The song that popped into your head the minute you heard Michael Jackson was dead reveals something about you. If it was a Jackson 5 song—Never Can Say Goodbye—you're probably over 40. You have memories of Jackson as a little black boy in an Apple cap. You're kind of a hippie, maybe, or a believer in the rootsy and the pure.

If you thought of Thriller, you're probably younger. Your Michael wears the white glove and has paler skin. You grew up in the age of hip-hop and global pop—music, for you, is rooted in the glittery artifice of videos and unexpected juxtapositions.

But what if you thought of Childhood, that confessional ballad where Jackson coos about loving "elementary things" because he was robbed of his own youth? Or In the Closet, a tough dance track that runs on the fumes of sexual repression and rage?

Are there people out there who got misty while humming They Don't Care About Us, in which Jackson uses language many thought was anti-Semitic to conflate his feelings of persecution with hate crimes?

A listener can find troubling material within every phase of Jackson's musical career, the early stuff, sweet and breezy. Said Motown founder Berry Gordy, "When I first heard him sing Smokey (Robinson)'s song Who's Lovin' You at 10 years, it felt like he had lived the song for 50 years."

Jackson wasn't the first child to be made into a product and a sex object, however chaste. But when Jackson grew up, he carried that inner disruption with him, and it marked his greatest work. Some kind of violence within him added energy to songs like Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' (in which he compares himself to a buffet, there to be fed on) or Black or White (a cry for universal understanding).

... contd.