Posted by The day after Chris Brown performed a tribute to Michael Jackson at the 2010 BET Awards, the blogosphere and entertainment media were full of lunatics, weekend psychiatrists and fake-a$$ mind-readers pretending to know exactly why Brown broke down into tears during his performance.
I will be quite blunt and speak directly to anyone this MJEOL Bullet applies to: Those of you who treated Michael Jackson like a piece of $hit shouldn’t even open your foul mouths about Brown’s motives.
Every REAL Michael Jackson fan knew exactly how Chris Brown felt at that moment. And when I say REAL fan, I’m not talking about some of you critics who didn’t give a rat’s a$s about Michael Jackson after 1985; Or those of you who suddenly remembered he existed because he stopped breathing one day; Or those of you fake fair weather “fans” who were only ever into Michael Jackson because everybody else was at the time; Or those of you who pretended like you didn’t know who he was as he was going through undeserved $hit-storms particularly the last 16 years of his life.
I won’t pretend to be inside Chris Brown’s head. But he hasn’t given me a reason to think it was an act. Actually, if Chris Brown is that great of an actor, Hollywood should be falling all over themselves to put him in movies.
Some things just are what they are whether you want to accept it or not. When Brown was so overcome he couldn’t speak, that moment goes a long way to illustrate all you need to know about how a great number of real Michael Jackson fans feel even to this day.
Those who are too jaded to see past their own noses didn’t pay any attention to the emotion of the moment and sought instead to come up with some smart-a$s reason why it happened.
I am speaking most directly to entertainment reporters and those who frequent celeb-based blogsites where general snottiness about everything is praised, and where good sense is often absent.
Some of you have a lot of ballz not to see anything wrong with your own rabid, hateful behavior towards Jackson when he was alive, but choose to sit on a high horse criticizing Chris Brown now. Your mess doesn’t smell like roses either, so don’t start trying to interpret somebody else’s emotions particularly when it involves the subject of Michael Jackson.
Moreover, if you used your media platform to engage in constantly bullying Jackson like an immature middle-school kid while he was still breathing, you don’t get to criticize Chris Brown without figuratively having your a$$ handed to you by people like me who can’t understand why you apparently can’t conceive of someone — even with Brown’s past — to be overcome by the death of a person they idolized for years.
If you used your media platform to spread everything from half-truths to unconfirmed lies about everything from Jackson’s finances to his children, then don’t even open your damn mouth to speculate about Brown’s motives. You have shown a penchant for latching onto fake $hit and misinterpreting information, so your opinion means absolutely nothing, as far as I’m concerned.
I keep asking myself that if this weren’t Chris Brown, would these people still respond in this manner? And I can only imagine the hateful hail of sick-a$s jokes that would have come if it were Justin Bieber (Beiber? Whatever.) who broke down instead. But because it was Chris Brown — someone who has not been ashamed to admit to studying Michael Jackson since he was a little kid — all of a sudden his tears were about Rhianna… or low album sales… or whatever the hell else that has been projected onto him.
And before you go on a ‘how can you defend a woman beater’ trip, this didn’t have anything at all to do with his past behavior. His emotion in that moment is only what I’m speaking to. Lord knows, Brown has been and will continue to pay for his disgusting actions. But that isn’t why I’m going off right now.
BEFORE Jackson died, Brown made no secret of his admiration. BEFORE Jackson died Brown was paying tribute to him in his own way with his own performances. He’s never been ashamed of Jackson, or afraid to admit he likes Jackson’s music. There are videos of Brown dancing like Michael Jackson pre-Rhianna scandal. So don’t treat this man like he just suddenly thought up a plan to use Jackson’s death to make you forget what he did. He knows all too well you won’t forget it because it’s brought up every time his name is mentioned.
Some of you who thought the worst of Jackson are now weighing in on Brown’s emotional moment like you don’t want to see what’s in front of you. Yes Chris Brown brought his own hell down upon himself by raising his hand to a woman. But, yes, he can be someone who was also genuinely overcome by the death of Michael Jackson. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Those of you who thought the worst of Michael Jackson only to be shocked….. SHOCKED I TELL YOU…. that anybody under the age of 30 would mourn his death (as if Jackson stopped singing after Thriller), can go stick your heads in the oily waters of the Gulf of Mexico for all I care. That also applies to the johnny-come-lately bandwagon jumpers who wouldn’t have been caught dead in a Michael Jackson t-shirt before June 25 2009.
Despite your uber-jaded views and guileful tongues, what remains is the fact that you are missing the point. People exist on this planet who not only admired Jackson as a musician, but also as a person. We lost a great human being on that day. We didn’t lose — as I read one shortsighted commenter on some random blog — ‘…a weird guy who could dance’. His impact was much, much bigger than that.
It’s an impact that would cause a young man — even one with a set of problems — to burst into tears the same way many people of all backgrounds around the world have done repeatedly since June 25 2009.
MJEOL