"Michael Jackson showed me that you can actually see the beat. He made the music come to life! He made me believe in magic. I will miss him."

- Sean "Diddy' Combs
Music Producer/Entrepreneur

"[A specific memory?] I've got a big one. Thursday morning, 12:30 a.m. He finishes the three-hour rehearsal [at Los Angeles' Staples Center], he goes over and does a group hug with Frank Dileo and Kenny Ortega, then he comes over to me, puts his arm around me and very softly in that voice of his says into my ear, ‘You got me here. I now know I can do this.'"

- Randy Phillips
CEO
AEG Live

"It never ceased to amaze me how many artists, producers and writers have been influenced by MJ. Every act that I've worked with said he was their favorite artist. He was definitely the greatest entertainer in my lifetime and will be missed."

- Max Gousse
A&R Island/Def Jam Music Group

"MJ's performance on Motown's 25th Anniversary Special (his first public
Moonwalk) was his official launch into solo superstardom in my opinion.
I got chills when I saw that for the first time, and still do to this day."

- Justin Prager
Director, Pop & Rock Programming
Music Choice



"I remember Michael on Motown 25 doing Billie Jean. I was really into breakdancing and was a big fan of the breakdance crew The Rock Steady Crew. Mr. Freeze had been doing the moonwalk for years and it was one of the most popular breakdance moves. Those moves were so street and insulated that we thought that no one had any idea of the names of the moves or knew they existed. Then there was Michael doing the Moonwalk and forever giving our culture and its moves and animated style a global stage. My mom was amazed at the Moonwalk and I had a private smile knowing that hip hop culture influenced the most popular Artist of all time. Michael's music influenced my young adult life down to my clothes and moves. He was immensley talented and although ecsentric he will always be to me a young Off The Wall and Thriller Michael Jackson and a member of the Jackson 5.  That is the MJ I choose to remember."

- MC Serch
Hip Hop Icon

"Michael, at such a young age, had the uncanny ability to sing each song with so much heart and soul. I remember sitting in my bedroom hearing for the first time his truly angelic and penetrating voice singing “Got to Be There.”  I had goose bumps on top of goose bumps and played that record endlessly first listening in awe and then singing every note at the top of my voice right along with him, hoping one day maybe I could give people goose bumps and emotions like that. Even today when I listen I honestly get that same emotional reaction and think to myself, ‘thank you Michael, for your musical inspiration, and for sharing your truly amazing gift of voice and song with all of us. May his soul rest in peace and love"

- Tomey Sellars
Recording Artist

Did the King of Pop Die for Our Sins?
By Roy Trakin

It's taken me a few days to get my thoughts together about Michael Jackson's death because it almost too neatly seems to represent the close of the modern pop-rock era in the music industry, one that saw the business scale the giddy global heights of Thriller, but, like Jacko himself, over the past decade, now appears to be running on fumes.

It's hard to imagine the alien figure who weighed around 112 pounds at his death, his body scarred, his hair left a stubble, was once a vibrant young man who not only broke down the color barrier at MTV and radio in the early ‘80s, but basically paved the way for the sound that now saturates the dominant rhythmic Top 40 format. Even before that, he was the preternaturally precocious adolescent frontman for the Jackson 5, who were basically the Beatles for their African-American fans, right down to the aggressive merchandising and Saturday morning cartoon show.

Michael Jackson was the quintessential child star, growing up in public, abused by papa Joe, ashamed of his big nose and acne-scarred face, an asexual, adolescent savant capable of writing, singing, dancing and performing like an adult, but trapped in a Neverland of Peter Pan-like arrested development, mutating his face until he could stand to look at "The Man in the Mirror." Like Orson Welles, he couldn't live up to the high standards of his own early breakthroughs. There was nowhere to go after "I Want You Back," Off the Wall and Thriller, but down, and for the ultra-competitive Jackson, obsessed as he was with numbers and records, that was no place to be at all.

Watching the normal, cheery Jackson in John Landis' landmark "Thriller" video, actually a believable romantic foil to lovely co-star Ola Ray, you start to wonder where that Michael has disappeared to, but the premonitions are all there. "I'm not like all the other boys," he coyly tells her before transforming into a werewolf. And we nod in agreement. "You ain't kidding."

Jackson's death is the first real rock star demise in the age of the Internet, broken by TMZ.com, not the New York Times, spread by Twitter, not terrestrial radio. He is the last in an unbroken line that arguably started with Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and John Lennon, all cut down in their prime. With Jackson, though, there was a feeling all along he was not long for this world, just as the L.A. Times' Tim Rutten quoted the poet Yeats about a friend's prematurely dead son in a piece, ironically, about King of Pop media overkill: "What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?"

To be a pop culture immortal, you have to live fast, die young and leave a beautiful body. Michael Jackson's death has made me strangely morose. It's not that I was a big fan at the end, but for me, it's yet one more sign of the end of rock's golden, Boomer-incited reign. Ironically, Jackson ushered in its most spectacular sales period with the global phenomenon of Thriller, and now offers its final death spasm, with the estimated $2-3 billion dollar his estate will now generate--minus, of course, his own very expensive consuming habits, which eventually began to drain his fortune and pile up his debt. Jackson lived like many of us, only spectacularly more so... beyond our means, only to leave behind a mess that will take years to sort out among lawyers, squabbling family members and all sorts of other vultures certain to emerge to pick away at the corpse.

In the future, there will be no global pop superstars that last for four decades like Michael. Most will flame up, burn brightly for bit, then fade... more within Warhol's 15 minutes than Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours. In a world where everybody's a star, nobody's a star. And with Michael Jackson's death, there's one less of even those to go around.

In America, we get the pop icons we deserve. With our collective sexual hypocrisy, a stupefying combination of Puritanism and repressed desire, our simultaneous glorification and trivialization of youth, our thirst for new entertainment experiences, we virtually willed Michael Jackson to life, like a Frankenstein of the collective id, a Jesus Christ to satisfy our spiritual hunger, except he moonwalked rather than walk on water. And, in the end, through our obsession to control him, to own him, we instead drove Michael Jackson to a premature grave, ultimately consumed by the self-created stress (and attendant drug-taking) of a monumental comeback that, in the end, seemed every bit as fanciful as his own existence.

So long, Jacko...and thanks for the memories. In the end, that's all any of us are left with.