Nostalgia, CDs, and the HIStory Tour
Remembering music before phones and streaming took over.
I was in the mood to listen to my CDs again – yes, I finally have a CD player again! And most of my CDs survived and are still in good condition. Not all, but mostly.
The problem here in Jogja, especially where I live, is the humidity. So many of my things have gotten moldy because of how damp it is. If you have any advice on how to deal with this, I’d love to hear it!
Anyway, back to the CDs, I still have Michael Jackson’s Dangerous and HIStory. So now I’m feeling a bit nostalgic. Remember when we used to read and memorize the lyrics from the booklet that came with the CD? Or even further back, from the cassette covers? Man, suddenly I feel old, haha.
My last post was about going to the Bruno Mars concert in Jakarta. But back in the day, I went to the HIStory Tour during a hot summer on August 10, 1997, at Hockenheimring, Germany. That was an era when you didn’t bring a camera everywhere, so sadly I have no photos from that concert. But I hope I’ll never forget it.
I was there with some friends, including Irene … she’s smaller than me and has very fair skin. We managed to get really good spots, right up front, because people kept letting us through. I guess because we were so tiny compared to most of the Germans there, they gave us space. We ended up right at the front barricade.
I was so happy. But poor Irene, because she’s so pale, the security thought she was sick and pulled her out of the crowd! We told them she was fine, but they didn’t believe us. So I ended up alone in front. The rest of our friends were somewhere in the back – only Irene and I had managed to get to the very front. Later I found out they had taken her to the medical tent, and she ended up watching the rest of the show from there. Poor thing, she had made it all the way to the front with me, only to be pulled out just because she looked too pale.
And Michael Jackson… wow. He was incredible. The vibe is hard to explain. It was just so different from the last concert I went to. You have to remember, a Michael Jackson concert was like nothing else at the time in terms of stage design, sound, and choreography. It was so advanced and incredible, truly ahead of its time. I just googled it, and it turns out the whole thing was staged and designed by Kenny Ortega. No wonder it was that good. Maybe because we were all fully focused on the show, with no phones or cameras to distract us, we just sang, danced, screamed… and he was PERFECT.
I found a video on YouTube, no idea how that person managed to record it, because if I remember correctly, cameras weren’t allowed during the show. But props to whoever captured it! I wouldn’t have been able to, being right at the front and screaming the whole time, haha.
Looking back, I feel incredibly lucky to have gone to that concert. It was his last world tour before the This Is It tour that never happened – because he passed away before it began. That was heartbreaking. I was so excited for the London concert. I ended up watching the This Is It movie… it was bittersweet. So sad and yet so beautiful. Tragic how it all ended.
Listening to those old CDs again made me realize how different the experience was back then. We weren’t just listening, we were fully present. No skipping tracks, no swiping to the next thing, no distractions. We’d read the lyrics, memorize every word, and let ourselves get lost in the music. Maybe that’s what made it all so special. And maybe, once in a while, it’s worth going back to that slower, more intentional way of enjoying the things we love.