An Ode to Michael Jackson's Last Great Song

I may never shake the following image from my memory: rows of teenage girls sitting cross-legged in an old Christian camp's great hall out in the country, as they watched me in disbelief, faces visibly reacting, as I performed a choreographed dance to "You Rock My World" for the Year 7 talent competition. Dressed as a 2001-era Michael Jackson.

My year level's assorted groups of friends had all performed before me. Cool girls, computer geeks, art nerds, emos. Even for all of their diversity, the night's festivities had been a pretty united front of halter tops and low rider jeans up until my dicey, oblivious act took the stage. A slapdash, two-hour ode to tween sexual discovery and the Save the Last Dance soundtrack.

I wore an outfit that could probably best be described as Dollar Store MJ: a black pseudo-suit I'd gotten from a family member—the pants were gathered ten-fold by a thick black belt at my 12-year-old waist—white tube socks, and a plastic trilby tipped down over one eye (m'lady). I had been genuinely unaware of the fact that not every single 13-year-old girl was obsessively infatuated with the musical stylings of a then-43-year-old Michael Jackson, and it wasn't until the song's instrumental breakdown (at three minutes at fifteen seconds in) that I noticed this was not resonating with anyone. But by then it was too late.

I was doing a kind of side to side body roll, the one that has you worming your head to one side, as your body follows, to then do the same on the other side, getting lower to the ground with each roll, until you inevitably end up at a crossroads: talented enough a dancer to pull out of it stylishly, or a bit fucked. I was the second type of person. I ended up having to sort of thrust on my knees to a crowd of Catholic school girls until the next bit in the song happened, and I could move on. The room looked at me blank-faced, suppressing laughter, and some avoiding eye contact at all costs.

Afterwards, as we all congregated in an adjacent room for a celebratory disco, my peers and friends told me I looked " just like Michael Jackson!", which I took as a compliment of the highest order because I idolised the guy. I much later realised I was being unanimously teased.

The gentle humiliation of that night stayed with me in a small way. I wasn't totally put off, I didn't stop being my weird little self or anything. But I don't think I ever entered another talent competition. And though it followed me throughout high school at times, it certainly didn't stop me from loving Michael Jackson. Or from naming my pet rabbit after his first-born son. Or from listening to Dangerous start to finish night after night on cassette in my room. What it did stop me doing was talking about him and his music to other kids my age. Which was probably a good thing, seeing as the only time he ever seemed to be a topic of conversation in my very small world was during the media frenzy of court cases, or at the butt of some awful joke about child abuse.

But "You Rock My World" remains, for me, an all-time, unfading, enduring pop song. Invincible , if you will. And I now know—thanks to the internet—that late-era Michael Jackson isn't shrouded in court cases and paternity scandals for everyone. That "You Rock My World" is a beloved song from a true great. That it's considered a kind of late-era classic. The last great pop song he really had. Take YouTube user Aalainah Smith, for example, whose comment under the song's music video says "This beat go hard, like I'm so mad how hard this beat go…. Like this is beat is the best thing that happened to mankind." With which, on some days, I'd have to agree. Maybe it's well-loved because people tend to be kinder posthumously, or maybe because people don't really talk about Invincible-era Michael Jackson in the way they used to—the lawsuits and the metamorphosis—because we've learned to be more forgiving and human towards each other (at times). Or maybe it was always this way, and that teenage girls with crushes on Ja Rule and Christina Milian weren't his demographic. I was pitching to the wrong crowd.

Written by Jackson, and produced by Rodney Jerkins AKA Darkchild, "You Rock My World" reached the top 10 in 10 countries on the Billboard charts back when it was released in August of 2001. It was incidentally his last top ten until the release of "Love Never Felt So Good" two years ago, which was a lot more Justin Timberlake than Jackson let's just be clear about that while we're here.

All these years later we're still embracing the brilliance and beauty of "You Rock My World," despite the fact that critics gave it mixed reviews— NME called it "old Meltface's finest single since anything off Bad," while Pitchfork called it "dead on arrival"—and despite the rumour that when Michael Jackson and his management sat the people at Sony down to listen to the album before its release, nobody said a word, and the executives left the room in silence.

And, yes, even despite the pre-Khaled, 13-minute-long ambling music video that featured Chris Tucker and Jackson fighting crime, and Jackson characteristically getting distracted and chasing some poor woman around a set, trying to convince her to go out with him, somehow meek and aggressive all at once.

In hindsight, it's obviously Jackson himself that stopped it from being stratospherically successful. Of course the general public perception of him was partly to blame; his appearance, his recent record of unusual behaviour, and the many legal battles he was involved in, in which he was charged with, but never convicted, of child molestation. But record executives and critics largely blamed the expectation he had fostered in people for its perceived flopping; people who would not settle for a single that wasn't as provocative as "They Don't Care About Us" or as cool and subversive as "Scream."

And so a single that might've catapulted another, less-venerable musician to incredible heights, peaked at number 9. And is oft-excluded from karaoke binders the world around—though that still hasn't stopped me from checking.