Michael Jackson

Michael Joseph Jackson was born on the twenty-ninth of August 1958 at Gary, Indiana, the seventh of nine surviving children of Joseph Walter Jackson — a crane operator at the U.S. Steel mill at Gary and a former amateur boxer — and Katherine Esther Scruse Jackson, a Jehovah's Witness homemaker. The Jackson household at 2300 Jackson Street in Gary was strict, impoverished and musical. The five eldest Jackson sons — Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael — formed in 1964 the Jackson Brothers, performing first at local talent shows and from 1965 across the segregated Black-club circuit of the upper Midwest.

The group, renamed the Jackson 5, signed with Motown Records in March 1969 — Michael was ten — and produced across the following five years the Motown-era singles "I Want You Back," "ABC," "The Love You Save," "I'll Be There," "Dancing Machine" that constituted the most commercially successful debut sequence of any Motown act.

The Jackson 5 left Motown for Epic Records in 1976. Michael recorded his first solo album Off the Wall in August 1979 under the production of Quincy Jones. The album sold over twenty million copies and produced four Top Ten singles. The follow-up Thriller of December 1982 — also under Quincy Jones — went on to sell an estimated seventy million copies, making it the best-selling album of all time in any genre. The video for the title track was the first music video by a Black artist in heavy MTV rotation. The follow-ups Bad (1987) and Dangerous (1991) reached commercial success at scales unprecedented for Black artists.

He performed across the 1980s and 1990s the body of stage choreography — the moonwalk, the leans, the hat work — that established the modern vocabulary of the popular-music stage. He was the principal Black recording artist of the post-civil-rights generation to integrate the mainstream MTV-and-stadium commercial-entertainment infrastructure.

He died of acute propofol intoxication at his rented Holmby Hills residence at Los Angeles on the twenty-fifth of June 2009, at fifty.

He is honored here as the King of Pop.