Michael Jackson: The King of Pop Who Changed the World

Michael Joseph Jackson was born on August 29, 1958, in Gary, Indiana — a gritty, working-class city perched on the southern tip of Lake Michigan. He was the seventh of nine kids, and by most accounts he could sing before he could properly hold a conversation. His father, Joe Jackson, wasn't the kind of man to let talent go to waste. He pulled the family together into an act, the Jackson 5, and pushed them hard. By the time Michael was ten, they'd signed with Motown Records, and anyone watching could already see that the youngest performer on that stage was operating on a completely different level from his brothers. I Want You Back, ABC — these weren't just catchy songs, they were the sound of a phenomenon taking shape. But even then, the story was always really about Michael. He'd talk in later interviews about how little of a childhood he actually had, all those hours of rehearsals and recording sessions and performances bleeding into one another. What those years gave him, though, was a discipline and a ferocity for his craft that most artists spend a lifetime chasing and never quite find.

Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009. He was 50 years old, and the news stopped the world in a way that's genuinely rare. You can draw a straight line from him to almost every significant pop artist who came after — Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd — and every one of them has said as much. His reach went well beyond music, though. Over his lifetime he donated hundreds of millions to charity, co-wrote We Are the World in 1985 which raised over 63 million dollars for African famine relief, and threw himself into causes around children's welfare and racial equality with a seriousness that often got overlooked amid everything else. His Neverland Ranch — the amusement park, the private zoo, all of it — said something real about who he was: a man who'd been robbed of his own childhood and spent the rest of his life trying to reconstruct it. Whatever you make of the complexities of his story, the music endures completely. It crossed every language, every border, every cultural wall you could put in front of it. That's not something many people manage once, let alone across a career of forty years.