How I Accidentally Became A Professional Tribute Artist
By Matt Walsh
One of the most persistent assumptions people make about me is that I grew up as a devoted Michael Jackson superfan, and that becoming a tribute artist was the inevitable outcome of a lifelong fixation. The reality is almost the inverse.
The only thing I knew about Michael Jackson before the summer of 2014 was that he had died and they had made a movie about it.
The cultural climate of the late 2000s also matters. In the years leading up to his death, Michael Jackson was widely portrayed in the United States as a controversial figure. Regardless of whether that framing was fair, it was pervasive. After the allegations and the media narrative that followed, he was not positioned as “cool” in the uncomplicated way he is often remembered today. During the years when I was between five and thirteen, Michael Jackson did not dominate the cultural landscape around me.
2008
When I was eight years old, my ambition was to own my own animation studio. I was deeply influenced by Pixar, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Looney Tunes, and the broader ecosystems of Nicktoons and Cartoon Network. Nearly all the media I consumed was animated. I lived inside cartoons and did not care for anything else. At that age, you could not have convinced me I would end up doing anything else.
Despite all of this, another thread was running through my childhood.
I was always performing.
From as early as four years old, adults routinely placed me in performance settings, and I never resisted. One of my earliest memories is singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” at Junior Academy of Lake Mary with a group of children wearing Santa hats.
Then in second grade, we performed “Feliz Navidad” at an end-of-term school event. When we were waiting in the wings, the other children used to fidget and make noise. The adults warned them, to little success, that the audience could hear every little whisper and that they needed to be quiet out of respect for the audience. I found myself shushing the other children, frequently. In my mind, I had watched enough child performers on Nickelodeon to assume they would have known better.
2009
I was nine years old when Michael Jackson died. I remember the moment vividly, largely because my reaction was so disconnected from the adults' emotional responses around me. I looked at the television screen as I was perfecting my cartoons, and I assumed the headline had to be incorrect. The caption read, “Michael Jackson dead at 50,” and I genuinely believed I was looking at a pale, thin, heavily made-up woman wearing a wig and bright red lipstick. I asked, sincerely and without irony, “Who is Michelle Jackson?”
Queenie corrected me immediately. She told me, “No, honey, that's Michael Jackson,” and that he had been one of the biggest stars of the 1980s. I could tell she was unsettled, particularly from a Black cultural and historical perspective, that I did not know who he was.
The week of his death, the country entered a sustained media vortex. News coverage was constant. Montages played on repeat. The public grieving process was enormous and unrelenting. I do remember watching Mariah Carey, my all-time favorite vocalist, sing at his funeral. What I did not do was meaningfully engage with Michael Jackson’s work as work. I did not sit down and absorb the albums. I did not contextualize the performances historically. In my mind, “Michael Jackson” became synonymous with a single idea: a famous pop star from the 1980s who had died. And I went back to drawing my cartoons as usual.
In those days, I was asked to join a group of other students and sing Christmas carols for the elderly at the DeBary Manor. We would all march in a group, our music in hand, and sing our hearts out to the delight of the seniors. It was a heartwarming experience.
I attended DeBary Sunshine Academy as an after-school program at my elementary school. They held “Worship Wednesdays,” led by two of our schoolmates who taught us choreography and vocal parts. The material was simple, but the structure mattered. It was my first time singing and dancing at the same time, and it was my first exposure to traditional black gospel. Mary Mary's “Shackles” and Kirk Franklin's “Stomp” were two of my favorites.
They alternated Worship Wednesdays with talent shows, which I always participated in. The grand prize was a popsicle. My favorite movie at the time was Madagascar, and I used to dance, hoping to get a few laughs. It was a hit. I ended up winning six talent shows in a row. Eventually, the organizers stopped counting me as a competitor. They allowed me to perform, handed me my popsicle, and then had the remaining children compete for placement. They felt the need to rotate winners.
2010
The year following Michael's death, Queenie took me to see This Is It. Even then, the framework did not shift. The film consists of rehearsal footage. It presents an older, physically diminished Michael attempting to preserve his voice as he prepares for a tour that will never happen. Once again, I was not introduced to Michael Jackson as an active, fully realized performer at the height of his powers. I was introduced to him as the subject of a tragedy and a postscript.
2011
By fifth grade, my performances became slightly more formal. I participated in Volusia's All-County Choir, which introduced me to harmony for the first time. We performed Broadway medleys, including material from Hello, Dolly!, A Chorus Line, Grease, and Annie. It was my first time singing with a live band. I'll never forget watching the band play and hearing the drums in that environment, the way I could feel the snare drum punch me in my chest, and the way the double bass anchored the rhythm section.
Later that year, my school folded the choir into a larger production. Due to logistical constraints, they leaned heavily on students who could handle complexity. I played six roles, including the lead, an emcee-style part, multiple supporting roles, and choir. The audience seemed to get a kick out of the overly enthusiastic delivery I gave as the emcee, confidently bellowing, “A Broadway Review, just for you! So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show!” I was also among a small group of students given a headset microphone. No one explained the criteria, but the reasoning was clear. Microphones were given to students who could maintain pitch and composure.
Perhaps they learned a thing or two from the nervousness during All-County. Over the years, I watched other children freeze, panic, forget their lines, or emotionally unravel under attention. Their pitch would drift, and their singing would soften. None of that ever happened to me. Being onstage felt functionally identical to being offstage. I've never experienced stage fright. To me, performing felt like something all children were supposed to automatically understand, because that's how it was portrayed on Nickelodeon. Carly Shay had her own website; I had mine. Freddie Benson was good with cameras and tech, so was I. The Naked Brother Band sang and wrote songs, so could I. Even side characters who said or did nothing much could automatically burst out into song and crush it. And in my lane as an aspiring animator, I was already drawing with former Disney animators who had worked on The Lion King and The Little Mermaid. Being artistically inclined had always been my idea of what “normal” children did because of the media I had been consuming up to that point, so I was becoming increasingly disillusioned when reality contradicted it.
By the end of elementary school, I had accumulated years of being placed onstage, relied upon, and trusted under pressure. Even then, if you had asked me what I wanted to be, I would have told you I wanted to be an animator.
2012
As I transitioned into middle school, I began to fall in love with soft rock. Every day after school, I would immediately turn on WFTV's Severe Weather Center 9 NOW. I had always been fascinated with the weather since I was little. On this channel, they partnered with 98.9 WMMO and played short snippets of classic tunes from Fleetwood Mac, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Boston, Kansas, Toto, America, and Heart, all of which became wonderful background music for me while I worked on my cartoons. I gravitated toward the 70s music the most. Even now, I experience the 1980s as an extroverted decade. My sensibilities have always leaned toward intimacy and restraint.
2013
Middle school marked a pause in performance. My undivided attention had shifted entirely toward visual art. I was at the peak of my abilities as a cartoonist and a 2D animator. Around thirteen, I discovered Blender and began teaching myself computer-generated imagery. I was doubling down on the path I already believed was mine.
At the same time, my musical tastes were shifting. I remember exactly where I was, on the bus ride home from school one cloudy afternoon, and on the radio, I heard a new hit song called “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk, Pharrell Williams, and Nile Rodgers. It didn't sound like anything else on the radio at that time, but at the same time, I knew that sound from somewhere before. It was a sound that seemed to exist outside of space and time. I remember thinking to myself, “I have got to find more songs like this.” That song changed my life.
Then 2014 happened.
Early that year, I attended a school talent show I did not even know existed. For the first time, I was an audience member watching a format I had previously dominated. It felt disorienting.
Midway through the show, two lanky boys entered the stage wearing white plastic masks. They stood in silence, waiting for their music to cue. It was a dubstep track called “Problematic,” and when the bass dropped, they suddenly came to life, moving robotically and creating all sorts of crazy illusions with their hands and feet. I did not know such a thing existed before, and it was way cooler than the “Madagascar” routines I used to improvise in Elementary school. I approached them afterward, and they began teaching me foundational elements, including the moonwalk and popping.
Later that year, a viral video of a high school student named Brett Nichols performing “Billie Jean” was all over the news. The clip appeared everywhere, and everybody was talking about it. The girls at my school, who had been following my primitive “dancing” since elementary school, began telling me, “You should do that!” I declined their invitation repeatedly. I wasn't interested. They insisted that I “looked” more like Michael Jackson than Brett Nichols did. It went back and forth for several months, until for some of the girls it became a dare. “I bet you can't do it!” Alright then, I told myself. Game on.
By the end of middle school, I decided to attempt something as a surprise at a school dance. I began looking more into this Brett Nichols thing and discovered Michael Jackson's original Motown 25 performance on YouTube. I began rehearsing it privately for the next two weeks. “Okay, he does a kick here, a twirl there, that shuffling thing with his feet, and the Moonwalk in the middle.” After watching the video several times over, I realized that the routine was rather simple to follow in its structure. The Billie Jean routine has a clear beginning with Bob Fosse-inspired poses, a middle section with the Moonwalk, and an ending. With the exception of the shuffle and kicks, everything else was filler that I could improvise with my existing library of dance moves I had been assembling since elementary school.
On the night of the dance, I showed up wearing an improvised costume: my black Perry Ellis suit that Queenie had bought the year before, a grey glove covered in hand-glued rhinestones, a black trilby from Party City, and mirrored sunglasses I had collected from Gradventure the week before. No one knew I had already asked the DJ to play “Billie Jean" at just the right time, and when he did, I went for it. The room erupted. Everyone froze in place and cleared a circle around me. Then I was pushed toward the stage and onto it. The girls were screaming louder than a Hannah Montana concert. For a song that was thirty years old, they seemed to know every lyric. I was just trying to make sure I kept my place in the song after being shoved onto the stage midway through the first chorus. When the song ended, pandemonium ensued. There was a mixture of awe, shock, pride, and euphoria. All the girls were repeating the same sentence in different forms: “I can’t believe you just did that!” Everybody wanted their photo with me. An administrator approached me immediately and asked how long I had been performing. I answered honestly: two weeks.
That night, I went from 28 followers to over 300 on this brand-new photo-sharing app called Instagram, which everyone was starting to use. People began saying, “He does this now! He's our Michael Jackson!” and “You have to do this for us again at homecoming!” I went home believing it would all cool down as the summer vacation ensued, and I would be back to drawing as usual. My summer plans were abruptly cut short when a family member informed me they had already scheduled me for another show in two weeks and that I would be paid.
That was when I panicked. Now, everyone around me was expecting me to be a really good Michael Jackson performer. I had only just barely learned Billie Jean the weekend before, and I saw from the videos that night at the dance that I still had a long way to go to be as good as Brett Nichols, let alone be believable as Michael. I didn't know the lyrics or the dances to any of his other songs. I had never seen the Thriller or Beat It short films. I had no costumes, my voice was changing, and in my mind, I was still a very bad dancer. If I didn't do something, high school was going to be rough.
I spent the entire summer studying every corner of YouTube content that had Michael Jackson in it: his music videos, his concerts, anything I could get my hands on. I watched videos while I did the dishes. I watched videos when I would normally be practicing my drawing. When it was time to enroll in high school electives, I immediately checked off “dance” without hesitation. In my mind, I needed all the help I could get. I practiced my dancing for hours upon hours every single day. One show led to another. And then another. And then another…
I began networking online with a group of other “Michael Jackson” creators on Instagram. They called themselves “Moonwalkers,” and a bunch of them knew the dances and had all the costumes, and you could tell they were all very proud, loyal, dedicated Michael Jackson fans. It was fun getting to know Michael's many fans from around the world who were my age, hearing their stories, and building an online community together.
I must admit, however, that in those early days, some members of the community bestowed a persistent strangeness in their idolatry that I couldn't quite articulate. Sure, I respected Michael's craft and success to the highest regard, but to some of these superfans, Michael must've been God Almighty himself. At times, their fixation seemed unhealthy to me, and I saw many parasocial behaviors I disagreed with. At times, it was hard to tell whether some members actually believed they themselves were Michael Jackson; they had so enmeshed their identities with him.
I tried my best to integrate myself into their ecosystem, but I knew I couldn't manufacture the organic admiration for him that flowed naturally from them. Michael Jackson was very clearly their hero, and not mine. I was here because it was seemingly compulsory. A family member had taken on the role of booking manager for me without ever really asking whether I wanted to pursue this path, and I didn't back out because I didn't want to disappoint the now thousands of people who were expecting me to perform for them at these upcoming shows.
Regardless, I still maintain a great connection with many of my talented contemporaries in the Michael Jackson community to this day. Brett Nichols eventually came across one of my YouTube videos in 2017 and left a warm comment, which was a huge reward to me, since he was so instrumental in my story. There were also Alex Blanco, Lenny Jay, Jeffrey Perez, and Michael Trapson, to name a few friends I made along the way, all of whom I have great respect for and who have been so kind to me over the years. Some of these tribute artists now have millions of followers. I personally try to keep a low profile on social media; it's just not my thing, and I enjoy the peace and quiet of the private, corporate, and VIP entertainment markets, where it's not customary to broadcast every event online.
The paradox of my story is that most people who become tribute artists do so because they fell in love with the artist and the source material so much that, in their hearts, they felt they had to pay homage. I, on the other hand, was pushed into this, accepted the dare, and within two weeks, I was being driven from city to city to perform. Because of this, every single time I get up on that stage and stand in front of that microphone, I always think to myself, “Why am I here? I am the last person who should be here. Why do all these people want to see me perform these songs when there are millions of actual die-hard Michael Jackson superfans who'd give anything to be doing what I'm doing?”
It really keeps me grounded to know that, for whatever reason, I was chosen to be there that day, that somebody believed in me enough to invest thousands of dollars to fly me out to perform for them. I don't think I'll ever fully understand why my performances make people react the way they do, but I just know that they do, and I can rest well at night on each plane ride home knowing that my presence, no matter how big or small, brought people joy and everlasting memories.