On a recent episode of the NPR radio show “Bullseye,” host Jesse Thorn used his closing “Outshot” segment to throw some hosannas in the direction of the Jackson 5’s classic 1969 hit “I Want You Back,” which he considers to be the greatest pop song ever recorded. In fact, it’s so good that, well, everybody likes it. Says Thorn:
The greatest pop song of all time is a song that makes literally anyone happy. You could play it for Israelis and Palestinians, you could play it for deep Amazonians who have never heard a record or, for all I care, you could play it for mole people deep under the crust of the earth, and you would get one reaction: happiness. Absolute, dancing, clapping, wide-smiling joy. It’s a song so good, it even stands up to a ridiculous introduction like that one.
Ah! But Thorn didn’t reckon with one of his listeners, who wrote in to complain about the effervescent pop classic released 44 years ago:
Yesterday afternoon, I listened and enjoyed most of your program. However, I guess I am from a different generation, in fact I know I am. I had never heard that song, couldn’t understand a single word that Michael Jackson sang, and it just sounded like a lot of noise. I can think of a lot of songs from my era that were a lot happier than that, many of them from Disney movies. Examples Mairsy Doats, Zipededoodah, among others. And in those I remember the words because you could understand them, enunciation was a big thing in my day, hearing the words, understanding the words, important to getting the point across.
Yes, you read that right, somewhere out there is an intelligent woman (Thorn identified her as a woman on his Facebook feed) who can compose a proper letter and who likes NPR (and Bullseye), and is bothered that everyone seems to like this craaaaazy song “I Want You Back” that she can’t understand and sees as such a far cry from the songs of her youth. It seems of a piece with the people who used to think that e.g. the Rolling Stones or Marilyn Manson or whoever are ruining the country. Does she think that the Jackson 5 are ruining the country? She would prefer it, you see, if we went back to doing songs like “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” which, you’ll surely remember, was introduced in the 1946 Disney movie Song of the South, a movie so cringe-inducingly patronizing on the subject of race that Disney has been trying for years to pretend it never released it.
We forget sometimes that the battle over, say, punk music, which seems so settled, isn’t actually over at all. There’s always going to be that one last holdout—always. In 1970, just one year after the Jackson 5 released “I Want You Back,” Black Sabbath released both their eponymous debut album and Paranoid. We have no record of what this NPR listener would have made of that. No, her issue is that you can’t understand the joyous warblings of a supremely talented 10-year-old singing (a bit incongruously, granted) about wanting his ex back.
The really hilarious aspect of it all is that Thorn frequently dedicates his “Outshot” segments to rap songs. But either she didn’t listen to those episodes, or else she really digs the stylings of Jay-Z.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Samuel Jackson 5
Jackson 5 nightmare: ‘Junk Food Junkie’