A million bloggers are frantically typing up hasty tributes right now, so I'll add my two cents before hitting the sack tonight. The world's greatest pop icon has died. Everyone of my generation and upwards has a story about a Michael Jackson song. Mine is a carbon copy of a guy the BBC just interviewed at Glastonbury: at age five or six, my first pop music cassette tape was Bad, swiped from my mum and stuck on repeat beside my bed.
One of my surviving memories of my grandfather, who passed when I was ten, goes thusly: "Why, who's your favourite musician?" "Michael Jackson." "Och, why are you listening to that rubbish?"
Unlike most, Thriller never did it for me. My Jacko was, to my loss perhaps, the later one, the eccentric white guy, the guy who sang huge modern anthems like Smooth Criminal and Black or White, whose every performance was bigger and better than the last one, to the point where he seemed unstoppable. But I don't think I lose out for this; he still defined that type of pop music for the 90s, as he had done for much of the 80s with the funkier, bigger stuff. And regardless of the horrific personal side of his existence, the lasting effect of Jackson the icon, Jackson the musician, Jackson the cultural phenomenon, is given no more fitting tribute than the way that the world is at this moment standing still to acknowledge him.
But when it comes down to it, it's really all about a little boy listening to a cassette tape, chanting every word along to Man In The Mirror, pulling silly faces, and then doing it all over again. The man - and his problems - are gone; but the music will really live on.
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