Music to listen to when you want to remember your friends just the way they are

"Do you remember the time, we first met?"

I will never again be able to listen to Michael Jackson's 1992 hit, Remember the Time without hearing the voice of a close friend. A friend who will soon no longer be with us. His voice was hoarse; each word delivered with so much pain it almost brought a tear to my eye.

"Do you remember the time, when we fell in love?"

Bravely, he struggled through the hurt to give me a message he so desperately wanted me to hear.

"Do you remember the time, we first met?"

“I will kill you. Don’t doubt me. I know you’ll get married soon enough, and I will kill you on your buck’s night. I will get my revenge.”

"Do you remember the time, when we fell in love?"

It was kind of hard to take him seriously, given the amount of spit and pop-rock lube caught up in his beard. There was something bittersweet in seeing my most formative role model be wrapped from head to toe in a body-length condom and a couple hundred metres of heavy-duty plastic wrap, struggling to avoid the torments of his closest friends. Ah, the joy of buck’s nights.

"Do you remember the time?"

With the film clip reeling in at over nine minutes, MJ’s soulful epic was the perfect background to the debauchery of the night. For nine minutes, he fought. For nine minutes, he struggled to avoid various sex toys. For nine minutes he screamed with all the strength he could muster his intentions for revenge. It’d be easy to say we defiled Michael Jackson’s music that night, but sadly, he defiled his own music a long time ago now.