Beat It: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love...No Seriously, Hit the Road!

As I hear countless stories of idiots hitting the internet attempting to pay obscene amounts of money to celebrate the life and times of Michael Jackson today I can't help but question their sanity. Do you REALLY want to hang out with hardcore Michael Jackson fans? They are a scary lot. STAY AWAY from downtown LA today! I'm picturing the tailgate @ a Jimmy Buffet concert w/ less drinking, more leather and NAMBLA members, and just about the same amount of tears. I thought I couldn't be more disgusted w/ the coverage of this nonsense till I heard Stacy Brown, Jackson's biographer, say "This is going to be Princess Diana's funeral times 20. Michael Jackson was Elvis and The Beatles rolled into one!". People paying into this feeding frenzy and treating it as some sort of cultural watershed moment that needs to be ranked makes me sick. Mind you if it were somehow possible for me to go see a reunited Beatles w/ a Zombie Lennon and a Zombie Harrison ripping through Helter Skelter I'd be be hitting eBay w/ the quickness. Lucky for me I don't live in a glass house.

The only plus about all of this nonsense is that because of the MJ hype I came across ear gold! After the news broke people began writing up countless tributes to MJ. Desperate to be heard in a sea of mourners they needed to guarantee traffic to their little sites....and what better way than to add a remix or a cover version of one of Jackson's songs . After hitting The Hype Machine.com* and sifting through some crappy remixes I came across an amazing auto tuned enhanced cover version of "I Want You Back". As it turns out it was done by Discovery, a side project for Vampire Weekend keyboardist and producer Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot lead singer Wes Miles. These geniuses, whose album releases TODAY of all days, must have been in cahoots w/ MJ's doctor for months as the cover was announced back all the way on May 20th. That can't be a coincidence. Let the conspiracy theories begin. That's right, I said it, MURDER. I'll send this theory to my ex-girlfriend who doesn't believe that astronauts landed on the moon. Plant the crazy seed in some fertile soil and let her run with it.

Along with the autotuned cover of the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back, The album features guest vocals from Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig and Dirty Projectors' Angel Deradoorian.

*The Hype Machine is an MP3 blog aggregator. It's pretty much the best site for experiencing new music...once you get past the countless remixes of MGMT's "Kids". Enough already, people!