SEGA GENESIS
“I heard motherfuckers sayin'
They made Hov
Made Hov say
"Okay, so,
Make another Hov!"”
― “Lost Ones”
Ta-Nehisi Coates begins his 2018 essay, “I'm Not Black, I’m Kanye,” by recapping what Baltimore in 1982 was like for a 7 year old. “Cable had not yet come to the city,” Coates remembered, meaning no MTV. So the first Moonwalk he saw wasn't performed by Michael Jackson, but an older kid in their elementary school auditorium imitating the world’s most famous backslide.
“The Walkman was still uncommon, and I was young and could not count on the car radio, because my parents lived between NPR and WTOP,” he wrote, explaining how a massive pop star like Michael Jackson―who released his sixth studio album, Thriller, in November of 82’―escaped him.
Thriller reached and remained No.1 on the Billboard 200 for thirty-seven consecutive weeks, becoming a ubiquitous sensation. For men and women like Coates, who were without access to cable or radio, walkmen or television, it was possible to miss the album first hand, but they couldn’t avoid how culture was shifted.
After Thriller, Michael Jackson was copied. Replicated. Imitators wore his face, parodied his moves, chased a likeness they never got right. It’s like tracing a painting by Picasso, a replica will never receive the same merit as the source, but a copy is able to appear in more spaces than the original.
A cosplay doesn’t have to face the hurdles the real Michael did, but those who pretend can benefit from performing his signature move, never having to experience what allowed him to invent moonwalk. Visibility made him a pop star, but imitation created the idol.
If you’re being original, let em copy. Being cloned is what comes with being extraordinary.