I wrote this up like, 4 years ago? Essentially how I experienced this day:
It was Friday the 26th of June 2009 (Being New Zealand, we’re like a day ahead of USA) and it was second period at school. I was doing Maths and we had a substitute teaching us. I was at the front of the class doing some work he gave us and it was around 10:50 (Interval/Recess started at 11am) when I started hearing some people say “OH MY GOD, did you hear? Michael Jacksons just died?!” Of course, I took no notice about it because so much rumors go on about him and I wanted to finish off my maths work since I was bored and had no one to talk to. Then at interval, a friend approached me and told that he had INDEED died and that his English teacher (and the rest of the class) spent pretty much all of the English period crowded around her laptop, reading about his death. I didn’t believe him either so I got out my mobile phone and went onto a local news website. The headline?
“Pop Star, Michael Jackson, dead at 50”.
And believe it or not, it actually started to rain (which it did for the rest of the day). NO-ONE stopped going on about for the rest of the day (Apparently, someone at my mums work ran up the staircase, into the office and screamed out to the whole workplace “MICHAEL JACKSON HAS JUST DIED!”
. Finally, it got to Assembly which was just after lunchtime (We have interval, then another hour of lessons, then lunch). At the end, the school orchestra played Thriller to which one of our deputy principals or whatnot went up to the podium and said “And that was dedicated to Michael Jackson, who passed away earlier this morning” (9.26am New Zealand time to be precise). Then, this f**ker next to me called [redacted] (Honestly, no one actually liked him. He was very annoying) said “HAHA, That pedo got what he asked for!” or something like that. I elbowed him hard in the stomach. The teachers didn’t hear or notice because people were applauding the orchestra. It felt good.
I remember walking out of the school gate that day and saying to my friend “Wow… it feels… sort of… different or wierd… doesn’t it?” He agreed. Every few people I’d pass by, I’d hear his name. Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson. I got home and I threw my bag onto the ground and went onto my families laptop. I was on there for an hour, just reading all the info about him. I asked my grandmother, who came over for a quick visit, if she had heard that Michael Jackson had died. She did and she had heard it on the radio earlier. I remember YouTube had on their homepage the top part set aside for his short films, Twitter had exploded, Facebook too with many friends posting “RIP” statues. Some even changing their profile pictures to him. He exploded on the iTunes charts too. This was only six hours after he was announced dead. I then did my chores, of course listening to his music on my iPod (which I had been listening to for quite a bit since early 08ish when I got my iPod in Hollywood).
Finally, the 6pm news started and of course, he was the biggest thing on there. Hell, he took up a good 20ish minutes of the entire show (there was only 20 minutes for the other news, 10 minutes for sports news and 10 minutes for weather). I remember listening to his music that night and for the first time that day, I was happy. I truly do believe he united the world through his music. Twitter was timing out, facebook didn’t update, every news website took ages to load, even Google blocked searching for his name because they thought it was a cyber attack on them to slow down their servers (Which ultimately it did). The Internet truly came to a stand still and many people have reported that that had never happened before. Internet traffic also suddenly went up a shit load too. Many experts agreed that they had NEVER seen anything like this.
I remember at like… 10:30 pm, I was in bed watching my TV (this was before I got a laptop and started to stay up late). I switched the channel to C4 (which back then, was a music channel in New Zealand). They were playing MJ’s top 40 songs. I managed to get the last 10-15 music videos. I remember time flying by and me just being glued to the screen until midnight when it stopped playing his music videos. I also discovered the song “Smooth Criminal” for the first time and God, did I love it. It was #2 or #3 on the countdown and I was quite disappointed to find it wasn’t on my only MJ album, HIStory (I bought it a while after on iTunes however). I then sat quietly in bed and thought over that day. At 9.26AM New Zealand time, one of the worlds greatest legends of all time had passed away. I didn’t cry. I don’t know why. I guess I was still in shock. Mind you, I was sad. The very first time in my life that I felt really sad that someone had died (No-one famous who I had taken a liking to had a died before).
