After blessing the entire world with six years of relative silence, the self-anointed King of Pop, Michael "I Love Myself" Jackson is back to torture us all with a new album - Invincible.

We hunted around the Pigdog Journal newsroom for someone that would listen to Invincible and write a review for us, but no one volunteered... even when threatened. Then our health insurer called and said that they wouldn't reimburse any claims made by PDJ employees that were the result of listening to Invincible - just too dangerous they said. No problem, the PDJ doesn't normally allow little things like facts and ethnics get in our way, (which is only different from every other news journal on the planet in that at least we admit we make shit up) and it seems perfectly natural to me to write a slander piece on Michael's newest efforts based solely on my "respect" of his collective body of work.

I mean, this is the "man" (a very generous description of Michael, if you ask me) that has had numerous alleged and undefined relationships with people that aren't quite old enough to vote. Or even to read. Then there is Michael's other alleged oddities. Like his lightening hue. His shrinking nose. His fear of germs. His yearly facial reconstructions. The decade where he wore that stupid looking cast. The oxygen tent. The chimp Bubbles, who slugged MJ and got sent to chimp jail. The affair with Liz Talyor. The Neverland Ranch. The brain surgery watching. The millions of stuffed animals. The Shields/Ross/O'Neal "girlfriends". The marriage to Elvis' daughter. It just goes on and on and on ... each story more bizarre then the last.

Back in the early 80's I had a good friend that really thought Michael was the shit. I always gave him grief for his musical taste, because I thought, even at his "artistic" peak that Jackson's music was just shit. Then, in 1982, Thriller came out and 40 million morons bought this utter piece of scat, filled with trite songs, vapid lyrics, overdone melodies, it was insipid and banal and it had that horrible nails on the backboard voice of Michael's. Of course, whipped into a frenzy by the market and public relations geniuses, the unthinking, unwashed masses loved this intellectual equivalent of a two hole outhouse just after twin 400 pound hungover hillbillies are finished making their daily joint deposits. Jackson's popularity soared even higher when he made music videos for each of his hits and became MTV's first star - back when MTV actually used to show videos. This became the prototype for the entire lightweight, cheesy, overproduced top 40s music churned out by the very untalented but exceptional good-looking boys and girls bands of today.

All this adulation went straight to Michael's head and with the size of his ego approaching that of Napoleon's, Michael proclaimed himself the King Pop much the way Napoleon snatched the crown from Pope Pius VII and declared himself Emperor of France. Several million Frenchman and Europeans suffered and died before Napoleon abdicated and was exiled to St. Helens. Sadly, even that amount of bloodshed would be unlikely to convince Michael Jackson that listening to his music is like eating some mythical Helium candy, impossible to see, dry to the taste, fleeting in its existence, utterly unable to satisfy your musical hunger, more a fragment of your imagination then something real and tangible.

So having heard all to often some of Jackson's early works what do I think of them?

I think they are poop.

And never having heard Invincible, what's my view?

I think it is poop.

And there you are PDJ, a review of Invincible as only the PDJ can do it.

If you'd like to read some more about Michael try here and here.

vagrant@pigdog.org