Filipino Prison Inmates Join The Michael Jackson Tributes

It’s been five days since Michael Jackson’s death, and his passing won’t be quickly forgotten. Even when you leave aside questions regarding the circumstances of his death, it’s now clear in a way that wasn’t last week what an impact the man had on not just pop music, but pop culture.

It’s a legacy that stretches internationally. This weekend the inmates at Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, who broke out as a viral phenomenon two years ago with their en masse recreation of the Thriller dance, paid tribute to Jackson’s passing with a three-song medley. The 10-minute video encapsulates Ben, I’ll Be There, and We Are the World, and while the dance moves lack the spice of the Thriller choreography created by Michael Peters and Jackson, it’s a too-long but still touching tribute to the King of Pop’s softer side.

Byron F. Garcia, the prison security consultant whose YouTube account is host to the videos, has definitely upgraded his production values since 2007 — the picture quality is crisp, the camera moves much more fluid. As Craig Rubens wrote when their Thriller piece debuted, there are serious questions regarding the exploitation of these prisoners that have not yet been answered, though that hasn’t stopped the tribute from acquiring almost 2 million views in two days. The key part of the video is the third segment, which celebrates the message of We Are the World by unveiling not just the national flag for the Phillipines, but a collection of world flags — all surrounding a giant portrait of Jackson mid-performance.

It’s definitely far truer to the song’s intentions than God Hates the World, a creepy perversion of the song by the Westboro Baptist Church (which has been around for years, but was recently reposted on Boing Boing, with lyrics like “It’s too late to change His mind/You lived out your vain lives/Storing up God’s Wrath for all eternity”). Karina’s initial coverage of the Filipino prison Thriller video emphasizes that the original video’s irony can be boiled down to “the sheer visceral experience of watching actual criminals enact some kind of zombie prison rape in homage to Western culture.” Well, at least the criminals can get the words right.

Last night, I was up on Hollywood Boulevard to see a movie, and afterwards went by the vigil in progress in front of the Mann Chinese theater, at Jackson’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A Flickr search reveals some of the chaos there, as people queue up in a block-long line (even at midnight) to deposit flowers and pay tribute. The last time I saw something like that, I was visiting Elvis Presley’s grave at Graceland. And yet, it was only a few years ago that Keith Olbermann was using puppets to re-enact Jackson’s child molestation trial.

It’s only taken a few days for Jackson to ascend from pop culture joke to “complicated” legend status, and something good has come out of it: We’re listening to his music again, appreciating exactly why we began caring in the first place. In the Filipino tribute video, Garcia’s picture quality has improved so dramatically that upon occasion, you can really see the faces of the dancers. And as they dance to the man’s music, some of them are smiling.