I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. … I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.
—
Woody Guthrie
Last night we were out pretty late at a bar that had latin dancing, and at around 1 in the morning the DJ suddenly cut off the salsa and the merengue and galvanized the audience with a 45 minute uninterrupted procession of Michael Jackson hits. Every single track during that span was greeted with joyous recognition, from Rock with You to Billie Jean to Bad to I Want You Back (cleverly played last with ABC, so that you could be reminded after all the hits of where they first began), and every one of them was the kind of song Guthrie might have approved of, one that brought joy and happiness to people’s lives, and that “proved to them this was their world”.
There’s a Josh Ritter lyrics that I love:
Radio waves are coming miles and miles /
Bringing only empty boats
If for no other reason, Jackson deserves the outpouring of grief of the past week for giving the world so many recordings that were not simply empty vessels, but were ships carrying a sort of joyful goodwill and hope about life that we barely find on the radio these days. He surely was a badly troubled man who made many terrible mistakes in his life, but to judge his art only on that basis seems to neglect the very real effect his music had on millions of listeners.
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