When funk legend Rick James called Michael Jackson a pop sellout on live TV and challenged him to show real funk, Michael smiled and took notes. What he wrote in that notebook would leave Rick James speechless in 300 soul trained audience members witnessing the most educational 12 minutes in music history. December 1983, Michael…
Michael Jackson called a children’s hospital at 11:00 at night and made a single request that confused the staff so completely that the head nurse asked him to repeat it. What he did when he arrived changed every person who witnessed it. It was a Tuesday in November of 1996 and the pediatric ward of…
March 15, 1982. Michael Jackson thought his solo career was over before it even began. The session at Golden Gate Studios in Los Angeles was falling apart. Every take sounded wrong. Every attempt felt forced. After six grueling hours, the 24-year-old singer was ready to walk away from his dreams and crawl back to his…
Michael Jackson showed up at a small flower shop after midnight with no cameras, no publicist, and no announcement because his crew had broken the owner’s window, and he believed that some things cannot be fixed with paperwork alone. It was August of 1992, and the Dangerous World Tour had moved into France. The production…
Michael Jackson found out his crew had driven through a farmer’s wheat field the night before, destroying three acres of crops that represented the man’s entire income for the season. Nobody expected what happened at 7:00 the next morning. It was June of 1992, and the dangerous world tour had been moving through Europe for…
Tokyo, Japan. Dome Stadium, December [music] 30th, 1992. The Dangerous World Tour. 55,000 people had been waiting for 2 hours. Michael Jackson was scheduled to take the stage at 8:30 p.m., but at 8:27 p.m. in a dressing room beneath the stadium, Michael collapsed. Not dramatically, not with warning, just a complete shutdown. his body…
February 19th, 1983, the Beverly Hilton Ballroom. James Brown was performing at his own 50th birthday celebration, and Michael Jackson, already the biggest star on Earth from Thriller, stood in the wings, watching his idol with religious reverence. Then, James executed a spin so impossibly smooth, so perfectly controlled that Michael literally stopped moving, stopped…
You know, when it comes to female MC’s who paved the way for the women in hip hop. Nobody ever mentions Miss Melody. That ‘8s wave of female rappers, she was definitely part of that community. Her verse on a classic hip-hop song called Selfdestruction really stood out. She did her thing on that song….
Paris, October 1935. A young woman stands at the rear entrance of a cabaret on the Ru Pierre Shaon, waiting to be told what to do next. She has just performed for the first time on a proper stage. Not a street corner, not a courtyard, not the narrow strip of pavement outside a Belleville…
[music] [music] [music] you know, growing up, right? I remember watching the network called Fox that has some great shows and living color used to come on living single rock New York undercover. I even go back to watching the show uh South Central was on. It was a show called South Central. But when…
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