The King of Pop Left the Building

Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, at the age of 50, and the world processed his death in the way the world processes everything in the internet age: all at once, from every angle, with no consensus on what it meant. TMZ broke the story. Wikipedia crashed from traffic. Twitter experienced its first major celebrity-death surge. Google thought the search spike was a DDoS attack. He was the biggest pop star who had ever lived — Thriller remains the best-selling album in history — and also one of the most complicated public figures of the twentieth century. The memorials were enormous. The complicated legacy conversations started immediately and never really stopped. What was undeniable, even to his critics, was the void. Nobody could do what he did on a stage. Nobody moved like that, sang like that, commanded attention like that. Pop music after Michael Jackson has been, in a very real sense, a series of attempts to fill a space that was always going to stay empty.