I loved the new Michael.
I want to begin there plainly.
Not with an argument.
Not with a defense.
Not with the careful language people sometimes reach for when something connected to memory, fame, Blackness, childhood, music, and history walks back into the room.
I loved it.
The songs moved me.
Not in some distant, critical way. Not the way a person listens to music after they have read all the books, watched all the interviews, studied all the contradictions, and learned how to hold admiration at arm’s length. I mean, the songs moved me in the old way. The body-before-language way. The way music enters through some door you forgot was still open.
At fifty-five, I do not hear those songs as artifacts.
I hear them as weather.
I hear them as radio coming through a kitchen that probably smelled like something frying, or boiling, or being stretched into enough. I hear them from the backseat of cars where adults controlled the dial, and children learned the world through whatever sound came through the speakers. I hear them on Saturday morning, as vinyl, as television, as that strange and beautiful era when even a cartoon version of the Jackson 5 felt like an event. I remember that cartoon. I remember what it meant to see Black children animated into joy, color, rhythm, and possibility.
Maybe that sounds small to someone who did not come up that way.
It was not small.
There are certain things you do not understand as history when you are living them. You only know that they are there. You only know that they have become part of the wallpaper of your becoming. The music played, and you were young. The world was not simple, but for three minutes at a time, it had a beat. It had a hook. It had a high note that made you think the ceiling could be negotiated.
So when I sat in that theater, I was not just watching a film.
I was sitting with a younger version of myself.
The boy who heard those songs before he knew how complicated people could be. The boy who watched the Jackson 5 cartoon without needing permission. The boy who did not yet understand how memory works, how it stores light right next to shadow, how it refuses to separate joy from the time that gave it to you.
The theater itself was nice. Comfortable. Clean. Respectable.
The audience was attentive and respectful.
And that, oddly enough, became my problem.
Because as a Black American, I know how we can be in a movie theater. And I will be honest: sometimes it bothers me. Sometimes the talking is too much. Sometimes the commentary arrives before the scene has finished breathing. Sometimes the theater becomes less a place of watching and more a place of public performance.
There are times when I want quiet.
There are times when I want people to sit down, hush, and let the movie do what it came to do.
But this time, sitting in all that good behavior, I found myself missing the very thing I sometimes complain about.
I had heard stories of other audiences singing along. People are dancing in their seats. People clapped when the old songs came alive. People who understood that certain music was never meant to be consumed silently, like medicine taken alone in a dark room. Some songs are communal property. Some songs do not belong to the screen once they begin. They belong to everybody who survived long enough to remember them.
And I wished I had been there.
I truly did.
I wished I had been in the theater where somebody forgot themselves during a chorus. Where an auntie somewhere in the middle row could not help but sing. Where somebody’s foot betrayed them. Where the room stopped pretending it was only an audience and became, for a little while, a family reunion without potato salad, folding chairs, or somebody arguing over who made the greens.
Because I would have joined in.
I know that now.
The part of me that usually wants order would have stepped aside. The part of me that loves silence would have understood that this was not noise. This was testimony. This was memory refusing to stay seated. This was the body remembering what the mind had tried to file away.
There is a difference between disruption and communion.
There is a difference between people being rude and people being careless.
And maybe that is what I wanted.
To be carried.
Not just entertained. Not simply impressed. Carried backward and forward at the same time. Back to the radio. Back to the cartoon. Back to the sound of a people finding brilliance in children, rhythm in hardship, spectacle in discipline, and magic in a world that did not always make room for Black genius unless it could first package it, sell it, and survive off the shine.
Michael’s music, especially for those of us who grew up with it, is not just celebrity memory. It is part of the architecture. It was in the rooms we lived in. It was in the cars. It was at family gatherings. It was on television when television still felt like a shared national fireplace. It gave us something to marvel at.
And Black people know what marveling means.
We know what it is to look at one of our own doing something impossible and feel, for a moment, that the impossible has been slightly revised.
That is why the respectful silence felt incomplete to me.
Not wrong.
Just incomplete.
Maybe it was only my particular audience. Maybe I caught the quiet room. Maybe everyone else was feeling what I was feeling, but had been trained, like me, to behave. Maybe we were all sitting there with songs rising in our chests, politely swallowing them back down.
There is something sad about that.
Not tragic. Just sad.
Because sometimes respect can become another kind of restraint. Sometimes we are so careful not to disturb the room that we forget we are allowed to be alive in it. Sometimes adulthood teaches us to sit still during the very songs that once taught us how to move.
I left the theater grateful, but also a little hungry.
Hungry for the version of the experience where the room loosened. Where people remembered they had bodies. Where nostalgia wasn’t treated like a museum piece behind glass, but like something you could clap along to. Something you could sing wrong and still mean with your whole heart.
Maybe that is why I believe I will go see it again.
Not because I missed the film.
Because I may have missed the room I was supposed to see.
I want another chance to sit among people who remember. People who know that certain songs do not simply play. They open a door. And when that door opens, the child in you steps through first.
At fifty-five, that child is still there.
Older now. Quieter. More careful. More aware of the cost of everything.
But still there.
Still listening.
Still remembering the radio.
Still remembering the cartoon.
Still waiting for the room to sing.
Kyle J. Hayes
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