Fuck. Michael Jackson died.

It was insane to watch this go from a TMZ rumor passed to me via gchat to most-twittered about subject to confirmed by the LATimes in about ten minutes. As I write this, the NY Times still hasn't confirmed (they're saying "hospitalized"). But again, that isn't stopping literally (no, seriously, literally) tens of thousands of people per minute from tweeting "RIP Michael Jackson." I wonder what the death of John Lennon would have been like (since that was even more shocking) in the twitter era.

Anyway, that said, go listen to Off the Wall if you haven't in a while. It's a fucking awesome album. .(So is Thriller, of course-- I'm not being contrarian by picking the lesser known one. It's just that we all know all the songs (or at least 7 out of 9) from Thriller-- Off the Wall is more of a revelation). Check this out-- if you take away the lead vocal and just listen to the backing track it sounds like it could be off of Remain in Light:



(BTW, the video above is one of those creepy "tribute" videos that are mostly useful to get an embeddable version of a song. But, of note, it's from two years ago!)