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Healing the World

Chris Azzopardi

The afternoon before Michael Jackson died, David Blair told BTL how his poetry collection would unite life in Detroit and the Jackson family. One focus, obviously, would be the King of Pop. The Detroit-based poet and musician called him an icon. Triumphant. A window into the American landscape. Tragic. A troubled soul. He compared him – eerily, as it'd turn out – to the doomed Kurt Cobain. A day later, on June 25, Michael Jackson's life would wind up much like the Nirvana singer's.
"Whoever thought Michael Jackson would die?" the 39-year-old asks, as if the artist was – or should've been – immortal.
His death at 50 propelled a networking viral effect as MJ mourners grieved together via Facebook and Twitter. Many relived his hits collection "HIStory," linking the decades-spanning songs to their own life. Some YouTubed Jackson at his pinnacle, realizing how controversy can so easily derail us from what we fell in love with in the first place. Blair took to the Motown Historical Museum in Detroit with friends, dancing and singing and remembering for hours on the lawn. "The whole world should be dancing," he remembers thinking.
His mourning spilled into the weekend, when he poured out his emotions in a voicemail to us. He doesn't recall details of the message, but he was half-enunciating – and it was barely audible.
For Blair, it was a major blow. Outside of a childhood filled – and bookmarked – by Jackson's pop catalog, he'd been consumed by a poetry collection for four years that required him to sift through old Jackson 5 performances and archived MJ interviews. Blair became a sponge to Michael's life story.

"What interests me about his life – and about writing about him – is that everything that he is calls to mind a discussion of race, gender, sexuality, poverty, stardom, rags-to-riches and age," Blair says. "He's a very American figure. I don't think that all that Michael Jackson is could've been produced anywhere else in the world but right here."
Blair wrote 70-some poems for "Beyond the Pale/Where the Mothership Landed," many concerning the Jackson family, but a suite of poems called "The Last Time I Saw Michael as a Child" troubled him. He debated dropping the "… as a Child" from the title, but "that sounds like he's gone," he remembers thinking, "and I didn't want to allude to that."
Now that he is, the world needs to heal. And as Blair does, he'll organize his scrambled thoughts and rethink his approach to his late idol, who was also the subject for a disc of MJ-related poems called "Moonwalking," in his poetry anthology. Whatever becomes of it, it may ultimately become more than Blair thought – a dedication to a singular talent who changed music forever.
"He should be remembered as one of the most talented performers – if not the most talented performer – that the world has ever seen. We live in a world where there have been many huge stars – Elvis, Madonna, The Beatles – but none of them can hold a candle to having been a part of creating what it was that he created."

Before the news of Michael Jackson's death sucker-punched him in the heart, Blair was chilling out – relaxing after an exhausting string of gigs, cooling off in his boyfriend's air-conditioned pad. He had just wrapped a five-week European tour, doing 20 shows in 37 days in three different countries. He performed at Idapalooza, a queer music festival in Tennessee. Then, he held two well-received, standing-ovation-earning release parties in Detroit for his latest LP, "The Line." He needed a break. A few days of nothingness.
"I haven't really been outside in three days," he laughs. "I've had a rough two months – not a rough two months, a fun two months."
Before that, the New Jersey native (Detroit's been his home since the early '90s) was recording his very personal, war-focused disc, sequestering his newly formed band – The Boyfriends, which includes eight instrumentalists outside of Blair – in an Athens, Ohio recording studio because "they're easily distracted," he says, cracking up in thunderous laughter. Among the nine-some: a former neighbor and a couple players in Urban Folk Collective, an old band he founded in 2000 and released three albums under.
In 2002, he focused on performing, trading a steady assembly line job at a Chrysler plant for open mic nights at the now-closed Bittersweet Coffee House in Detroit. He found his niche, emerging the same year on the spoken-word scene and becoming a National Poetry Slam champion.
"The Line" follows "Burying the Evidence," a 2006 one-man show performed in Detroit that was also released on disc, and situates on Blair's deeply personal words that reveal a lot about his world and the world around him. Some of it was written over a decade ago, like "Enough Ropes" – a song he wrote after the brutal beatings of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., a black man dragged to his death in 1998 by racists in the South.
Others reflect his war sentiments, the original muse for the LP. A powerful piece encouraging artists to raise their anti-war voices, written by Detroit journalist Walter Wasacz, prodded Blair to make himself heard – and he's loud and clear on "Warzone" and "Airstrikes."
"When I read that, I was like, 'He's right,'" he recalls. "And so I wrote a song. And I wrote another. And then I wrote another."
"Back Again," about a queer soldier denied equal rights even after serving the country, relies on subtlety to blackball the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" decree.
"Art is such a huge part of our life," Blair says, discussing how at face value it's pure entertainment – but it can also be profoundly moving and life-altering. It can change minds. And the world.
"It's important to comment on those things (war) and to get out what I have to say, but also hopefully inspire other people to think about such things."
Michael Jackson's vision … continued.

Blair
8 p.m. July 11
Goldfish Tea
117 W. Fourth St., Royal Oak
7 p.m. July 15
Five15 Media, Mojo and More
515 S. Washington Ave., Royal Oak
http://www.seriousartists.com/blair.html

Note: See our print edition, on newsstands now, for a poem Blair wrote about Michael Jackson.

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