MJ Icon & Legend

MTV WRITES….

Michael Jackson

Where were you when you heard the news? It’s a question reserved for only the biggest of moments, and it’s usually not asked fondly. And that was the case with the death of Michael Jackson, an event that stopped the world in its tracks.

That’s not hyperbole, either. Jackson’s death on June 25 was a global event, bringing traffic in Times Square to a standstill, turning London’s O2 Arena — where he was scheduled to hold a 50-show residency — into an impromptu memorial site, filling the streets of Paris, Berlin and Dakar, Senegal, with mourners. His fans gathered because they didn’t know what else to do — so deep was their grief that they sought out the solace of strangers, their only connection the undying devotion to a man and his music, both of which, on one solemn day, disappeared forever.

It was an awful tragedy. Jackson’s legacy — not just his music or his effortless showmanship, but his charitable work too — extended to every corner of the earth, reached places even the United Nations dared not tread. Even as his popularity waned here in the States (and waned is a relative term, considering, even though he hadn’t released an album of new material in nearly a decade, his catalog still sold millions each year), he remained the most famous man on the planet, a near-deity seemingly lifted from the pulpy pages of a Siegel and Shuster comic, or, perhaps more correctly, a Greek tragedy.

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Tagged as: king of pop, mtv shows

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