My Old Blogs at Yahoo!360 / MTP

This is my Part Two.

As I mentioned in Part One, Guo Chiang-sheng's main focus was on MJ. The writer asked, "how dark must one be in order to let the world realize that one is black?"

Guo said we had thought we'd recognized MJ's accomplishment by buying his CDs, by imitating his choreography, and by "intentionally overlooking" the fact that he was black, since this color often reminded us of more negative aspects than the positive ones. According to Guo, MJ's "blackness" did not really stand out until the King of Pop had his skin thoroughly bleached. It was MJ's unique and peculiar way to assert that he was black, said Guo.

The writer went on and gave a few examples of the different paths other well-known colored singers took so as to compare. In short, all those that tried to act "white" were more successful than those that acted "black", but none of the act-white singers could reach the level of the most successful white singers, whereas those that acted black and bad often ended up with failure - except MJ, who acted black and was so very successful in his career. What Guo said here could be argumentative and highly offensive to many Americans.

Guo had spent many years living / studying in America. He concluded from his experience that color would remain a very sensitive issue in that country. He said MJ's skin color would always be an interesting topic until the time came (if that time ever comes) when all of us became unanimous and equal, something like those grayish green zombies in "Thriller", in which zombies's pre-makeup skin colors did not matter at all.

He said the scenes of the emerging zombies from the tombs could always shake the mind of the Americans. Unlike the dead, those zombies more or less represented the scars and the tragedies from the past - something which could not be put away permanently or forgotten completely.

I am not sure how agreeable Guo's statement could be.

Over here in my surrounding in the tropics anyone can be very "dark" after months and years of outdoor hard labor - or GOLF (LOL!). In our society one from a privileged "class" can be as tanned as the disadvantaged ones, and being pale did not mean one is more respectable or of a better social status. We do have our culturally sensitive issues but skin tones is not one of them.

Somehow I stumbled upon this on Youtube:
"Vitiligo, Does Michael Jackson REALLY have this disorder ?"
( *** Youtube has removed it. )

And this is the forum that mentioned the disease:
Physics Forums: Michael Jackson's skin
Too bad most of the interesting links in that forum did not work on my computer.

I found more info on vitiligo at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitiligo
It said besides vitiligo the pop star also suffered from another potentially lethal disease called " lupus ".

Wow.... What a heavy burden on MJ! May his soul rest in peace. I was kind of surprised that Guo mentioned nothing about the diseases. The comments in that Youtube page said the media stressed more on MJ's color and did not give enough details on vitiligo or lupus that had troubled MJ for so many years. How awful. Nevertheless, IMO, a lot of what Guo Chiang-sheng said could not be ignored.

Oh well,.... whatever....!

To me, MJ was the first "moonwalker", and I always enjoy watching all the exaggerated and breath-taking visual effects in his music videos.

I will always miss MJ's creativity in music.