To over 1,000 Filipino inmates locked up in a mountainous jail, Michael Jackson is not just the King of Pop.
"He is like the God to them. It is Michael's music that gives them international recognition," Byron Garcia, security consultant of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center told Xinhua inside the sprawling jail.
For the past two years, the inmates have been dancing Jackson's "Thriller inside the walls almost every month to curious audience who visited the prison up the hills in Metro Cebu's Opra city, or recently, watched it through Youtube on the Internet.
The four-minute video clip generated 23 million views after it was posted in 2007.
Now, as the legendary music talent passed away on Friday before his scheduled farewell concert in London on July 13, the prison birds across the Pacific decided to perform four Jackson songs in a row to pay their final tribute.
Clad in the orange uniform, all of Cebu provincial jail's 1,581 inmates, sentenced to one to ten years over murder, rape and drug crimes, on Saturday rocked the prison playground with Jackson's tunes, a bizarre scene that drew around 500 visitors and an army of local and international journalists.
"I am really sad, because Michael Jackson is my idol," said an inmate introduced by officials as one of the main dance coaches.
Garcia, who pushed the dancing inmate idea into reality with others in 2006, said he felt bad too. "I grew up with Michael Jackson's music and the first song I learnt to sing is 'Bad'."
"Filipinos are so Westernized and that's why lots of us loved Michael," he said.
Michael Jackson was in Manila for a two-day concert that was part of his historic world tour in December 1996. Over 50,000 fans attended the concert. Almost all major Manila newspaper front-paged Jackson's photo for Saturday's issue.
Garcia said dancing brought so much happiness to these inmates, and their popularity could be considered as positive from the angle that it restored the inmates' self-esteem.
"Dancing is good for them," said Segundo Ganedo, assistant provincial warden at the jail, gazing at the dancing crowd. "After all, they are very disciplined and pose no dangers."
(Xinhua News Agency June 28, 2009)
