Michael Jackson album resurrected for AMAs

Away from the excitement of Adam Lambert and his very, very dry face-humping, the big story of the American Music Awards was Michael Jackson winning big.

Four awards, in fact. Quite an achievement considering the man hadn't actually done very much - besides dying, of course - in the qualifying period. There was something of a stretch on display:

He was named favourite male artist in the pop/rock and soul/R&B categories. His 2003 greatest-hits album, Number Ones, also won favourite album in both categories.

Okay, you can just about get away with calling his final curtain a justification for people going "you know, the way he keeled over was superstar, man, pure superstar."

But to scrabble around to give a prize to a six year-old album which, itself, was just a coagulation of earlier work is just ridiculous. If the album was that good, why didn't it win when it came out? Or any year subsequently, come to that? I'm a sucker for cheap sentimentality, but death hasn't added anything to the record that wasn't already there. And if the music industry is in the doldrums, maybe it might want to think about not writing off an entire year's worth of releases on the basis that there was a shoddy compilation made years ago that was better.