DEATH has a way of elevating a person and making legions see him in a different light.
Before today, Michael Jackson was a has-been pop star attempting to make a comeback, a spaced-out oddity who had become better known in recent years, not so much for his music, but for assorted paedophile charges, bizarre quickie marriages and cloistering himself in a vast ranch home replete with amusement park and zoo, a veritable shrine to an arrested childhood.
As news of his sudden death from cardiac arrest spreads across the world and cyberspace, pop music lovers are playing his old songs once more and calling up YouTube videos of his performances.
Pop is fickle, but when the time came to take stock of his legacy, Michael Joseph Jackson is now being acknowledged for what he is - a consummate entertainer whose appeal crossed racial and cultural boundaries, and a pop icon whose career presided over the transition from melody-driven 1970s Motown soul, to the MTV age with its pumped-up imagery and funked-up dance rhythms.
All that - plus his 13 number one hits on the Billboard charts, which put him behind only Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Mariah Carey - caused him to be anointed the King Of Pop, during his heyday in the 1980s and 1990s. (His counterpart as Queen Of Pop, Madonna, has outlasted him in longevity and chameleonic ability to transform herself.)
When I heard the news of Jackson's death this morning, a series of images flashed in my mind. The little boy with the Afro hairdo and baby fat belting I'll Be There in his unbroken soprano, singing with his four older brothers as part of the family group Jackson 5.
The adult solo performer with the aviator shades, one-gloved hand and slithery, molten dance moves, whose breakout 1982 album Thriller took the world by storm with earworms like Billie Jean, Beat It and Thriller.
Then, as the 1980s shaded into a new decade, he shed some of that skin for all-black leather garb, his features whitened and resculpted by surgery. The original template for the change in his looks may have been Motown leading lady Diana Ross - his friend and idol, as he once declared - but the unnatural sharpness of his nose and cheekbones looked like no man or woman on this planet.
But the music played on, and he gave us catchy pop gems like Black Or White and - my personal favourite - the gospel-influenced Man In The Mirror.
As the world enters an optimistic but no less dangerous epoch flagged by US President Barack Obama's mantras of 'Yes, we can' and 'Change you can believe in', Jackson's 1987 hit is a good rejoinder. The lyrics, 'I'm starting with the man in the mirror, I'm asking him to change his ways', tell us change must start with the human heart before it can percolate to the level of nation and society.
Ironically, the black singer who wanted to look 'white', and who was dogged by charges of molesting young boys, was no angel himself.
But his message of faith and self-reckoning - accompanied by his trademark falsetto whoops and yelps - lives on on the airwaves.
