i recently got an email from a reader of my blog. it went like this:

Dear “Cobra Celia”
I really enjoy reading your blog. I hope you keep up the good work! However I hope that you write more about how became a music fan. Did you have any childhood heroes? How did you become a punk rock fan?

All the best

D*!@%

as you can tell i decided to not publish the name of the person who sent it to me. but it got me thinking. actually i have been spending the last few days thinking about it. i started writing about my musical journey which after the end of the first two chapters became a memoir of sorts. people under the age of 30 should not write memoirs. people who write memoirs are people who are obsessed with themselves constantly.

below is the first part in a long list of essays i’ll try and publish once a week or when ever i have the time. i have nearly completed three so i am covered for the next couple of weeks. i think i will call my entire collection of essays TURN THAT MUSIC DOWN! Musical moments from a slightly crazed individual. it is like Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs, but hopefully better. enjoy!

Black or white and Islamic sensibility

I was born in Stavanger, Norway. When people ask me where I am from in Norway, I say that I am a Bergen girl; the city where most of my Norwegian family is from. Although I am a proud Norwegian, I can’t escape the fact that I left the country when I was two years old and that my home town really is the world. I didn’t fully learn how to speak Norwegian until I spent a year in Norway when I was 17. When people ask where around the around the world I had the most cherished childhood memories, I always say the country of Brunei. I arrived in Brunei when I was three years old as my parents worked for Shell, the oil company. Brunei was the type of place you may read about in the National Geographic. I lived in a house that was right next to the rainforest and regularly woke up to the sounds of Hornbill birds and wild boars eating my trash. I also swam with crocodiles (although at the time this was unknown to me), been a victim of monkeys throwing their feces at me and have been chased by a bear. Brunei was also an Islamic country with Islamic rules where homosexuality was illegal (granted in a lot of Asian countries homosexuality is generally prohibited), where you had to drive to Malaysia to buy pork, maps of the country were prohibited due their paranoid fear of invasion and where you couldn’t buy alcohol until the mid-nineties… but you had a limit and only non-Bruneians could buy alcohol. Brunei was also the home of perhaps the most disturbing stamp on earth – a picture of a man sitting in prison with a hangman’s noose in the background as a warning of the consequences of using drugs. Not many countries I know use their drug policy as inspiration for the stamps they issue.

 

I arrived in Brunei during the early nineties but you wouldn’t have known it if you lived there. Brunei was one of those places that was permanentally stuck in the ten years in the past. You didn’t know what the biggest movies were, what the major trends were and who was the next big thing. I never heard of Nirvana until I came to Australia. Fuck, I didn’t know that Kurt Cobain died in 94′ when i started to listen to their music when I was a teenager. One of the biggest stories in Rock n’ Roll and I never heard about it until six years later! While there were some things I missed that I wished I could have experienced (Brit-Pop for one thing), even Brunei couldn’t escape the super-stardom of Michael Jackson. Asia is a very strange and wonderful place – even when the west began to revile the man in the late 80’s/early 90’s, Michael was and remains eternally popular. Asia has long been transfixed with the west – one only needs to spend a couple of hours in Kuala Lumpur and see Starbucks popping up like cockroaches and seeing kids that would fit into any American high school (if all the students were Asian). Michael was the perfect pop star to west and especially to Asia. He was (before all the devastating plastic surgery) good-looking enough to curb much of Asia’s xenophobic tendencies, an extremely gifted songwriter/singer/dancer and was eccentrically cute (until the late 80’s and beyond).

 

When I was a child, if you asked me who was the coolest person on the person, I would have said MJ. I respected him so much, my parents were able to convince me to grow my hair long and learn ballet because Michael had long hair and danced. I was, and still am, a tomboy and I refused to do anything girlie. But if MJ did it, then it was OK. I find it quite funny that I once thought Michael Jackson was the most masculine man in the world. Michael was so popular in Brunei that everytime the Cub Scouts or the Brownies went to the radio station, the first song that was requested was “anything by Michael Jackson!”.

 

When I lived in Brunei, I had an Au Pair (or a nanny/maid) named Lita from the Philippines. She was one of those very maternal women who because a second mom to me. She cared for me when I was sick, cooked for me when I was hungry, and was usually able to get me out of trouble when I was naughty. Her biggest ambition in life was to own a pig farm. My family lost contact with her but I miss her dearly and wish she got the pig farm she wanted to dearly. Lita also happened to be a giant Michael Jackson as fan. Her admiration of Michael rivaled mine. I became a fan of Michael because of her. One of the albums she had on tape was MJ’s Dangerous record. It may not be his best record (that is a fight between Thriller and Off the Wall), but it is the record that has the greatest personal meaning to me. Everyone song on that record is genius, I still think it is the perfect pop record. Classic songs from that record include Remember The Time and the ironic In the Closet. But my personal favourite song on that record is the utterly stupendous yet ridiculously catchy Black or White. This was a song that demanded racial equality from a man who appeared unhappy with his own race. Perhaps an impossible request from such a man, it still made you feel that “yeah, racism sucks! I’ll listen to the man who appears to be confused what race he is!”. I went to an international school in Brunei called Panaga with people from all around the world so the song at least fit with my world view. Slash from Guns n’ Roses plays guitar on the song which demands respect. Plus there was a rap! I never heard of NWA or Public Enemy or rap in general at the time (would Eazy-E even get through immigration?), so this song was probably instrumental in my later love of rap. The video for that song is classic. The video for Remember The Time is crap as it has Iman the super model and Michael chasing her in vain; it was completely unbelievable. Do you really believe Michael would be running after super models when he spends most of his time with young boys at his Neverland Ranch? The video for Black or White is completely believable – it makes no sense like him. It begins with this beyond stupid skit featuring the always annoying Maculney Culkin playing his guitar so loud that it sends his dad to Africa seeing Michael dancing with some African tribesmen. The video also features a tiger, two babies playing on a styrofoam earth, Michael dancing with Indonesians and Native Americans, Maculney again rapping the rap part, Michael singing on the Statute of Liberty and a scene where people’s facings are morphing into different faces (look hard enough you can see Tyra Banks, before she obsessed about other people’s problems she obviously had the ability to morph into different people).

 

However the ride of MJ wasn’t entirely smooth sailing for the people of Brunei – his legal trouble would eventually surface. I remember telling a kid in school that MJ was my favourite singer and seeing his response of disgust. He disliked MJ because his mom told him that MJ was “mean” to kids. As I was unaware of MJ’s legal problems, I simply assumed that he took candy and toys away from kids. There were other things threatening the dominance of Michael Jackson. The World Wrestling Federation (WWF) had finally came to Brunei and all the kids loved it. I secretly loved it as my dad thought it was the most brain-rotting thing to have ever existed (this was all before Crazy Frog came into existence). I also loved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with a passion. I felt that Leonardo was created as the mirror image of me. Leonardo seriously rivaled Michael as my childhood idol. But I still remained loyal to Michael through the good times and the bad times. When he got married in 1993, the thing I remember most from that year was not my little brother’s birth but hearing that Michael got married to Lisa Marie Presley! I tried in vain to get my parents to name my little brother in honour of Michael. They chose Daniel over Michael. How many rock stars do you know are called Daniel?!?

 

1996 was a big year for me. I left Brunei to move to Perth, Australia. I also got to see Michael Jackson live. The Sultan of Brunei despite of all the in-breeding in his family that rivals the British Royal family, was able to organise a free Michael Jackson concert as a birthday gift for himself to the people of Brunei. This was perhaps the biggest thing to ever happen to my life. Michael Jackson. In Brunei. For a concert. That was free! I was brought in an atheist family and I am an ardent atheist but when I heard that Michael Jackson was coming to Brunei I did question that perhaps there was a higher power. But I had also prayed for a flood so I didn’t have to go to school which did happen so I had a lot of spiritual confusion occurring in my short life. I couldn’t sleep the night before the concert. It was like Christmas if Santa could moonwalk. I went to the concert with Lita, my mom and another family who I can’t remember their names for the life of me. We drove to the capital of Brunei, Bandar Seri Begawan, which usually took an hour to drive one way. I always remember the drive to the capital fondly as there was white sand as we drove on the road and I always thought it was snow. Even when I forced my family to stop on the side of the road to actually see myself that it was just sand, I still believed it was snow. After an hour we finally arrived at the concert. I think the entire country showed up. But then again, the country only had about half a million people living there maximum so it was entirely possible that the entire country was there. We arrived at the concert a few hours early and we had to wait what was perhaps the longest wait for a concert I have ever had to endure. We had to wait for the Sultan and Prince Charles to be seated which just added a couple of hours of waiting. God, why do people like monarchy? But when the concert started, it started with a bang. I can nearly remember the entire concert in full. I can remember dancing to “Thriller”, “Beat it” and of course, “Black or White”. I remember screaming because I sat on my mom’s shoulders and I could actually see Michael Jackson on the stage. The fact I could see him proved to me that people like him existed. Going to this concert as my first rock concert probably became the reason I enjoy rock concerts so much; you actually get to see the people you admire and respect on stage and you get to finally see with your own eyes that you didn’t make this up in your head. Despite all the concerts I have been to, nothing can beat the experience of your first rock concert – especially if it was Michael Jackson. I remember going to bed that night with a giant smile as if I had been at Mecca. A few months later when I was living in Perth, a girl boasted in class about how she got see Michael Jackson live in concert when he came to Perth. I told the class I got to see Michael Jackson live too in Brunei for free. No one believed me, but I didn’t care – they didn’t get to see Michael Jackson live, for free! Plus, I can honestly say that I sat on the same seat as Michael did on a certain rollercoaster ride at the Jeruda Park. I checked the newspaper picture of him riding the rollercoaster – I sat in the same seat dammit! My ass was in contact with the seat that Michael’s own ass sat on. It is a disgusting thought in retrospect but is still worth all the memories.

 

It is now 2008 as I now reminisce about my love of Michael Jackson and of that concert in particular. I was talking to my friend in Norway and she said that seeing Björk playing live at the Roskilde festival in 2007 was the best concert see had ever seen and it made me immediately think about Michael Jackson and my first concert. If she saw Michael Jackson play I bet she would be saying something different. It is impossible to look at Michael with the same childhood innocence as I did when I was kid. Even though he was found to be innocent of sexually molesting a boy, once you get accused of sexually abusing boys not once but twice, you find it hard to believe that you once wanted to be his best friend. But I still want Michael to come out on top (get your mind out of the gutters). I want him to have a giant hit record that would shatter dance floors, I want him moonwalk until he gets decrepit, I want him to stop hanging out with kids and realise that he needs grown-up friends, I want him to get his old nose back and become black again! Once you go black you never back, or in Michael’s case – once you go white, tell everyone you have a skin disease. Despite all of this I still listen to Michael Jackson with pride. People say that my love of punk music clashes with my love of Michael Jackson music – but they are idiots who can’t understand how people can like good music. They can just beat it.