This ain't it

As I write this, the movie This Is It completes one-half of its two-week run in cinemas around the world, including Bangkok. In only five days the movie all about Michael Jackson and his music will be wrenched from theatres, preventing it from petering out and preparing it to be repackaged for DVD just in time for Christmas.

PHOTO: PORNPROM SARTTARBHAYA, RETOUCH: NATTAYA SRISAWANG

I for one will heave a sigh of relief when it's gone. Not that I don't like Michael Jackson  -  there is a paedophile lurking in all of us  -  but he is the proud owner of a song which, if I hear one more time in a speech competition in Thailand, I will jump out from my judge's desk and storm angrily away to the nearest Isan immigrant selling Leo Beer outside the auditorium.

I am often a judge at Secondary School level English speaking competitions where the topic is something like "Pollution In Thailand" with 10 kids to get through. By the time number six takes the stand, I have already started doodling on the score sheet my Top Ten list of positive changes I must make to my life immediately after the competition ends.

But we are discussing Michael Jackson. As I am starting to scribble "4. No meals after 5 pm" on the score sheet one of the well-intentioned students nearing her final minute will say: "And if we can do all these things, then Thailand will have no pollution and we can make our world a better place. Pause. I freeze. I know what's coming. Then she starts to sing: "Heal the world ... make it a better place ... for you and for me ... and the en-tire human race."

The lead at the end of my pencil snaps at the word "pm" and veers off like an insane lightning bolt. The audience is smiling and nodding as she sings and I am, yet again, left feeling alone and unwanted in a cruel, cold world that embraces Michael Jackson and his song Heal The World.

Forget the fact I think Heal The World is high up on the list of all-time Hideous Hits, sandwiched between I've Never Been To Me and My Girl Bill. Rather, it is a mystery to me how a song that was a hit in 1992 can still be known to Thai teenagers today, many of whom were being conceived around the time it first lodged an all-out assault on the world's airwaves.

Heal The World sits in a basket of elite English songs that Thais have taken to heart and know inside out. Anybody who has ever accompanied a Thai to a karaoke bar knows about this elite list. Thai karaoke bars are dangerous places; only last week we had a page one story of a man who took his girlfriend along to one, ordered a few drinks, asked a few of the semi-clad tissue-stuffed bar girls to sit alongside him, and then swooned when he was handed a bill for 30,000 baht.

The whole of Thailand gasped as they asked: How could a karaoke bill be so high? For me, I was more intrigued about a guy who takes his girl out on a date then invites hoards of semi-clad bar girls to sit with them.

Nevertheless, besides dim girls with great figures, one thing you will be sure to see in all these places are books and books of song titles, many in English. A waste of paper; Thais will only sing one of five English songs from the elite list. And by some weird coincidence, those five songs are all high up on the Hideous List as well.

Let's start with Hotel California. I have now been so conditioned to the opening bars of that song that bile actually rises to my throat before we get to hear about the dark desert highway. It's the same with a Danish band called Michael Learns To Lobotomise, who had a minor hit 15 years ago. The world has forgotten it, save for Siam. The USA has America The Beautiful - Thailand has Sleeping Child to assault us on every karaoke corner.

And ladies, speaking of the threat of assault ... if ever you find yourself in a secluded soi late at night, confronted by a drunken bikie gang wearing sinister orange vests with numbers on the back, do not despair. As the silhouetted figures approach you, chains rattling and coke sloshing about in a plastic bag attached by a rubber band to their belts, simply open your mouth. But don't scream. Just start singing: "Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shanendoah River."

Looking at that sentence, which Thai would ever understand it? And yet it is enough to turn a Thai axe-murderer's knees to jelly once you reach the chorus. As they all join in for Take Me Home Country Road, that is your cue to make a run for your life - they won't even notice you gone.

Throughout my stay in Thailand all sorts of obscure songs have been huge hits here while stiffing elsewhere. "I'm a big, big girl, in a big, big world, it's not a big, big thing if you leave me." That was a monster hit here, featuring lyrics clearly written by a woman with pituitary gland issues.

Another massive hit in the mid-90s was And So The Story Goes whose chorus went: "Lee, dee da dee, dee da dee, dee da dee da dee da dee, dee da dee, dee da dee, dee da dee da dee da." That came out around the time a woman called Jessica Jay had a hit with Broken-Hearted Woman. She was rumoured to be Singaporean. Her English was so bad I could only understand the single line of "In the morning when I wake", something we wish Jessica had never done the day she recorded that song.

The most curious case belongs to evergreen singer Paul Anka. He came to town a year ago and performed a medley of hits before a sell-out crowd, dedicating his Times Of Your Life song to "my beautiful wife out there in the audience tonight, who means everything to me" amid cheers and romantic sighs. Sadly, aforesaid beautiful wife assaulted Anka a few short months after that concert and he required stitches.

Anka needed not to have sung his medley of hits that night. There are only two songs that have been genetically programmed into Thais; one is I Don't Like To Sleep Alone. The other is a little more bizarre.

Back in 1975 Anka had a number one hit with a song called You're Havin My Baby, a song which never took off here. So why, then, is the flipside so incredibly popular? Every guitarist in every cowboy pub worth his namprik in this country must perform the B-side entitled Papa: "Every night my Papa would take me, tuck me in my bed, kiss me on the head, after all my prayers were said."

I blame Paul Anka and Michael Jackson. When I least expect it, a song from one of these two artists will rise up and assault my ears, jolting me out of whatever I am doing, reminding me that if music is indeed the food of love, then I ordered a rotten pork chop.

One of these two artists, did I say? Try both. It is surely a conspiracy of the universe against me that the brand new song of Jackson's, This Is It, is starting to catch on with Thais and could be this generation's Heal The World. It's a song that was sung by Michael Jackson ... written by Paul Anka.