Translated material
Funeral "Thriller"
On Michael Jackson's birthday, his fans staged their idol's most famous video
Fans of Michael Jackson celebrated the first posthumous birthday of their idol with mass dances. On August 29, the day the King of Pop would have turned 51, almost 13 thousand Mexican Jackson fans gathered in the square in front of the Revolutionary Monument in the center of Mexico City and reenacted the plot of the famous Thriller video. As you know, in this 14-minute video, filmed for a song from the 1982 album of the same name, Michael acted as the living dead, dancing in the company of the same zombies. Critics have repeatedly placed "Thriller" at the top of their "all-time" music video ratings. The album itself, released more than 20 years ago and then receiving eight Grammy awards, is still considered one of the best-selling records. “Thriller” was also included in the Guinness Book of Records as “the No. 1 hit album in the world.”Now fans of the King of Pop are counting on getting into the chronicle of records. "We did it!" - Javier Hilgado, the organizer of the event, one of the leaders of the Mexican Michael Jackson fan club, commented on the “memorial dance”. According to him, experts from the Guinness Book of Records who were present during the performance had to determine whether the dance matched “the elements and pattern of the choreography of the original Thriller.”
A similar, but much more modest in scale, performance was organized on Saturday by the singer’s Russian fans. About four hundred young men and women gathered at one of the pavilions of the All-Russian Exhibition Center and dressed up in costumes of various monsters and danced to Thriller. After “Thriller,” the “monsters” gathered in a circle and launched dozens of balloons into the sky to Jackson’s song “Heal the World.” Despite the “monstrous” makeup, the participants of the action, in their own words, wanted to remind in this way of the ideas for which the King of Pop fought - about mercy, love and mutual assistance.
In Michael Jackson's hometown of Gary, Indiana, a funeral procession was held on the singer's birthday. According to the American television channel Fox News, the initiators of the “pilgrimage” to the house where the Jackson family lived were two residents of Chicago - radio host Denise Jordan Walker and jazz singer Tecora Rogers. “The town hasn't changed that much since the Jacksons lived here,” Walker explained. - There is a feeling that time has stood still. "We just want to paint a picture and give people the opportunity to experience for themselves what the Jacksons experienced every day."
Meanwhile, the investigation into the circumstances of the death of the pop star continues. Last Friday, the Los Angeles coroner (an official who investigates cases of sudden or unusual deaths and directly determines the cause of death) confirmed that what in the Anglo-Saxon legal system is called homicide - it can be interpreted as murder, including including murder by negligence. Let us recall that a maximum concentration of propofol and lorazepam was detected in Jackson’s blood - potent drugs, an overdose of which led to the singer’s death. In turn, the pop star’s personal doctor, cardiologist Conrad Murray, who is actually named as a suspect in the murder, claims that Jackson himself accidentally increased the dose of propofol: according to the doctor, he gave the patient only 25 mg of the drug, but Michael accidentally reset the readings of the machine that regulated dosage. Because of this, according to Dr. Murray, the dose was arbitrarily increased, which led to a heart attack that became fatal.