The Ultimate Thriller

Jeff Widerner / AP Photo Forget all the scandals and the weirdness, Pat O’Brien says. In the end, what we will remember about the Michael Jackson he knew is the music.

In his brilliant book about Fred Astaire, Joseph Epstein borrowed from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer to describe the difference between talent and genius. “Talent,” Epstein wrote, “is like a marksman who hits a target that the rest cannot reach; genius, one who hits a target they cannot even sight.”

By that definition, Michael Jackson was, indeed, a genius. Yes, through all the demons and Wacko Jacko behavior and all the horrible allegations and public displays of craziness, it was the genius of his music that we end up mourning today. There is enough material on Michael Jackson to make it possible to actually narrate something about him without saying one nice thing, but that’s not going to be the case with this man. The King of Pop lived and died in controversy but will be long remembered as an icon who transcended anything we threw at him. In his death, nothing will stick. Bank it.

Sinatra made us want to love. Elvis made us want to swoon. The Beatles made us want to sing. Michael’s music made us want to dance.

Few have hit the musical bull's-eye he targeted. Sinatra did it. Elvis did it. The Beatles did it. And that’s about it. It’s a pretty good club. It wasn’t so much about the sheer numbers of records sold, which was astounding. It wasn’t so much about the hysteria from day one, when he came on the scene as a young boy. It wasn’t even the moonwalk. It was that he made you want to, well, dance. Sinatra made us want to love. Elvis made us want to swoon. The Beatles made us want to sing. Michael’s music made us want to dance. And unless you haven’t studied this aspect of our glorious history, we are not a dancing country. We’re lovers and fighters and singers. Michael taught us to dance.

I was talking to one of the aforementioned Beatles shortly after George Harrison died and we were reminding ourselves that when somebody who is such a big part of our lives dies, he takes a little of all of us with him. We remember the milestones, we remember the clothes, the performances, the good and the bad and the ugly.

Many of Michael Jackson’s milestones are not worth remembering, or more to the point, are somehow worth forgetting. He’ll never be forgiven for at least the perception he was a pedophile or for the way he paraded his kids around in masks or the way his physical appearance morphed into something that made us squeamish. Those events and demons, if you will, will always be part of his memory, but when it came down to it in the immediate coverage of his death it was about his genius. It was about the music.

Even this country’s greatest self-appointed cynic, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, was able to forget about the “issues” tonight. There he sat, with his coat off and without a teleprompter for a change, morphing himself into Walter Cronkite covering the death of John F. Kennedy. There was a sense of urgency we rarely see in this cable and viral world. Olbermann, it should be remembered, was the Pied Piper of Michael Jackson critics, humiliating and degrading the King of Pop night after night in the form of puppets, gleaming with great “journalistic” joy, it seemed, in Jackson’s downfall.

But listen to him now. Listen and watch all of them, all of us, now all hail the King of Pop.