Michael Jackson's Indelible Pop Legacy

Classic Composers:

Marvin Gaye: Gaye's career obviously preceded Jackson's by a good 20 years, but by 1982 he was foundering. Lost in a spiral of drug abuse and self-loathing, releasing dated albums for a dwindling audience, Marvin needed a reinvention if he was going to maintain any measure of relevance. And reinvention is what he got: Gaye's Midnight Love is his final masterpiece, and it's not hard to hear it as a concerted effort to best all comers. Midnight Love finds the king of soul cautiously glancing over his shoulder at the young buck nipping at his heels. The album's sole hit, "Sexual Healing," is vintage Gaye, but the rest of it seems to take cues from Jackson's Off the Wall. "Rockin' After Midnight" and "Turn on Some Music" are sly, slippery R&B numbers that utilize the same kind of syncopation as Jackson's best hits, topping them with the kind of soulful vocal only a master can provide — proof positive that sometimes pioneers need help finding their footing.

Lionel Richie: Richie's legacy was established with the 20-ton funk hits he wrote and performed as part of the Commodores, but his transition into the pop milieu tended toward weepy balladry — that is until 1983's Can't Slow Down. Front-loaded with big, danceable singles like "All Night Long," Richie, too, seemed inspired by Jackson's move toward motion-friendly pop. And if Lionel's star eventually faded, the string of hits he produced in the '80s — among them "All Night Long" and "Dancing on the Ceiling" — seem unthinkable without Michael.

Cool Cousins:

LCD Soundsystem: Let's call Brooklyn's James Murphy the Michael Jackson of the eyeglass-&-T-shirt set. His records are prized by folks whose tastes tend toward the obscure, but it doesn't take much work to hear the King of Pop lurking the shadows of Murphy's finest songs. Like Jackson, Murphy has a fondness for disco and R&B, but he subtly inverts them, making alarmingly original compositions out of familiar musical memes. There's no mistaking the lineage of the propulsive rhythms on LCD songs like "Us v Them" and "Disco Infiltrator." Like Jackson, Murphy is also preoccupied with and terrified by the notion of aging — his best songs, "Losing My Edge" and "All My Friends," are sly meditations on how age dulls, crushing adolescent fantasies and replacing them with day-to-day drudgery. The video for his "New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down" even starred Kermit the Frog. LCD Soundsystem provide proof positive it's possible to love both Michael Jackson and New Order.

J.U.S.T.I.C.E.: Not only do the French dance duo share Jackson's affinity for quirky, infectious rhythms they actually name-drop "P.Y.T." in their own alphabetic masterpiece "D.A.N.C.E." The rest of the group's debut veers from glitchy electro to floor-filling techno, but they never lose their knack for a hook. Cue up the manic, screeching "Stress" and tell us you can't envision zombies rising from their graves, both band members transforming into werewolves as a whole new creature feature slowly unspools.