10th & 18th Best Selling Singles Worldwide of All Time: Baccara & Goombay Dance Band

Mr Mary, Miss Wernicky & I were going thru listening to the songs listed as best-selling singles worldwide of all time. It is a surprising list filled with gems & startling bizarre forgotten sensations. The first is Elton John's Princess Diana song, the second is Bing Crosby's White Christmas, but could you possibly have predicted this song as the 10th best selling song ever, above any Beatles or Michael Jackson song:

It seemed Baccara rode a short-lived wave of trendiness until, as the Wikipedia puts it, "by 1981 the duo's distinctive blend of disco, pop and Spanish folk music was no longer fashionable". How soon the pedals fall from the flower! Here's another gem from the list, Goombay Dance Band coming in at 18, still five above 'Billy Jean:

Comments from the Michael Jackson Castration Article, New Evidence, Counterarguments, & More About Castrati: PART TWO

Continued from below, more comments from the original Michael Jackson castration article. The first comment from 2009 was posted at January 14th at 4:59am by "anonymous":

Ha ha!!
This is one of the most pathetic things I've ever read.
You need to do more research on Michael + open your mind.
Castrated? ... What kind of statement is that to make? Wow, how pathetic & ridiculous. It doesn't even make me angry, I just laugh at small-minded people.
Good luck with that

Is it just me, or does that totally sound like Mr Jackson himself, perhaps googiling himself in the middle of the night? Amazing. Anyway, since there's no way to disprove it, we'll just assume that the late Michael Jackson himself commented on my blog six months before he died. I first heard of his passing whilst driving back from Mr Olaf Mary's family's cabin, which has no phone reception or internet, & this comment was e-mailed to my phone, by "sweetgrass":

Hello.. I have been saying the same thing for years.
I completely agree.
There is something about the way bones and ligaments develop as well that helps to add credence to this idea.

I am deeply saddened to hear of his passing, his musical genius is undeniable.

Then in the past two days, there's been a bunch of new comments. June 26th, 10:13am:

I have also thought this may well be the case for a number of years. It does fit with his persona and his singing voice, as well as his ambitious, overbearing father. Time will tell...

7:05pm:

I remember hearing rumors that he'd been castrated back in the 70s. I was a kid - 5th grade, and I've never forgotten that, because I had to ask what it meant. So it's interesting that the thought it crossing someone's mind after 30+ years.

That was news to me, that this theory had been floating around since the 70s. Then, I saw there's a new article about this by Daniel McCarthy in The American Conservative called "The Last Castrato", which begins with a quote by Michael Kinsley from the New Republic in1984:

What’s happened to Michael Jackson isn’t too different from what they used to do to young male singers in Europe a few centuries ago, to keep their voices sweet. In another way, it resembles the exploitation of child stars like Judy Garland in the heyday of the Hollywood studios. In fact, what American capitalism has done to Michael Jackson is even a bit like what the Soviets do to their women athletes.

McCarthy also posts a recording of the actual Last Castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, from 1902:



On June 27th, 5:29am, Anselmo commented:

I've landed here because I was looking for evidences or opinion about this theory. Riccardo Muti, a famous orchestra director, today remembered how his life and his consuption, not only his voice and aspect, were so similar to the famous castrato singers, like Farinelli. If you understand italian:

http://www.corriere.it/spettacoli/09_giugno_27/grande_come_farinelli_33634b46-62f4-11de-ac0d-00144f02aabc.shtml

Here's some of Muti's article google-translated:

Maestro, which idea has been done to Michael Jackson? "His controversial affair, its weaknesses, the extreme restlessness and exhausted at the end make me think about the events of the great baroque castrated as Farinelli and Caffarelli, objects of worship and an unbridled idolatry. Often the victims of this cult. "

She was neither black nor white, had a voice that was neither male nor female ... "For I spoke of the castrated.

Another anonymous wrote, yesterday at 5:44pm:

wow this article explains how castration helps autoimmune disease in some mice - remember MJ had vitiligo and lupus, two different autoimmune diseases: http://books.google.com/books?id=PNPU0sknfCUC&lpg=PA161&ots=ol0M73G-Z6&dq=castration%20autoimmune&pg=PA161

and this:
http://endo.endojournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/134/6/2516

Also pointing to the castration theory is the testimony that the child who brought him to court knew something strange about the appearance of his genetalia. In this theory, it would be clear that MJ wouldn't want that to get out, so settling out of court makes even more sense. The photo was thrown out of court and never leaked.

And for the record, MJ was not a pervert, but a very gentle nurturing soul, misunderstood by almost everyone, and probably the most amazing performer we have seen in our lifetime. He may not have appeared to understand "real life" but he sure did care about it and devote himself to the world. If we lived in a different society, that honored mentorship and service to the youth, that provided a place for children to explore their imaginations ... a society that wasn't so over-sexed and constantly adding stigma and sexual connotation to the idea of men hanging out with children ... and for all the positive ideology and love he's given to the world, Michael would be considered a saint.

That's pretty interesting about his diseases. Thanks for the thoughts, anonymous, & I knew there's was something about a photo of his genetalia being odd... The Huffington Post just had an article about how people with those conditions often die young of heart attacks - that it may have been more of a factor than any painkiller addiction. Hmm. Well, anyway, thanks everyone for your comments. The first post of comments (many about his "deep voice") is here. The original article is here.

Comments from the Michael Jackson Castration Article, New Evidence, Counterarguments, & More About Castrati: PART ONE

Since that old essay about the Michael Jackson castrato theory has gotten another couple thousand hits in the last few days, I seems timely to reread thru all the comments - there were a few good counterarguments & some are like additional little essays themselves. I had called out if anyone knew of any moments where Mr Jackson "throws in a masculine phrase or Elvis impersonation, where is it, & are we sure that he sang it?", so there first couple are about that:

On October 13th, 2007, 946pm, welshirishwoman wrote:

Hello,

Michael actually has a deeper voice in real life...his high pitched voice is part of his stage persona. Lisa Marie Presley also said this in an interview after she and Michael were divorced (not sure of the date though). Also, if you watch Michael's "private home movies" special, there's a clip where he's in the grocery store shopping (it was closed for the night), and there's a moment when he's looking for some gum...when he finds it, the camera zooms in on him, and he says something about "Not just red, but big red," and then laughed, all in a deeper voice...deeper than I've ever heard it.

Anyone have any idea where to find that clip?

Oh, shoot! back in December 2007, a few comments later, I wrote "Also, has anyone heard Jimmy Scott sing? He's on the Twin Peaks soundtrack, & I just heard him do 'Tea for Two' as a duet with Pink Martini's China Forbes. He had Kallman's condition, so he never went thru puberty. Now he's eighty-two years old, & his voice is chillingly beautiful."
I totally forgot about Jimmy Scott! Here's him singing, for comparison:

And don't miss him in Twin Peaks, altho, spoiler alert if you haven't made it to the finale of Season Two yet. On June 5th, 2008, 2:00pm, someone posted:

I agree with castration thesis... But there's another moment when Michael sings deep:in "get on the floor" ("Then why don't you just dance across the floor")

I responded: "...However the lowest of those low notes is an F below Middle C - I'm a tenor with a pretty high range, & that note is only in the middle of my low range; Jackson sounds like he's singing it really low in his voice.
"Also, it's hard or unwise to prove anything from a recording (My Uncle Tom insists, for instance, that Elvis had backup singers sing his lowest notes.) Please send more instances of Michael Jackson singing or speaking low, especially a live video, would disprove this forever."
And someone else added: "...and to the people above the low vocals in 'Get on the Floor' are background singers: Jim Gilstrap, Augie Johnson, Mortonette Jenkins, Paulette McWilliams and Zedric Williams."

Another commenter linked to this video from The Wiz to hear Jackson's supposedly deep voice:

But, come on! He sounds way below his range singing an A two steps below Middle C! Most altos can comfortably sing lower than that. He ends on a pretty weak 'e'.

Stay tuned: More from the Comments to that old article

PART TWO:
More about his diseases & other new variants on the theory

This website is now exclusively about Michael Jackson's Testicles

A few years ago I wrote an essay positing if Michael Jackson was a castrato. If you haven't heard, Mr Jackson just died. And that essay, which seemed to always get a lot of hits, got like a thousand hits in a day & a half. As we wait anxiously for the full results of the autopsy (my God, could this be the moment!?!?) here's a look at what some people have googlied to reach that page in the past thirty-six hours:


_________________________________________________________________

Please "like" our band The Manna Tease on facebooks:



More shameless advertisement:
My illuminated nonsense rhyming poetry book - only $2.15 on scribd.com:

S. Sandrigon - Prophecy and Doggerel 2009

Special Report: Is Michael Jackson a Castrato?

For those unfamiliar with the term, a Castrato is a male soprano whose larynx was never transformed by puberty (i.e. lowered into Tenor or Bass range). Occasionally, this is the result of an endocrinological condition (as the Wikipedia tells me), but it was semi-common practice throughout the Catholic Middle Ages & Renaissance to castrate great boy singers to preserve their pristine upper ranges. (Countertenors are male altos with testicles who have perfected their falsetto, & were also commonly used in church music for centuries, & still sing modern & ancient music today. The last proper Italian operatic Castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, died in 1922. There are a few scratchy old recordings of him.)



I do not know that much about Michael Jackson or his music, but I watched the premier of his controversial interview with Martin Bashir, Living with Michael Jackson, while I was in England in 2003/04. I was fascinated by his behavior on that program, & I tossed off the theory that maybe he was castrated before he reached puberty, thus explaining many of his quirks at once. I was just thinking about it again recently, & I asked my friend Danny Holt to bring up an old VHS tape of Living with Michael Jackson, from his collection, when he visited last night. (It's not commercially available.) Danny's friend Shirley suggested I should write down my theory, so, if in twenty years, I'm proved correct, I can say "look when I guessed it!" I'm sure others have suggested this before, but here's my talking points, all based on Martin Bashir's interview.



-HIStory: Jackson was an inspired child singer. His father was controlling, abusive, violent, & obsessed with the success of his children's act. Michael describes repeated beatings, & also his extreme desire to fulfill his father's expectations. With the international fame, & stressful schedule, Michael more or less did not get a childhood. He also refers to his emotional turmoil at puberty, not wanting to grow up or lose his child star qualities, being embarrassed at his zitty pubescent face. If he, his father, or someone else, ever had the crazy idea that they could prolong his child fame & soprano voice by castrating young Michael, I do not want to speculate the actual events. Or maybe he developed an endocrinological condition possibly related to his phoney skin disease.

-His Voice: His singing range is very high, with some seriously difficult-to-reach upper notes which he hits with no strain. Stranger, tho, is the apparent lack of any low tones. I'm not that familiar with his complete cannon, but if anyone is aware of a moment when he throws in a masculine phrase or Elvis impersonation, where is it, & are we sure that he sang it? More interestingly, his speaking voice is pretty high without sounding affected - it doesn't sound like, say, a stereotypical movie transvestite speaking in falsetto with the occasional break away from head voice.

-Eternal Youth: It is obvious that Jackson has deep psychological issues with age. I'm sure these can't be chalked up to any specific thing, his abnormal childhood or his celebrity isolation - and if you castrated a normal small-town boy, he could conceivably have a normal adult life or musical career without building a fantasy Neverland with a private zoo. Jackson claims to have the soul of a child, & some of his regular 12-year-old friends that are interviewed say that he acts & plays like just one of the kids. But as sociopathic behavior isn't evidence of anything physical, I'll leave this issue to the forensic psychologists.

-Virginity: Jackson tells several anecdotes to Bashir about how he was scandalized by sex as a boy. Once when his brother was having sex with girls in the same hotel room. The second story is far stranger, when he is older, at a time when normal teen stars couldn't be happier that girls follow them everywhere, he describes a groupie trying to seduce him & he wasn't "tempted." I should discuss that castrati historically are not asexual, with famous examples like Farinelli, the 18th Century playboy opera-singer. Eunuchs of Antiquity were castrated men employed to accompany & protect the many wives of a patriarch, but their roles also were not asexual - they were often needed to pleasure neglected women of a harem without the threat of impregnation. Michael Jackson is almost certainly not a virgin; but in my subjective opinion, there is something very non-sexual about his relationship with women, & there is something very pure about his obsession with toys & desire to hang out with kids his mental age. I'll return to this thought below.

-His Children Are White: The unalterable nature of genetics & recessive genes were not subjects that his private tutors (most likely Jehovah's Witnesses) ever taught in much detail, because he has a Bush-ian ignorance that he can just tell the world whatever fantasy he believes, like that he is the father of his children. Prince Michael I, Paris, & Prince Michael II ("Blanket") are Caucasian, visibly not half nor fully African-American - (Jackson claims the secret mother of Blanket is black). Whether he has convinced himself that his phoney degenerative skin disease has affected what color his children's skin will be, or if he has been lied to, or simply doesn't get that the rest of the world understands genetics better than he does, is a mystery. But on the interview he unblinkingly describes the conception of his children with their contractual mothers, & rhapsodizes lovingly about their family resemblance to other Jacksons. I feel I can say without much controversy that Joe Jackson is not their genetic grandfather. Whether this is because Michael Jackson does not possess the biological capabilities to create sperm may never be known. But at some point in his late thirties, he expressed the obsession to become a father (he says he would carry around baby dolls), & rather than going about the fairly conventional process of impregnating his wife with his own DNA (& celebrities with large egos are even more prone to want to sire replicas - like baseball player Manny Ramirez, who also named both his first two sons Manny, Jr.), Jackson somehow brought into this world three white children.

-Michael Jackson His Sexuality: Again, we may never know for sure if he is actually a sexual predator who has a history of ogling adolescents. He has been determined, thru several decades, to have sleepovers with kids, & it is even his naive & earnest desire is to admit it openly. This doesn't seem like the behavior of a pervert, who usually has some self-awareness of indiscretion. When I think of Humbert Humbert's caution & paranoia, Jackson comes off as much more of a foot-in-the-mouth putz. He is just so oblivious that, in his mind, kids aren't allowed to sleep in the same bed as other "kids". A better historical parallel may be Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the Oxford mathematics professor & Anglican clergyman, who wrote Alice in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Carroll. Although Dodgson had many consecutive relationships with young girls, & even photographed some of them semi-nude, Carrollians are in general agreement that his relationships were "platonic". As an adult, Dodgson was a shy, nervous stuttering man, & he only ever felt comfortable around his child friends. It's more complicated than that of course, & one interesting aspect is that the age of Dodgson's girlfriends increased as he did, so that by the time he was an old man, he had several female friends who were in their twenties. As for any Victorian appreciation for the beauty of children, without the creepy sexual overtones always inflicted by our modern minds, we may never be able to see his photography-hobby as not suspect. I'll tell you what I think is creepy: the oil painting in Michael Jackson's house, shown behind him in the interviews, of a mostly-naked Michael in Renaissance style, surrounded by a dozen floating naked cherubs. The point is, even if he naively doesn't see the harm in this aestetic, can't he realize how twisted that seems to the rest of us! Dodgson's photographs have long since been salvaged from suspicion by art critics & biographers - (Go ahead! you can enjoy the beauty of Alice Liddell without feeling non-Catholic guilt or receiving a subpoena) - but there's something fundamentally disturbing about Jackson's tacky taste. I'm on the fence about what's actually going on in his psyche, why or how he is the way he is, what he actually did, & whether history will vindicate him.



If it ever comes out that Michael Jackson is a castrato, that would certainly add an interesting dimension to the discussions about his sexuality & psychology. I recall that in one of the court cases, there was some talk about the victim identifying something unusual about the defendant's genitalia, & there was going to be a photograph of the King of Pop's privates exhibited as corroborative evidence. Any revelation of that magnitude would have been explosive, impossible to keep away from the press. But could it have been....?

Read more from our fantastic weblog: www.itwaslost.org
UPDATE: I've posted some of the comments from this post in two new separate posts: here & here.
←─╥╜╞╬╝More updates: Follow SSandrigon on twitter.

Shameless advertisement:
Buy my new illuminated nonsense rhyming poetry book - only $2.15 on scribd.com:

S. Sandrigon - Prophecy and Doggerel 2009

Friends Around the Campfire's Stuck Home Syndrome is now available for only $5.99!

Special Report: Cho Seung-Hui No Great Playwright

For those who have not been following the fallout of the Virgina Tech shooting, it has come to light that the 23-year-old South Korean gunman was an English Major. More amazingly, his class writings were so disturbing that one of his professors, Lucinda Roy, had contacted the police & sent him to counseling. His poetry professor, Nikki Giovanni (whom Oprah is a fan of), said that his poems scared away his fellow students from attending class! From the Times Lede blog:

In interview after interview in newspapers and on TV, Ms. Giovanni has described a student whose behavior caused her creative writing class to drop from about 70 to 7 students in the fall of 2005.

“Once I realized my class was scared, I knew I had to do something,” she told The Washington Post.

So she confronted him about the dark sunglasses and maroon cap he would wear in class and the darker poetry that he would write.

“You can’t do that,” she told him, referring to the “intimidating” poems.

“You can’t make me,” he replied.

“Yeah, I can.”

Her next step was to lobby the department head, Lucinda Roy, writing a letter requesting he leave the class, she told CNN. And she was ready to go all the way.

“I was willing to resign before I would continue with him,” she told CNN. “It was the meanness.”

Well, two of his short plays have been leaked to the internet. Of course, they are as sick & angry as everyone has been saying they were. But I'm happy to report that they are also really dumb & poorly written. I must admit to having a brief glimmer of wonder if this was some misunderstood writer, & if his writings may have been "disturbing" like Nabokov is disturbing or Andres Serrano is disturbing. There is no depth tho, here's a passage from "Richard McBeef":

Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick ... Richard McBeef. What kind of name is that? What an asshole name. I don't like it. And look at his face. What an asshole face. I don't like his face at all. You don't think I can kill you, Dick? You don't think I can kill you? Gotcha. Got one eye ... Got the other eye.

The play is entirely a son & mother hurling dumb insults at their loser step-father, who has no redeeming qualities. With Ahab, the boy character shares a revenging obsession to kill a large Dick, but the sexual undertones in Melville are much more interesting. Are any of the insults at least a little Shakespearean in their variety? I admit to liking "Eat this, you giant tree trunk piece of ass." But, no, they're mostly pretty boring, like this rant:

What are you, a Catholic priest! I will not be molested by an aging balding overweight pedophilc stepdad named Dick! Get your hands off me you sicko! Damn you, you Catholic priest. Just stop it, Michael Jackson. Let me guess, you have a pet named Dick in Neverland ranch and you want me to go with you to pet him, right?

The second play is "Mr Brownstone", in which three 17-year-olds sneak into a casino with apparently no other purpose than verbally abusing their "ass-raping" math teacher Mr Brownstone, whose name is cleverly compared to a kidney stone. This play turns into a musical, with two of the eleven pages devoted to the kids singing a Guns 'n Roses song. Originally, there's a bit of diversity in the teens' obscenities, but by the last two pages, they settle on simply repeating "muthafucker" over & over again.

I assume it will only be a matter of time before someone leaks the poetry which so frightened Ms Giovanni's class. It's amazing to me that both these teachers went to the administration & even the police about this student's writings, almost two years before he was to become the gunman in the most violent non-Indian massacre in American history. Six years ago, performances of the works of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen were canceled after he made a comment comparing the September 11th bombings to a "great work of art". He publicly apologized, explaining that he had simply meant that the time, effort, & finances it takes to create a large work of destruction is comparable to creating something constructive, say, like an opera or a building. Not to mention how much more media attention the ideas & images "destructive art" can receive.

Cho had serious psychotic & angry tendencies & he expressed them first thru some terrible plays & then thru a violent movie-inspired rampage - (a semiautomatic gun in each hand? come on, man, that's as cliche as your pedophilic step-father, an uninspired blend of Claudius & Humbert Humbert). Interestingly, this massacre came right after Quintin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez's double-feature Grindhouse hit the cinemas - a very gory flick lampooning old slasher B-movies. Compare how Cho & Tarantino differ in their response to their shared muse - the latter with taste & irony, the former with a tragic lack of creativity & loss of human life. And Cho received ten times the media attention; possibly more people are reading his lame plays online today than watching that movie - indeed, I'm sure this real grindhouse will bitter everyone's taste to watch a clever send-up.

T.S. Eliot said "there will be time to murder and create", we all have the potential for either creation or destruction, but most of us won't make the news.