The glove, for starters. The white sequined glove pulled tight over one of his dainty hands, hands that would come to symbolize his undoing. The glove: An iconic accessory like Woody Allen’s glasses or George Burns’ cigar. It was a real-life Superman cape, a garment with transformative power. The glove made him mysterious. Nowadays we all know way too much about Michael Jackson, down to the distinctive markings on his genitalia. Back in the ’80s, we fans allowed ourselves to obsess over something as quaint as a pop star’s handwear. Just why did he wear the glove, anyway? What did it mean? Nothing about this man was an accident; surely the glove had a point. It couldn’t have just been an affectation. Maybe it was a commentary on the duality of celebrity—the exposed skin of his bare hand symbolizing the mortal Michael, the gentle young man from a sooty corner of Indiana, and the gloved hand representing the flashy showbiz Michael, the superstar singing and sweating and twirling under the lights. The glove also had a dark side—it was a sheath for fingers that drifted uncomfortably often toward the singer’s crotch, fingers that would come to be accused of fondling little boys. The glove was at once glamorous and unsettling, a simple garment rendered complicated by the context of who was wearing it, and why.

Now that post-acquittal Michael has fled to wherever he is, doing whatever he’s doing, I find myself nostalgic not just for his spangled clothing, but also for his shy smile and feathery speaking voice, always suspended between a whisper and a giggle. I also miss the art he made during the long prime period before he became so freaky that his artistry seemed beside the point. I miss those songs. I miss those dance steps. I miss both his supernatural look and his ecstatic pop sensibility, and I miss the way we were when we let him carry us away.

The moonwalk? It was jaw-dropping, one of the last dance moves to become a cultural phenomenon. Everybody saw it, everybody knew it, everybody was stunned by it. (When he debuted the move in 1983, during a 25th-anniversary concert celebration for Motown Records, the audience responded with a bewildered shriek—they’d never seen anything like it.) This was not like the Macarena, a wedding dance, an asinine hand jive drunken bubbas could do in the stands at NFL games. The moonwalk was otherworldly. We didn’t know a body could move like that—our bodies couldn’t move like that. The moonwalk belonged, and still belongs, to Michael. Have you ever seen anyone else attempt his signature move? It’s pathetic. Not long ago I caught a concert by teenaged R&B star Chris Brown, who is sort of a less charismatic version of Usher, who is himself a less charismatic version of Michael Jackson. And at this show, Brown wanted to pay tribute to someone he’d idolized since he was two years old, and so without mentioning the artist’s name he donned a sequined glove and danced to three Michael Jackson songs of early vintage. And when it came time for him to do the inevitable moonwalk, Brown—ordinarily an excellent dancer—turned his body sideways and strolled backwards across the stage. It was all walk, no moon.

Michael Jackson was probably the last male entertainer to be at least as famous for his dancing as his singing. Fred Astaire was, James Brown was, Michael Jackson was. Today we’re left with Chris Brown, Usher and Justin Timberlake, whose most famous stage move to date involved ripping the bodice of Michael Jackson’s sister. When our male pop artists stop dancing, it signals an important change in the roles we expect them to play. Although dancing favors grace over strength, it also requires extraordinary athleticism—dance, in other words, is an act of balance. Today, though, we either want our men tough or cuddly. We want them to be either gangsta roughnecks or sensitive emo boys. The third way, the middle way, no longer exists. Jay-Z does not dance. Kenny Chesney does not dance. Bono does not dance. When we lose our dancers, we lose glamour and sensuality, we lose the exquisite interplay between physical and vocal performance. We lose a fundamental level of human expression. In some African languages, the words for “music” and “dance” are the same—Michael Jackson embodied that sameness through the 1980s. And pop music has been out of balance ever since.

Michael’s run as a beloved dancer ended in the early 1990s, when he became infamous for moves that involved grabbing his crotch. Looking back, this move seems to have been a premonition of the sex scandals to come, for his alleged crimes against little boys involved this very same sexual gesture—placing his hands below the waist. We’ve always been disturbed at the thought of Michael Jackson touching that part of the human body, whether it was his or someone else’s.

Before Michael’s disgrace (back when he seemed less like a predator and more like a naïf), he was a pop star of almost unparalleled popularity. After Elvis and The Beatles, he was it—the biggest. I miss the shared cultural experience that only a star of this magnitude could create. I miss the way MTV used to hype Michael Jackson videos, and the way everyone used to crowd around the TV to watch them. The short film Michael released in conjunction with “Thriller” is certainly the most influential music video of all time, the one that thrust videos into the realm of art, the catalyst that completed the transition of music from an audio medium to an audio-visual medium. Artists almost never break big today with radio airplay alone. For better or worse, there now has to be a video or a magazine cover or a talk-show appearance or some kind of eye candy to go along with the sound. These promotional opportunities existed before Michael Jackson, of course. But he and his groundbreaking visual marketing made them de rigueur across the music industry.

Michael also changed the notion of superstardom. He blew it up bigger than anyone in his generation, and bigger than anyone after. Bad sold 8 million copies in the United States. Off The Wall sold 7 million. The double-album HIStory sold another 7 million. With 27 million copies sold, Thriller remains the second-best-selling album of all time, behind only The Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits: 1971-1975. Stardom of that magnitude isn’t necessarily healthy for an artist. For fans, though, it creates a sense of awe—or, I should say, it created a sense of awe. Celebrities don’t really make us awestruck anymore. They annoy us with their ubiquity, like mosquitoes. In a weird way, they’re not famous enough. We now have more stars than ever before, but fewer mega-stars. Maya Arulpragasam, the Sri Lankan expatriate musician who records as M.I.A., once told me that when she moved to London she knew four words in English: “mango,” “elephant” and “Michael Jackson.” That’s the sort of fame I’m talking about—Muhammad Ali fame, Princess Diana fame—the kind of fame that elevates human beings to godlike status. There’s something awesome about the whole world singing the same song or watching the same music video, worshipping at the same altar.

The last shared experience we had with Michael was awaiting the verdict of his sordid child-molestation trial. Needless to say, that kind of sharing wasn’t nearly as fun for his onetime supporters, who had to face some unsavory facts: That he had dubbed his home Neverland, underscoring his arrested development with a Peter Pan allusion; that he had described lying in bed (platonically) with boys not his own; that he’d had a No. 1 hit in 1995 with a song called “You Are Not Alone,” which took on a creepy cast in light of the molestation accusations; that he had named his records Off The Wall and Bad and Dangerous—and that the older he got, the truer those adjectives seemed.

I miss the old Michael Jackson, the one whose music—whose whole persona—was blissfully lightweight. I miss the highness of his voice, the nervous “hee hees” and the crisp “woooos.” Michael drove straight-ahead dance music as deep into the mainstream as it could possibly go, embellishing it with rock flourishes like Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo on “Beat It.” At the time, black and white music didn’t co-mingle as much as they do today—recruiting Van Halen was thus a radical gesture. It’s been a long time since a guitar solo seemed radical.

Michael Jackson’s music was escapist, a term that takes on a negative connotation much of the time. But why should it? Fantasy and the suspension of disbelief are critical components of fiction, theater and movies—why is artificiality in music so wrong? Every artistic discipline is artificial to some extent, even documentary film. All Michael did was put the artifice on the surface. I mean, the “Thriller” video was a miniature zombie movie—it doesn’t get much faker than that. Michael even included a sweet little disclaimer at the beginning, reassuring us that “this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.” To my mind, “Thriller” was far less manipulative than, say, Rage Against the Machine releasing radical anti-establishment music on a major label, or 50 Cent rapping about his street life in Queens while residing in a Connecticut mansion. Michael was different. Michael was guileless. He made it perfectly clear when he was acting, which is why the last few years of his life have been so upsetting to those of us who’ve loved him—nobody in his right mind would choose to act the way he has.

[Thriller Resurrected] [Smell the Glove] [Another Part of Me]