To be honest, my first reaction to the news of Michael Jackson’s death was a feeling of relief. Like a lot of people, I spent part of my life sort of feeling as if I’d grown up with Michael Jackson, and it was tiring to watch him spiral downward, from tabloid mess to tabloid mess, amid reports that he was on, or past, the verge of utter financial ruin. I didn’t realize how soothing it would be to get word that I’d never hear about another of his catastrophes. I long ago lost any interest in him as an entertainer, and I thought I’d lost any stake I ever had in him as a person. But as it happens, my first sense of who Michael Jackson was came not through his music as a solo act or with the Jackson 5, but through the old cartoon The Jackson 5ive, and maybe you never get over being a little in awe of someone who, as a kid, achieved the ultimate dream of many of us at that age: to become a cartoon.

I missed out on the Jackson 5’s peak, but I remember how exciting it was when he grew to full, independent stature as a performer with his best album, the disco-era triumph Off the Wall. The follow-up album, Thriller, lacked Off the Wall’s freshness and nonstop propulsion, but I remember getting it for my birthday about a week after it came out and thinking it was okay: it led off with a fierce dance track, had one great song (”Billie Jean”), a couple of pretty good songs, a cringe-worthy duet with Paul McCartney, a blaring rock song with Eddie Van Halen, a very long song that I never felt the urge to listen to again voluntarily but felt kindly towards in theory because it was nice to hear Vincent Price’s voice on the radio, and some filler. But the album rode the wave of Jackson’s appearance on the TV special Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, where he gave one of those once-in-a-lifetime displays of sheer, uncontainable talent that automatically elevates a celebrity’s profile to the level of a star, and cut through the miasma of ’80s culture like a switchblade.

I’ve heard a number of people dismiss the scandals and assorted stunners that overtook Jackson’s career with the idea that we should think only of “the talent.” That’s a reasonable-enough sentiment, but it overlooks that Jackson’s zenith of popularity in 1983 and 1984 couldn’t all be attributed to his talent, either. A disciple of both Fred Astaire and Jackie Wilson, coming into his own at the moment when hip-hop culture was beginning to take shape, Jackson bridged generations of pop. And the scale of his success made people want to see him as more than a mere entertainer, as being symbolic of something. For a lot of people, including liberal rock critics looking for a sign of hope in the Reagan era, that something was the news that a black man was the most popular star in the world. But others — including the Reagans themselves, who welcomed him to the White House — must have found his old-school show-business chops and all-embracing niceness very reassuring.

Jackson was never under any obligation to make political statements or pick sides, but at some point, his stardom became a reflection of what was ugliest about the ’80s. He was the greatest of all time and the biggest star in the world because he moved the most units. At the same time, he was, like Reagan, celebrated because of the supposedly magical quality of his seeming… not all there. The inevitable Time magazine cover story reads very strangely today, because it finds the magazine and various top celebrities and music-biz honchos falling over themselves to exalt Jackson for the same kind of Boo Radleyisms that, after declining sales and a few plastic-surgery disasters, rendered Jackson a punch line and kryptonite to endorsement-deal agents. “I wish we could all spend some time in his world,” it quotes Steven Spielberg as saying of the “nice place Michael comes from,” after mentioning that “During a break in a photo session… Spielberg saw Jackson chatting and swapping gestures with E.T.”

For people who miss that level of hype, Jackson’s death marks a chance to strain for it again; this week, I turned on the TV just in time to hear Michael Eric Dyson tell a poleaxed Keith Olbermann that “you have to go back to Mozart” to find a comparable example of a “child prodigy” so thoroughly fulfilling his promise as an adult. Actually, you don’t even have to reach beyond the Motown roster, since Stevie Wonder first signed with Berry Gordy when he was eleven — the same age as Michael when the Jackson 5 had their first hit — and went on to build up a body of work that surely compares favorably with Michael’s. In trying to understand Jackson, remember that unlike both Mozart and Stevie, becoming a “child prodigy” wasn’t his idea; he had his childhood shanghaied by his father’s plan to turn his offspring into a five-headed singing cash cow. He never got a vote. Given how hard he worked — or to be more precise, how hard he was worked — from an early age, it’s no wonder that he turned into a master performer, except that the same alchemy didn’t work with his brothers. It’s no wonder that, after the 1984 “Victory Tour” that he was bullied into doing with them, he spent the last twenty-five years of his life reportedly having next to nothing to do with his family, except for his sister Janet, the only one of them in his league in terms of talent or popular success. Say what you like about blood being thicker than water, but talent has a way of seeking out its own level.

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