A Tribute To The Boy King

Waking up in the morning to hear the news of legend passing away is never an easy thing to handle but it was surprising for me to be sulking about it even late in the day when i had some very important decisions to take. What was more surprising for me was the fact that Michael Jackson was not such an important part of my growing up years as it was for others. I never followed Western music, i still don't. But Michael Jackson was different, he had reached every nook and corner of the globe even before the cold war was over and globalization had begun. Much of what i know about him was from reading stuffs and not real-time participation. I did love his music and dance but i still can't claim to have listened to all of his songs. So why then was i was so affected?

Perhaps it was his charisma, his fan following, his life-style and his life-story that had us fascinated us all this time. Despite unimaginable fame and wealth his life seemed one tragic story. He was the first African-American to have reached the pinnacle of glory and that may have something to do with the controversies that dogged his later life. There was something deeply tragical that made him yearn for childhood and his unwillingness to grow up. Half of the controversies seem to have arisen from his reclusiveness, the other half may have something to do with him being sorrounded by greedy gold-diggers. But one cannot deny that the way the media, the authorities and even the people reacted to the controversaries everytime,envy , if not prejudice may have something to do with it.

One of the most distubing things that followed MJ's demise was the number of nasty jokes and criticism doing the rounds on the web. Most likely these people have no clue to what MJ has contributed or are simply sick,envious of him or worse, racially prejudiced. i don't need to enumerate the contributions of Michael Jackson to entertainment industry or the records he holds. It is there for all to see. Neither video albums nor MTV could have been as popular without MJ's mersmerizing steps, artists across the world made careers just by imitating him.

Michael Jackson's final act to silence his critics and naysayers was by his death which created so much furore that it almost took the Internet down. Shortly after the news of his cardiac arrest appeared on the Internet, there such a huge surge of online traffick that Google mistook it for an automated attack and for 25 minutes Google searches on Michael Jackson returned an error page. The official Google blog gives a first-hand account in the following post: Outpouring of searches for the late Michael Jackson.

But Google was not the only one, Twitter saw the number of tweets per second double as news of MJ's death was out and soon the site crashed from overload. The Yahoo News page reporting on MJ being rushed to hospital had a record number of 16.4 million visitors and Yahoo News overall had a record number of 175 million pageviews! Yahoo blog entry "Losing Michael Jackson" shares some insights on how it handled the situation. All popular search engines and services including Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr, AOL had to deal with an unusual situation and had to allocate all available resources to cover the news.

In his last years Michael Jackson's had lost some of his popularity, the slated comeback tour could have salvaged some but his untimely death and the fact that the major players in web technologies including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were brought to the knees by the news only reaffirms the belief that Michael Jackson was the greatest entertainer ever.