Eissah Aminzada's List: Michael Jackson Game Changer

• Michael Jackson, an incomparable figure in music, dance and culture whose ever-changing face graced the covers of albums that sold more than half a billion copies
• died Thursday, shortly after going into cardiac arrest at his rented Holmby Hills mansion. He was 50. He spent much of his life as one of the most famous people on the planet, and to many, his untimely death felt both unthinkable and, oddly, inevitable.
• Paramedics found Jackson in cardiac arrest when they arrived at his home shortly before 12:30 p.m., three minutes and 17 seconds after receiving a 911 call. His personal physician was already in the house performing CPR. Jackson was not breathing, and it appears he never regained consciousness. Paramedics treated Jackson at the house for 42 minutes, and he was declared dead at 2:26 p.m.
• Jackson--who most famously lived in Santa Barbara County at his Neverland Ranch, named for the island where Peter Pan and the Lost Boys were in no danger of growing up--had taken up residence in a seven-bedroom estate in Holmby Hills, which he was renting for $100,000 a month.

• Michael Jackson, Pop Singer, 1984 Michael Jackson is shown in a 1984 concert in Detroit, Michigan. (MCT FILE PHOTO BY PAULINE LUBENS/DETROIT FREE PRESS) Photo Selected by ProQuest Staff

  He had come to Los Angeles to rehearse for 50 sold-out concerts at London's O2 Arena, a run of shows that was scheduled to kick off July 13 and had been dubbed "This Is It." The concerts were to have been the start of an ambitious career revival designed to begin wiping out Jackson's staggering debt--he owed at least $400 million and would have earned $1 million a night--and return the singer to cultural relevancy.
• Jackson's comeback, Mottola said, represented "a very important platform for him to bridge the old and new." But Jackson also needed the comeback to reverse the damage done by years of excessive spending and little work. He has not toured since 1997 or released a new album since 2001, but he has continued to live like a megastar.

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•  When Thriller dropped in the U.S. on Nov. 30, 1982, America--and the world--were in transition. Ronald Reagan was president, E.T. was stunning movie crowds and Justin Timberlake was almost 2 years old. The United Kingdom and Argentina were sparring in the Falkland Islands, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record high of 1,065.49, and Olivia Newton-John's album Physical was No. 1 on the charts.
•  And Michael Joseph Jackson was quietly working in the studio with Quincy Jones, about to make history.
•   Michael Jackson has been an international star since he was 6 years old. While most kids were watching Scooby-Doo, Michael was choreographing the patented stage moves for himself and his brothers, the Jackson 5.
•     "In some ways, Michael was like a child. And in some ways, he was very sophisticated," remembers Walter Yetnikoff, then head of CBS Records. "He was a very smart businessman, would read contracts as good as lawyers could. But in some ways, back then, he was like a baby."
  
•  Today that whispery, high-pitched voice has more bass in it. Those soft features have become more defined. Traces of that "baby" in Michael Jackson appear to have faded. His musical genius and influence still dominate the music world, 25 years after Thriller came out and went on to become the best-selling album of all time--selling more than 104 million copies worldwide, 54 million copies in the U.S., and spawning no less than seven Top 10 hits and two No. 1 singles.
  
•  With nearly a dozen solo albums, and more than a dozen more No. 1 singles, 13 Grammys and more than 750 million records sold worldwide in his career to date, Michael is humble about and proud of his influence on music history and the current music scene.

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•  Yet as he grew older, Jackson was unwilling--or unable--to adjust to a grown-up world. Apparently scarred by the lack of a real childhood, a painful adolescence that included verbal and physical abuse at the hands of a demanding stage father, and finally the pressures of fame, Jackson devoted much of his adulthood to recapturing the carefree atmosphere he was never able to enjoy.
•  Jackson always maintained that his affinity for children was non-sexual, and yesterday a jury agreed, finding that Jackson did not molest a 13-year-old former cancer patient. But while Jackson left the courtroom a free man, he also emerged as a broken, tragic figure with his once-brilliant career now in tatters.
•  Jackson was born in gritty Gary, Ind., surrounded by poverty and crime. With nine children, his mother, Katherine, and his father, steel worker Joe, looked for a way to keep their children off the streets. Music was a hobby at first, but Joe, a former guitarist, saw it as a way out of the ghetto. While Jackson has said he was never forced into show business, by the time he was 8, he already had a full-time job with a stern boss.
•  Now only his most die-hard fans would describe him as visually appealing--years and years of plastic surgery have transformed Jackson from a handsome, somewhat androgynous figure into a strange, feminine oddity. Coupled with the evolution of his skin colour from milk chocolate to vanilla (he suffers from vitiligo, a rare condition that robs skin of its pigment over time), visually he's an unsettling figure.
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  Michael Jackson, Pop Singer, 1983 Michael Jackson wearing a red leather jacket at the opening of the stage musical "Dream Girls" in Los Angeles, California, in 1983.

  At his peak, Jackson had the world spellbound. His moonwalking "Billie Jean" performance on the 1983 Motown 25 TV special was a mesmerizing moment on par with Elvis Presley swivelling his hips or The Beatles singing on Ed Sullivan. And at a time when music videos were primitive performance clips, Jackson revolutionized the genre with elaborate choreography and dramatic plotlines--even 21 years after it was released, his 15-minute Thriller mini-movie, directed by John Landis, is considered one of the greatest videos ever made.
•  That all changed in 1993, when a 13-year-old playmate accused him of molestation. That year, Jackson had been riding high--he had successfully diminished his weirdness factor with a sympathetic, highly rated Oprah Winfrey prime-time interview; his album Dangerous sold millions of copies and was still on the charts; he was on a sold-out world tour; and had gotten a legend award from the Grammys, at age 34.
• But in an instant, he became an accused pedophile, an almost permanent stigma. It became even more difficult to separate him from the accusations after Jackson, despite maintaining his innocence, settled a civil lawsuit by the boy for a multimillion dollar price tag. The boy then stopped co-operating with authorities and no charges were filed.

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