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

Even then, anyone could hear how weird and wounded he was, yet there was something heroic in the way he turned his psychosexual agonies into such intensely emotional, impossibly exuberant music. Whether you were a metal kid, a disco kid, or a new wave synth-pop kid, Thriller had what you wanted. According to the reports at the time, it sold even more copies in the first six months of 1984 than it did in the first six months of 1983. He was the most famous, pampered star in the world, yet you rooted for him, because he came on like an underdog, a very ordinary kid oppressed by extraordinary gifts, renouncing the privileges of machismo, a shy boy dreaming of the street. As he memorably put it in the "Thriller" video, "I'm not like other guys."

That was putting it mildly, and you could hear it in the irreplicable whoops and hiccups and glides of his voice, and you could see it in the irreplicable dance moves (not that we didn't all try to replicate them). That "Beat It" video — he's a sad kid alone in his room, wearing that spacey powder-blue T-shirt, then he slips on a glittery red jacket (he just had one of those hanging up?) and dances out of his shabby, solitary apartment (as unforgettably poignant a sight as Ducky's bachelor pad in Pretty In Pink) to go stop the rumble. I remember the night MTV gave that video its world premiere, in March 1983. It was scheduled for 10 o'clock on a Friday night. I went to a high school dance, drove home to watch the "Beat It" premiere, then drove back to the dance so I could tell everyone how awesome it was and make my first attempts to copy that dance at the end. He was so fragile and tormented in that song, in that video, all over his music. As if he'd float away.

He ended up not floating away — as he got older, his music got heavy and ordinary, and his voice lost that wiggle and bounce, though he did his best to adapt with the grown-and-sexy R&B lilt of the crazily underrated Dangerous. But by the time he started calling himself the King of Pop in 1991, it was a kingdom that didn't exist anymore, and he seemed like the only one who didn't realize it. Yet no matter how depressing his celebrity spectacle got, those old records of his remained full of life, and it's the musician Michael Jackson that I am grieving and remembering today.

Last night I couldn't stay home and listen to his records — I needed to be out in a crowd, walking the city streets, hearing the songs blasting out loud. I felt like the kid Michael sang about in "Human Nature" ("Four walls won't hold me tonight?") There was an old man in a tank top sitting alone under a tree in McCarren Park, talking out loud to himself: "It was the drugs, Michael. It was the drugs." I heard the same songs cranking every place I walked past, as I knew they would be, and ended up at a table full of friends at a bar on Grand Street. The crowd was demanding Michael, so the bartender commandeered an iPod from a sad-looking indie kid in a green shirt who was drinking alone at the end of the bar. "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" was first (maybe the fifth time I'd heard it that night), then "Wanna Be Starting Something, then "Billie Jean." But I beat it before "Human Nature" came on — the lonely ache in that song was more than I could face right then, and I was dreaming of the street.