The way people move is as unique as their DNA—indeed, it is their DNA, living proof of their singularity. Most dancers have to give it up to become professionals in the style of a school, a choreographer, a company.

Not Michael Jackson. It was his supreme achievement as a dancer to remain indomitably himself, to offer a vision of expanded human potential. He helped turn MTV into DTV, making television the place where dance films set to new music inspired a generation with their creative power and originality.

In his music videos, the components of his personal style are easy to see. Start with isolation: each move alone as if in a close-up, sudden and incredibly sharp. Weightlessness: the sense of freedom from gravity and a body with no mass or muscles. Transformation of the mundane: shadow-boxing and other moves drawn from athletics and pop dance heightened through a spectacular sense of flow and delirious speed.

Like the brilliantly calibrated gliding steps that formed his signature Moonwalk, Jackson's nervy, high-velocity turns seemed to operate in zero gravity, and his finest dance performances gave the illusion of being a momentary impulse, almost accidental in their perfect balances and other evidence of faultless technical control. If his high-pitched vocal sound simulated perpetual adolescence, the way he moved kept him super-stylized and ageless—a lover, a monster, a streetwise idealist at home in many cultures and a smooth criminal too.

The finest music-video choreographers who worked with him expanded the scope of Jackson's style, grounded it in a muscularity and masculinity. A skinny kid in a red zippered jacket might not have one chance in hell of stopping a gang war, but we believed it in Beat It.

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