Jackson and surrogate "family" Brooke Shields and Emmanuel Lewis at the height of his fame

Michael Jackson was the last music superstar, transcending for a time the limits of age, race, orientation, and geography while selling 50 million copies of a single album. He had a knack for peaking, having achieved first stardom with his brothers in the Jackson 5 at Motown Records just as their brand of soul was about to be eclipsed by funk and then disco. His first solo record, 1979′s Off The Wall, was one of the best album’s of the disco era, which would soon be ushered out to pasture by the MTV driven stars of new wave and hair metal.

Jackson was an icon with an increasingly disturbing dark side, a star who aged from childhood into adolescence in public and then seemed to get stuck there. His interests, obsessions, scandals and charities all seemed to revolve around childhood – perhaps as a consequence of his having been so thoroughly terrorized and then commidified by his own father.

Then there’s the music – sometimes bombastic or bathetic but just as often transcendent and ass-shaking. The aforementioned Off The Wall and the mega-selling Thriller are the obvious classics, alongside any decent greatest-hits collection of the Jackson 5. Then there were his dance moves, the moonwalk being the dance to copy during my middle school years.

His videos set new standards and broke the color barrier at MTV, but his attention to presentation would begin to take a thornier turn beyond simply inspiring the outfits of Moammar Quaddafi. His music and self-styled crowning as the “King of Pop” became more and more grandiose – a child’s protective, projective fantasy of power, of “Healing the World”.

His progressive plastic surgeries and skin lightening and a voice that seemed only to grow higher and more whispery as he aged were at odds with the tougher image he tried to project on Bad and Dangerous – albums that began to show diminishing artistic returns as producer Quincy Jones began to be edged out in favor of Teddy Riley and succeeding flavors-of-the-month.

His progressive facial disfigurement began to seem like a rebuke to his country, to the very idea of stardom, adulthood, and his race. This scene from Three Kings shows and Iraqi who finds the ills of a sick culture in the face of it’s pop icon:

His retreat to a ranch called Neverland and cavorting with children famous and otherwise also sat uneasily with his much-publicised marriage to Lisa Marie Presley – an attempt to associate himself with an entertainment icon as ill-advised and audacious as his takeover of The Beatles publishing rights – a move which would sever his friendship with Paul McCartney.

Jackson was at work on a comeback when he died – beginning with 50 sold out dates in London.

I’d love to show you some videos but the idiots at Sony seem to think that people won’t be interested in buying their music if they can hear it or see it first. Must be why they are doing so well at this whole music biz thing. Take a cue from Micheal Jackson – he sold 50 million copies on the back of free radio and television exposure at a time when the industry was bleating like stuck pigs about how home-taping would ruin them. Bet you wish you could be a record exec back then.

Jackson tears it up with his brothers in 1983:

Solo doing “Billie Jean”

With former buddy Paul McCartney and the late Linda McCartney in “Say Say Say”:

The Captain Eo Disneyland attraction directed by Francis Ford Coppola: