I’m sorry, but people constantly going on about what Michael should’ve done genuinely pisses me off. The goalposts move every single time it comes to him. Nothing he did was ever going to be good enough for some of y’all.

This is why HIStory will always be my favorite album and era, and it has nothing to do with how he looked. It’s the message. This was his magnum opus. I don’t care what it sold compared to another album, where it charted, or what anybody defines as the metric of a “successful” album. From start to finish, every new track serves a deeper message, and there’s something almost poetic about the fact that it opens with Scream and closes with Smile. It begins with all this rage and ends by asking you to keep going anyway. That’s HIStory in a nutshell. And between that first and last track, Michael is asking you to look at history and decide what you’re going to leave behind as your legacy, to question what you consume instead of blindly believing tabloid junk, to recognize injustice, to stop putting up with shit, to look inward, to grieve, to rage, and to sit with all these different emotions that people rarely allowed Michael Jackson to have. He’s showing you that he is human, that he gets angry, that he hurts, that he questions, that he mourns, and that sometimes he has rage that simply needs somewhere to go. HIStory feels like Michael taking everything that happened to him, everything people believed about him, and everything he believed about himself, and putting it all on trial right there on Front Street for everybody to see. That’s why it will always be my favorite.