Hey, two months late! That's a new record. But I said I was gonna finish this Quarterly Report shit, and here it is. Hopefully I'll get the fourth-quarter shit done quicker. And just because the whole chronology is so massively fucked up, I'll clarify: These are my favorite songs that came out between July and September. Some of them are old as hell.

The Quarterly Report - Singles

1. Thom Yorke: "All for the Best". This is from the tribute/benefit album thing for Mark Mulcahy, this old 80s/90s college rock guy whose wife recently died. Yorke is covering a song by Miracle Legion, one of Mulcahy's bands, and so he's singing someone else's lyrics, and they're not even remotely about corporations slowly taking over our universal consciousness or whatever. Instead, it's a bunch of telling, vivid details about being totally sad and totally devoted to someone, how those two feelings can feed off each other in ways that don't even come close to making sense. The melody is pretty simple, too. Yorke's got this insane compositional sense, and he knows when to phase in the big discordant guitar riff or the trash-can percussion or the electronic hums and beeps so they'll have maximum emotional impact. His voice is also obviously on some force-of-nature shit. And here he's devoting those gifts to a song that's pretty deceptively simple, and it keeps him grounded. He's also harmonizing with his brother, and so there's this warm intimacy to the whole thing that I really never hear on actual Radiohead songs. Point is: Everything about this song is totally devastatingly gorgeous. I'd love to see Yorke applying his gifts to really direct gutpunch songs like this, but I know it's not gonna happen, so I might as well just take full delight in it while I've got the chance.

2. Lil Cali: "Ric Flair [feat. Young Dro & Mouse]". I was talking to David Drake about this one. Drake mentioned how a friend of his predicted that the real Ric Flair would pull a Rosa Parks and sue over this one. I don't think Ric Flair will sue. I think that when Ric Flair hears this shit in the club, he screams "whooo!" a bunch of times until his face gets all red. Then he runs around chopping people's chests. Then he gets all dazed, takes a couple of steps forward, and flops on his face. That's what I would do if I was Ric Flair, anyway. Obviously awesome title aside, this is just perfectly executed deep-South bounce-rap with a particularly nasty Dro verse and a total MVP performance from Mouse. Right now, I wouldn't be mad if Mouse was house producer for the entire world instead of just Trill Ent. He's the most consistent non-Boosie rapper in Louisiana these days, his hooks stick in your head all day, and no producer anywhere else is better at uncomplicated dance-rap shit these days. I hope his car is entirely free of weed and guns; these Louisiana cops aren't playing these days.

3. Jeremih: "Imma Star". I didn't like "Birthday Sex" because you guys know how I feel about yippy/stuttery Dream-isms. But the follow-up is total simple, slithery, insinuating R&B strut, and it's great. Jeremih's basically just singing battle-rap lyrics here. Except they'd sound a whole lot more ridiculous if he rapped them, and somehow they come out simultaneously ridiculous and cool in his detached matter-of-fact croon. There's one part where I'm pretty sure he says, "Don't need Roger Ebert or the paparazzi," which is clearly ridiculous; everyone needs Roger Ebert. Also: "You a Scorpio? Girl, get over here / Ride me all night like you kin to Paul Revere."

4. Trick Daddy: "Ruby Red". If all those songs with kids' choruses proved anything, it's that Trick's most dubious impulses can sometimes turn out to be his best. So: a teary-eyed addiction confession over a bloopy Jim Jonsin plastic-pop beat with a chipmunked-out Southern rock chorus? Yeah, that'll work. Trick's built up ridiculous amounts of goodwill over the years, and this song uses all your built-in sympathies, almost preying on them, so that Trick can tell us about how his chest hurts when he wakes up in the morning. It's a simple song about the accumulated physical costs of a life lived hard, and it reminds me of something like Johnny Cash's "Sunday Morning Coming Down". It's not exactly a song about hard-earned wisdom; it's a song about hard-earned depression, about wishing you had the wisdom to prevent what you're feeling now.

5. Toby Keith: "American Ride". Keith's particular strain of asshole conservatism is one that I kind of like, even if I almost never agree with it. Keith doesn't get all furious or offended or bent out of shape; he's no self-righteous Fox News Bible thumper. Instead, he just lays back and makes fun of everything, trusting that everything's going wrong and every attempt to fix shit is doomed: "Plasma getting bigger, Jesus getting smaller / Spill a cup of coffee, make a million dollars." And then, on the chorus, he sings about how you have to love all this bullshit. It sure helps that he attaches these shithead sentiments to a monster of a three-minute Southern rock windows-down singalong, snarling out na-na-nas when he can't think of any other stuff to complain about.

6-10. Big Boi: "Fo Yo Sorrows [feat. George Clinton & Too Short]", Lil Boosie: "Top Notch [feat. Mouse & Lil Phat]", Still Going: "Spaghetti Circus", Tum Tum: "Don't Play No Games [feat. Baby C]", Florence & the Machine: "You've Got the Love (Jamie xx Rework)".

The Quarterly Report: Albums

You know what's getting hard? Finding time to do any sort of writing that I'm not getting paid for. I thought about just stopping doing these quarterly reports, but I guess I'm addicted to my own opinions or some shit. Apologies to M.O.P., Memory Tapes, KD, Baroness, Dizzee Rascal, and the TrapsNTrunks Huntsville tape. As always, singles when I get to them.

1. Girls: Album. I already reviewed the thing for Pitchfork and talked about it on this weird ABC thing, and every other writer out there seems to have an opinion on this one, so I don't know if there's too much to say about this one. But there's a line that got cut from my Pitchfork review, probably for good reason. I originally ended that review by saying that we should dive into this band right now because who knows if we're ever going to get a follow-up. And it's true: This is a whole album about fragility from a band led by a dude with some serious demons and filled with guys who like drugs. The fact that they ever became a functional band feels like a small miracle. But there's something else about this band and this album that I love. They take all their press photos and shoot all their videos with their their bigass mob of friends, and that sense of mutual support really creeps into the music. Like, that's how this album gets to be so fun: Everyone involved is propping everyone else up at all times, which is kind of a beautiful thing. A whole lot of people played on this album, and all the great little production flourishes help attest to that. But there's also this whirling bruised out-of-control quality that reminds me of every scary/sad/fun Baltimore cokehead party I ever went to. This is indie rock teetering on the precipice of something heavy, which is something indie never seems to do anymore. It's music with something at stake.

2. Raekwon: Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II. When I'm in the right mood, this one is #1. There's been a good amount of talk from folks like Brandon about how Cuban Linx II is straight-up regressive mid-90s revivalism, revivalism that doesn't even get the twisty mythology of that initial wave of Wu records right. Brandon's not exactly wrong there, but an album full of insular hardhead gangsta shit is pretty much the best possible thing Rae could be making right now. And more to the point, we're dealing with transcendent insular hardhead gangsta shit right here. Every one involved is rapping like this is their one shot to grab a big audience again, which it sort of is. Ghostface might be the guy with the least to prove here, but he still spazzes out on every track, bringing nauseating realism with intensity that's rare for even him. The beats are all drugged-up and heavy and evocative, which is so much better than the rote budget thud we get from so many of Rae's peers. And more to the point, this works as a subtle corrective to all the triumphal drug-dealer talk of someone like Jeezy. There's no glorification at work here. And while Rae talks about buying stuff, he's way more vivid talking about blood-spatters on sidewalks. I can't imagine anyone wanting to take part in something like "Sonny's Missing", and Beans' verse on "Have Mercy" is some seriously heartbreaking shit. In a way, then, this is humane gangsta music, or at least music that acknowledges the sickness of the life it describes. Amazing that Rae had something like this in him after all these years.

3. Freddie Gibbs: Midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzik. I've written about this guy a couple of times in the past few months, so I don't want to repeat myself too much, but the appeal here is pretty simple. This guy raps his ass off, picks great beats, and generally takes everything he does very seriously. His mixtapes, especially this one, sound like really good albums. He's got one of those all-time take-no-shit snarls, and because of that toughness, his beat-up emotional moments sound earned. The beats on "Murda on My Mind" and "How I Feel" and "Iodine Poison" are drunk feverish nightmare things, and he raps over them even though he'd still be great over workmanlike throwback tracks. Gibbs is a great rapper, but he's not so great that other people out there can't do what he does. And now it finally feels like we're coming out the other end of that weird blog-rap circus, reaching the point where rappers can generate buzz by rapping well over great beats instead of resorting to attention-grabbing gimmickry. Gibbs and Playboy Tre and Pill and KD and probably plenty of other people I haven't heard yet are showing that you really can do this, even now, and the proliferation of these guys kind of reminds me of the recent wave of great low-budget straight-to-video action movies like Blood and Bone and Undisputed 2, the stuff this guy talks about. When people remember how to do that simple, honest, unpretentious B-movie shit, good things happen.

4. The Big Pink: A Brief History of Love. Unapologetically epic festival-bait Britrock from two young dudes who completely get that "swagger" doesn't have to be a quality specific to rappers. The lyrics here are just droolingly dumb, to the point where it's not so much accidental as confrontational; the first song has a line about watching 10,000 naked chicks writhing. On the chorus. Musically, it ransacks shoegaze for all the car-crash noise-smears it can find. One of the two used to be in Alec Empire's band, which is kind of hilarious. But this is a band that understands how to use churning noise to its advantage, to sculpt skree into hooks that sound bigger because they sound less controlled. And when those two guys sing, they either sound like Richard Ashcroft knocking over old ladies in the "Bittersweet Sympony" video or Noel Gallagher snarling over careening breakbeats in "Setting Sun". (Or, you know, slightly whinier variations on those two, but still.) I haven't seen this band live yet, but I'm guessing they play really, really loud.

5. Beanie Sigel: The Broad Street Bully. This is lesser Beans, probably by design. No hype, unclearable samples (Queen!), released on a label that looks for all the world like some kind of janky money-laundering enterprise. Only guests are similarly embittered State Prop dudes. There's one song where Beanie uses Biblical imagery to obliquely go at Jay. There's another where he talks exclusively in cowboy-movie name-checks, which is about as goofy a song concept as you can hope for. And yet this is still a hell of an album because Beanie is just constitutionally unable to release something halfassed. (I didn't think much of The Solution when it came out, but even that sounds really good now.) His threats are genuinely scary, he puts words together beautifully, and the emotional stuff on here, like "The Ghetto", is just heartwrenching. Noz had an interesting riff on his Twitter a little while back about how the big divide between New York and Southern rappers was that NY guys hardly ever make music about the redemptive power of making music. I don't know if I entirely buy that, but it's good for making a distinction between State Prop and their NY counterparts. Because the State Prop guys, Beans in particular, almost always sound like they'll completely lose their shit if they're not rapping.

6-10. Lil Boosie: Superbad, the XX: The XX, Willie Isz: Georgiavania, Discovery: LP, the Dead Weather: Horehound.

Hey, I still have a blog! I don't have to just post inane shit on Twitter all the time! I'd do well to remember this.

There's this one part in Tyson where he's giving a press conference the night he gets out of prison, and some onlooker yells that he should be in a straightjacket. Tyson looks out in the crowd, finds, the guy, and then just screams terrifying stuff at him for a couple of minutes. "You couldn't last two minutes in my world!" "I'll eat your asshole raw!" "I'll fuck you till you love me!" That kind of thing. I rewound that part a bunch of times, and I wish they could've found that heckler for a follow-up interview. Dude must've been convinced his life was about to end.

The weird thing about Tyson the movie is that it makes its subject both fucking demonically frightening (seriously: "I'll fuck you till you love me"?) and enormously sympathetic, even in that moment. Because when Tyson's talking about his time in prison, it's evident that he's totally convinced he didn't rape that one girl, though who knows what actually happened. So this guy just wants to get back to boxing and get on with his life after a nightmarish prison stint, and it makes sense that he'd be furious when some fucker won't leave him alone. I was on his side in that scene, insane as he was. That happened a lot in Tyson. It's a complicated movie, and how many complicated movies even get made anymore?

Also, Carmelo Anthony produced Tyson. Yet another reason why that guy rules.

EDIT: And here it is! Thanks, Rich!

Quarterly report: Singles

Well, here it is, what, five weeks late? Having an infant at home is time consuming! Just to be clear, the cutoff point here is the end of June; I've ignored everything new I've heard since then.

Anyway. Good songs coming out right now! really kills me that I couldn't find room for "You're a Jerk" or Gucci Mane's "Awesome" or Basement Jaxx's "Raindrops" or that "Who's Real" remix with the entire peak-era Ruff Ryders lineup.

1. Rancid: "Last One to Die". There's a moment in the "Last One" video, where Tim Armstrong, standing on a beach somewhere, slurs, "We knew from the very first show what it was all about" while he points at a couple of hefty, busted-up looking old punk dudes standing behind him. And I have to wonder: Are those the other two guys from Operation Ivy? Or are they just two dudes who were standing there? Kinda doesn't matter; either one is great. As a Rancid song, this shit is top-notch. Everything does its job: the kinda-pretty backing vocals, the galloping drums, the great half-surf riff, the soaring chorus. And all of this is pressed into service of a sentiment I can seriously get behind: We still exist, fuck you. "We got it right. You got it wrong. We're still around. Last one to die." If you're older than 25 and you can't relate to that shit, you're doing something wrong. Obstinate defiance is an honorable thing.

2. 8Ball: "America". This hits a lot of the same buttons for me that "Last One" does: Craggy old motherfucker who's seen it all and let it all creep into his voice, letting you know he can still tear shit apart when he feels like it. On the Memphis All Stars album, you had to wait through a five-minute sermon from some preacher before the song actually started, and I still played it more often than the rest of the album. But thank god Ball decided to rescue this one from its intro, making it a video and everything. I love how he switches it up here, kicking hard fuck-you-up shit for two verses before switching into some unbelievably bleak and depressing everything's-gone-wrong talk for the last verse, never really giving any outward indication that he's talking about different stuff. The beat just glimmers, too.

3. Gucci Mane: "Gorgeous". If Status Ain't Hood still existed in 2009, there would be at least 10 posts about Gucci. But Gucci seems fated to be sort of underrepresented on a list like this because his appeal isn't about a single track or even a mixtape; it's this full-immersion thing where you just know you'll get another track from him every time you finish clicking through your RSS feeds, that he'll come with another couple before you finished digesting the last one. That's how he's become the rap story of the year, as Brandon and Noz and (especially) David and Jordan have totally shown again and again in some ridiculously great pieces. One of the reasons I'm loving Gucci so much lately is that he's inadvertently helped prove that great criticism still exists. Can't remember the last time a single artist inspired so much good writing, but then that's what good writing does, and Gucci's a great writer. I'm sort of cheating in using "Gorgeous" to stand in for so many other songs, the ones named after single-word adjectives in particular. This one fits perfectly into Gucci's onslaught: cheap-as-hell minor-key Zaytoven beat, unbelievably sticky chorus, absurdly great ad-libs, and at least a few lines that I wish I'd written: "Your jeweler is a loser," "Watch like thunder, chain like lightning, my pinky game scary, my chain so frightening." And I love the idea why Gucci's so obsessed with jewelry is that he keeps on hearing voices telling him to ball. That's why he keeps on buying Porches. It's a funny line, but it lends this weirdly spooky force to everything else.

4. Black Eyed Peas: "I Gotta Feeling". Look. I know. I'm sorry, OK? I never meant for this to happen. But one of the prices of claiming you don't believe in guilty pleasures is that sometimes you have to rep for things that you know are just unbelievably lame in so many ways. The Black Eyed Peas have done so many things to annoy me in so many ways over the past five years (at least) that I had a hell of a time admitting to myself how I felt about this one. But there it is: Gigantically hooky jock-jam about getting ready to go out at night, with a perfectly executed techno-rock stomp and a riff the Killers would've killed for. And the way Will.I.Am and Fergie deliver their lines, every last line ends in an exclamation point, which is exactly the sort of dumb shit I love: "Fill up my cup! Mazeltov!" Those strings just kill me. This is big-money all-cylinders pop done just exactly right, and real talk, we should all be glad that this sort of thing is still allowed to exist. I hate to even bring the man into this, but it seems weirdly appropriate that this song managed to cling to iTunes top dog status even immediately after Michael Jackson's death; it's proof positive that the monoculture that Jackson came to represent for so many pundits still exists in some battered form. I don't know why I think that's a good thing, but I do.

<5>Mr. Hudson: "Supernova [feat. Kanye West]". Speaking of shameless! Kanye decides he's going to create his own Donnie Klang out of mid-air, so of course he grabs some British dude with a sci-fi dye-job who sounds exactly like Chris Martin. Then the two of them streamline Coldplay's already-streamlined uplift into straight-up synthpop, jacking a significant chunk of Madonna's "Ray of Light" chorus in the process. And then Kanye decides he's going to sing at least half the song himself, not only taking a full chorus for himself (pronouncing "chance" in a British accent for absolutely no reason), but actually allowing himself to sing runs all over the coda while the actual singer on the track gets relegated to backup status. You really just have to love that kind of audacity, and it sure helps that it's in the service of a great song and that Kanye's Autotune allows him to sing like an actual singer, sort of. So: a windows down dumb-as-fuck adult-contempo jam that's as much fun to think about as it is to bleat along to. I'll take that.

6-10. Gucci Mane: "Neva Too Much Remix [feat. Three 6 Mafia, Project Pat, Yung Joc & OJ Da Juiceman]", Killer Mike: "Man Up", Beyonce: "Ego Remix [feat. Kanye West]", Polvo: "Beggars Bowl", Simian Mobile Disco: "Audacity of Huge [feat. Chris Keating]"

So uh my kid met the GZA.

The Quarterly Report: Albums

Hey, it's time for another one of these! Lots of good albums in the past three months. Apologies to Lee Fields & the Perfect Expressions, Rick Ross, Cam'ron, Dirty Projectors, Extra Golden, Passion Pit, Wu-Tang Chamber Music, Grizzly Bear, T-Rock, Phoenix, Isis, the Field, Two Fingers, Juicy J, and DJ Paul. Singles when I get to them.

1. Playboy Tre: Liquor Store Mascot. I slept on Goodbye America, like an idiot, so this was pretty much my introduction to Tre. And holy shit this guy is a complete package: Painfully honest and real personal-experience shit, righteous and ferocious but never overbearing political fury, and self-deprecating goofiness, all wrapped up in a fluid, conversational realness. And plus the guy can flat-out rap. That matters. He actually reminds me of someone like Mack 10, bringing this flat, nasal unpretentiousness that keeps his stuff from flying off into melodrama even when he's talking about his girl getting an abortion or whatever. "Pain in my left side, pain in my kidney": That's just a serious, relatable problem, rendered elegantly and dispensed almost as an aside. And I like how almost all the guests are fellow unappreciated Atlanta journeyman types: Bohagon, Homebwoi. The beats are warm and heavy and well-selected, classic Atlanta album-construction shit. The gospel stomp on "Oh My Lord" and the Gil Scott-Herren flip on "Living in the Bottle" punch especially hard. In a lot of ways, Tre feels like a man out of time. Ten years ago, he could've been the deceptively smart hardhead in a crew like the Dungeon Family, like Cool Breeze without all the drug-dealing stuff. Right now, he's relegated to cranking out these really great free mixtapes and hoping people take notice, and it really makes me happy to see that it's actually starting to happen.

2. Pink Mountaintops: Outside Love. Black Mountain does riff-heavy bongwater-sticky retro drug-rock better than anyone else, so it makes sense that their low-key side-project would do welling-up campfire sad-bastard shit better than anyone this side of Band of Horses. But Pink Mountaintops never grabbed me before this one. Maybe they got better or maybe I just got older. But holy shit, the slow-motion gospel dynamics and big-hearted stoner-blooz riffs at work here are just gorgeous. Stephen McBean has this craggy and bedraggled but completely self-assured voice, and here he's got organ sustain and sad violins and choirs of backing singers behind him, and everything just works together perfectly. The choruses are gigantic, and the band knows it because they build up to them slowly and sometimes teasingly. "And I Thank You", the best song here, draws itself out to six minutes, taking forever to get to maybe the best hook McBean has ever written. Seriously, I'd probably take this one over the last Black Mountain album, and I love me some Black Mountain. This album makes me want to go for a six-hour daylight drive past cornfields and shit.

3. Bat for Lashes: Two Suns. "Daniel" barely squeaked onto my last quarterly report singles list, but holy shit I've listened to that song a lot since then. Not to get too emo with this, but when my daughter was born, Bridget and I had to spend a few days in the hospital. For whatever reason, we listened to "Daniel" over and over again over those few nights. The rest of the album isn't nearly as sublime as that one track, but the airy drift of this whole record is really always going to remind me of those days in the hospital, which simultaneously rank as some of the happiest and most fraught of my life. Two Suns is a mysterious and weirdly imperious piece of work, and I still admittedly have no idea what Natasha Khan is singing about half the time. But it works beautifully as musical comfort food because as much as the melodies wander and twist, they're still very much great pop melodies. The creeping atmosphere is impossible to ignore, but this is still music to bask in. Kate Bush is the obvious point of comparison, it reminds me of Julee Cruise's songs from the Twin Peaks soundtracks, these deliriously pretty impressionistic things that just barely hint at very serious anxieties right around the corner.

4. DJ Quik & Kurupt: BlaQKout. It's funny: Except for his super-technical and twisty turn on "9x's Out of 10", Kurupt is almost a non-factor here. He's one of the nastiest rappers in West Coast history, but he might as well be AMG or somebody here given how completely Quik takes over. Except Quik's been saying in interviews that he worked extra hard on these beats because he wanted to impress Kurupt. So that makes Kurupt, what, the spirit animal here? BlaQKout seems notable because it's the one where Quik really drops the leash on himself, indulging his weirdest ideas both musically and lyrically. Every Quik album has come with a ton of stylistic left turns, like all those "Quik's Groove" instrumental tracks he loves throwing in. But here he's going nuts with it: Moroccan music, mutant electro, barked dance-instruction reggae. There's a lot of Dilla at work here, except it's Dilla fed through Quik's top-down aesthetic, so it's way more laid-back or approachable than, say, Jay Stay Paid. This is an album I can actually listen to for fun. It strikes me that this is the first album Quik has made without even half an eye on radio play or commercial success. I mean, I can't imagine anyone ever thought this one would sell. If Quik continues to embrace his cult hero status, I can only imagine how many deeply twisted albums like this that we might get.

5. Rancid: Let the Dominoes Fall. It's been six years since the last Rancid album, and yet these guys seem like they can crank these things out at will. So: Hyperspeed chugga-chug tempos, broken-teeth blurting, uber-simple Gibson hollowbody rockabilly solos that end as soon as they begin, ahh-ahh backing vocals, ska diversions. And huge, glorious, life-affirming, heart-expanding choruses. They still know how to write those. The overarching theme here seems to be: "Fuck you guys, we're not going anywhere," which is a great overarching theme to have. And since I've basically grown up with these guys, their persistent, defiant, weirdly adult refusal to grow past Life Won't Wait is more than heartening. It's inspirational. When you get good at doing something, you stay doing it. The last third here gets a bit unfocused, but virtually everything before it is pure fire. So glad to have these guys around, still.

6-10. Jarvis Cocker: Further Complications, Bobby Creekwater: The B.C. Era Deuce, Gucci Mane: Writing on Da Wall, Lil Boosie: Thug Passion, Dinosaur Jr.: Farm.

I was in line at the falafel place near my office yesterday, listening to "Rock With You" on my iPod. When I took my headphones off to order, I realized they were also playing "Rock With You" in the falafel place, and it was almost at the exact same part of the song. It took me a minute to figure out what was going on. And that got me thinking: One of the incredible things about Michael Jackson's life was that he didn't just belong to a few of us. He belonged to pretty much everyone who found it within themselves to give a shit about pop music.

That's why I haven't really written about Jackson's death until now. There's been so much written about him since Thursday, so many on-point and moving essays, that I'm not sure I really have much to add to the conversation. Like, check my old boss Chuck Eddy here. Good lord that guy can write.

Bad was the first album I ever bought. I was nine years old, and my family had just moved to England for a year. Right around then, my parents started giving me an allowance, a pound a week. I waited five weeks, and then I went around the corner from our house to Woolworth to buy Bad. I could've spent that money on candy or water guns or whatever, and I eventually did, but I had to have Bad as soon as possible. And I can't even tell why I had to have it. I didn't know the songs from TV or radio because TV and radio were basically never on in my house; my parents were weird like that. Maybe kids in my school talked about him? Maybe I just thought the cover looked cool? Honestly, I have no idea.

A couple of weeks later, my brother bought his own copy of Bad. We both shared the same tape player, but we both needed our own copies. We wrote "Tom" and "Jim" on the tapes and on the covers, and then we still accused each other of stealing our tapes anyway.

Man, I loved that album. Thriller and Off the Wall and old Jackson 5 compilations all followed, but that tape was it for me for at least a year. I loved all of it, even the tracks that people still think are crap: "Just Good Friends", "Speed Demon", "Liberian Girl", all of it. Sometimes I fast-forwarded past "Man in the Mirror" because sometimes it was too slow, but even that I usually let play.

The thing about this whole ridiculous story is that it is completely, entirely mundane. The same exact thing, word for word, probably happened to at least a couple of thousand kids. If there was a single kid in my third-grade class who didn't feel exactly the same as I did about Michael, he shut up about it.

Twenty-one years later, I can actually talk in music-critic terms about the incredible things that MJ did. It's absurd that he was able to become the most popular singer in the world, way bigger than Madonna or whoever, while singing against the beat on damn near every song, flattening his voice into a hard, paranoid grunt, turning the James Brown vocal style into something alien and almost sexless. This YouTube clip of 10-year-old MJ auditioning for Motown, singing a James Brown song and executing all those moves so beautifully and fluidly, just fills me with joy. If that kid walked into my office tomorrow, I'd start a record label just so I could sign him. And he adapted from that incredibly early age, adjusting his style to fit whatever was going on from 1969 to about 1991, a seriously ridiculous run that very few other pop figures have managed to equal. And he did it without changing the central feeling of wonder and weightless joy at the center of his persona, even as he swung through soul and funk and disco and synthpop and new jack swing and goopy adult-contempo balladry and hair metal and whatever the fuck else. (He never quite got rap, but that's almost for the best; no way his persona could've ever translated.) Everything he did just came out sounding like him. A lot of singers can try to make that claim, but I can't think of any others who could claim that shit quite so truthfully.

But all this rock-crit stuff feels entirely beside the point. So does all the stuff about his intensely bizarre personal life, something I've thought a lot about but not something I really want to address here. (Maybe later.) What matters right now is that this guy made the first tape I ever bought and one of the only ones I ever wore out. What matters is that seeing this guy dance on TV was like watching some kind of flickering quicksilver ghost; it didn't even seem real. He did incredible things. And right now, to me, that's what matters. That's what I'm thinking about, and that's what I can't let go.

I'll probably end up writing more about this later. It's not like I can think about too much else right now.