The Day The Music Died – Remembering Michael Jackson
It’s up there with Princess Diana for me. The day Michael Jackson died. It was on this day in 2009 that Michael Jackson was found dead in the Los Angeles mansion he was renting.
I remember we were on a family vacation. We had just checked into our hotel room and news was breaking that Michael Jackson had been found unresponsive. Just like with Princess Diana, there was hope for a second that he would be okay.
Do you remember where you were? Despite everything he had been through. The scandels. The trials. It was the King of Pop. You never expect a day like that.
He was only 50 years old when he died.
It was shocking and it didn’t take long for news to spread. I remember being glued to the news channels and following along. Hoping it wasn’t true.
He was discovered unconscious and unresponsive by his personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, who attempts to save the singer. Paramedics arrive quickly and try to revive Michael as they make their way to hospital where he was later pronounced dead.
It was too much for the internet. It could barely keep up. Websites slowed down and actually shut down with the millions of search requests. Wikipedia reports nearly a million visits to Jackson’s biography in just one hour. Both TMZ and the Los Angeles Times crash, and AOL Instant Messenger goes dark for 40 minutes. 15% of Twitter posts, roughly 5,000 tweets per minute, were about Michael Jackson.
The end result – The Los Angeles county coroner discovers high levels of antidepressant drugs in Jackson’s system, including the anesthetic propofol, which triggered a fatal cardiac arrest
Two months after Jackson’s death, the documentary Michael Jackson’s This Is It debuts, along with compilation album of the same name. Before his death, Michael Jackson had been planning a series of comeback tours and was pushing himself hard, relying on drugs to ease anxiety and treat his chronic insomnia (he allegedly went a record 60 days without any real sleep).
The film showcases his rehearsal sessions. It becomes the most successful concert film of all time bringing in 35 million album sales worldwide and record-breaking download sales (one million in a single week).
Three of his albums sell more than any new release and his first posthumous album, Michael, lands in the Top 10 around the world.
If you’ve never seen This Is It – I highly recommend. You really get an idea of the passion he had for the music and the shows. And you get a glimpse into how sad his life seemed at times.
A legend in the music world gone too soon.
