A Voice Like a Fly in Amber
Now that I have a fancy new corporate job, I’m regularly walking between train and office, and I often listen to a couple of songs along the way. Last week it was The Jackson 5, and I was struck by what an odd experience it is to listen to a young Michael Jackson singing. As an audience, we know so much about the future of that voice’s owner, none of which is known to him. We know about his past as well, more than most people would have known contemporaneously. That voice is a fly trapped in amber, frozen between the weight of knowledge on either side of its timeline. And amber feels like an apt analogy for the sound of that voice too. The texture, the grain, the way it gently rumbles and cracks through sweet lightness. It’s warm and a little rough, with an oh-so-poignant catch to it that belies its youth. Is it the incongruity of the poignancy and the youth what draws us to that voice? I wonder whether people in 1967 could hear that poignancy and whether they recognised it as suc