the charts, "Billie Jean" was arguably Jackson's biggest success. In death, it becomes something greater: his racial-pioneer badge. For, as every TV or a newspaper commentator now knows, with that song Jacko "broke MTV's color barrier" and became "the first black musician to appear on MTV." So beat it, Rosa Parks, beat it.

Actually, before "Billie Jean," MTV programmed videos by Eddie Grant, Tina Turner, and Donna Summer, as well as a whole lot of Musical Youth's "Pass the Dutchie." MTV skipped Thriller's first single, "The Girl Is Mine," not because Jackson was black-the tune also featured the quite famous and rather white Paul McCartney - but because it was doggone treacle.

Then a relatively small operation with a largely suburban teenage audience, MTV programmed uptempo, moderately noisy music by performers who made videos, which at that time meant mostly Britons. (Music promo vids developed earlier over there, because BBC radio played so little rock.) "The Girl Is Mine" was unsuitable, but "Billie Jean," with its driving beat and high-gloss video, was ideal.

According to the myth, executives at Epic, Jackson's label, gave MTV an ultimatum: Play "Billie Jean" or else. But that was a publicity stunt. In Hit Men, his 1990 history of the music biz, Fredric Dannen recounts: Around this time Jacko added a new lawyer, John Branca, to his all-white management team. Not long after, Branca was also representing MTV. As racial showdowns go, this one sounds a lot like a boardroom shuffle.

Whatever Jackson's gifts, he was above all a guy in the right place at the right time. Thriller arrived as MTV was booming, and the era of made-in-the-U.S.A. videos dawning. Also, it was released just as labels decided to milk albums as long as possible, rather than scuttling off to the next prospect for a hit or two. So seven of the disc's nine songs became singles, and Thriller lingered over the charts like a stationary front, eventually selling 28 million copies in the U.S. (and another 40 trillion intergalactically, I'm pretty sure).

Great timing. Garth Brooks had it, too, but don't expect his obits someday to assert that he transformed society.

Selling lots of albums is consequential, but not in the way Jackson's analysts earnestly wish. So maybe it's time for the legit media to let Jacko go. He belongs not to
history, but to TMZ.