"Not Like Other Guys": Rob Sheffield Remembers Michael Jackson

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The night Michael Jackson died: a street corner in Brooklyn, Bedford Avenue at North 5th, 1 a.m., a car with the windows down, blasting "Wanna Be Starting Something." Another car pulls up to the intersection, same song, a minute or so further in. For a moment, interlocking "mama-say mama-sah ma-ma koo-sahs." It was a moment that summed up everything we loved about Michael Jackson, as every car, every bar, every open window seemed to throb with the same beat, as if Jackson had successfully syncopated the whole world to his own breathy, intimate, insistent rhythmic tics.

Of the many weird things about Michael Jackson, the weirdest will always be the music. Tragic wages-of-fame stories and celebrity disasters are a dime a dozen, but there has never been anyone who wrote or sang like this man. For a few years, from 1969 to 1973 or so, he was the child-star singer of the Jackson 5, and he already had that voice, soaring over the fast songs ("I Want You Back," "The Love You Save") and piercing in the ballads ("I'll Be There," "Got To Be There"). If he'd never done anything beyond this — if he'd settled into the respectable career groove of a Gladys Knight — he still would have been mourned and remembered today, as these songs have never left the radio. You could make a killer playlist merely out of the hip-hop bangers that sampled the J5 hits, from Naughty By Nature's "OPP" and Kris Kross's "Jump" to Jay-Z's "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)" and Ghostface Killah's "All That I Got Is You."

But in 1979, with Off The Wall, he invented modern pop as we know it. He'd been around for years, making the occasional solo record, but for literally millions of us, it was a de facto debut album from a kid — a kid! Like us! — we were hearing for the first time. It was an unabashed disco record, with an anthem called "Burn This Disco Out" at a time when "disco" was the most polarizing word in pop music. But it was a disco record that imagined the entirety of pop in disco terms, and it sounded universal on a level nobody had imagined possible before — even Donna Summer's Bad Girls, which had dominated 1979 radio, sounded a bit narrow in comparison. Off The Wall had more hits than the radio had time to play: When "Rock With You" crashed the radio, it was time for "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" to go home, but the radio just kept right on playing it — because none of us had gotten enough. His voice had that sad, lonely, vulnerable twitch, just as his songs felt haunted by something otherworldly and beautiful. He was as personal and eccentric as any crackpot singer-songwriter could be — yet he was also the most famous guy in the world.

The only reason Off The Wall isn't remembered as the greatest pop record ever is that Thriller was even bigger and even better. People love to argue Off The Wall vs. Thriller, but there will never be any loser in that fight. Everybody who heard Thriller wanted a piece of it, and every pop musician out there spent the next few years trying to catch up with it — even Michael, who didn't even get close with Bad. The obvious plan was for "Beat It" to crack rock radio, but it failed, just because rock radio had already cracked and played the hell out of "Billie Jean." And "Human Nature." And "P.Y.T." and "Somebody's Watching Me" and "State of Shock" and "Farewell My Summer Love." You could make another killer playlist out of all the brilliant "Billie Jean" knockoffs of the mid Eighties: Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want To Have Fun," Madonna's "Like A Virgin," John Waite's "Missing You," Lionel Richie's "All Night Long."