I’m sure Michael Jackson is happy he’s not around to see all the psychobabble being dished up about his life.

Did the crappy upbringing really doom him to brooding unhappiness, or did it fuel his otherwordly talent? Would he have been just as strange and troubled without the fame and fortune, or was being "Michael Jackson" the only thing that kept him out of Leavenworth?

We’ll never know.

His soaring talent was obvious from the start.  There’s always something odd about young children who are that gifted, but his ability to connect with music and express emotions far too complex for someone to comprehend at such a young age was affecting and singularly haunting.

His musical identity struggle in early adolescence came at a time when the group was also having contract troubles, so it wasn’t clear whether it was personal in nature or whether he had simply fallen out of step with the times.  Though his talent vastly outstripped and tended to blur his awkwardness,  his discomfort in the mid-70’s Dancing Machine days is visible and acute in retrospect.  

But by the late 70s, Michael’s artistic struggles resolved themselves in Off the Wall, a stunning piece that I remember thinking just came out of nowhere. 

He’d been out of sight for several years, and in the interim managed to bring the full force of his talent to bear on a form of expression that was grounded in dance and soul but completely personal and uniquely his own.  In Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough, it was clear that he had reconnected with the joy he felt in performing in those early years, and I don’t think he was ever better.

If your job is evaluating talent you grow accustomed to seeing beautiful and gifted people.  But you come to rely on a few touchstones to measure what true, mesmerizing talent is, and these become the yardsticks by which all others are judged.  If you look back now at the 1982 Motown 25th anniversary show, Jackson’s performance of Billie Jean might seem cliche, but that only happened because it was so iconic,  such a pure moment of stunning personal expression that it broke the mold and affected everything that happened in popular music that came after. 

If you were watching that night — and I was — it left you breathless and open mouthed, in awe at the spectacle.  It was all anyone talked about for days.

It’s hard to hit that kind of apotheosis and stay there.  Michael Jackson was no exception.  His career continued to flourish, and he was consistently an incredible live performer.  But whatever fueled his music also expressed itself in his bizarre obsession with living life in the tabloids, and as time went on both became more weird and idiosyncratic.  

It’s hard now to look back through the scandals and the crumbling nose and all the family drama and untangle the sublime from the ridiculous.  Nobody has really mentioned the words "Michael Jackson" for well over a decade without triggering some freakish expectation. 

But there was a time he truly did deserve the moniker he later bestowed upon himself, "the king of pop."