I call it wierd. As a matter of fact, I think he is what wierd is measured against. Compare him to his own family. He's the wierd one, Janet's the hot one & so on. Wierd is not all he was by any means, but wierd he was.

Michael Jackson was a freak. You can't really compare him to anyone in the list above.

He had sex with children.

I feel pity for the young Michael Jackson of the late 60's, he was used, abused, and his life was ruined by his parents. It is truly a tragedy what was allowed to happen to that talented and happy child.

The adult Michael Jackson is an epic freak of the Howard Hughes class. Drug addled, self-mutilating, and on a quest to spend more money that anyone in history.

Michael Jackson's children are better off without him. May his life serve as a warning to all of us.

Well, there was something very weird and disturbing about the aging Jackson, but I think it is a kid of weirdness that is not that unusual in the history of very successful and very wealthy artists. It stands out because of the sharp contrast between the man he had been and the man he had become.

Jackson didn't start out as some some dark and self-consciously alienated rock musician or performance artist, with a fixation on the grotesque, misfitting, bleak and socially rejected. He was a singer of cheerful and optimistic pop and club music, and also the "glass of fashion and mould of form". His modish physical appearance was part of his artistic success. At the peak of his early career, he was considered a very attractive young man, though with a boyish and sexually ambiguous manner. Over time, he developed his appearance in a more androgynous direction, but still in a way that could grace the cover of a fashion magazine. His Warholian 15 minutes lasted for many successful years, through several modifications.

But ultimately, he took his modifications of his appearance in a direction that became bizarrely ugly, and almost incomprehensible. What was disturbing is that unlike a dark artist who is consciously trying to project associations with pain, evil, grief, and the grotesque, Jackson was apparently trying to make himself more beautiful, but failing in a spectacular and disturbing manner. The whole world was aghast with a collective "What could he have been thinking?" response.

Like an anorexic who looks in the mirror and sees "fat" no matter how thin they are, it seems Jackson looked in the mirror and saw "nose too big", "skin too dark", "chin too small" no matter how much he changed. And he lived in a creative sphere where the boundaries between reality and dreams, appearance and reality, what I am and what I can become, are much more fluid than they are for people in more prosaic spheres of life. As he bacame rich and powerful, it seems he had nobody who could tell him what to do and keep him tied down to any kind of non-subjective reality, and his disturbing and unbalanced preoccupations with his appearance were made more and more physically real. If the people around him tried to ground him, he could just change the people around him. This has happened to other successful artists, though more often with women in our society than men. I was thinking of the Talking Heads line, "I've changed my hairstyle so many times now, I don't know what I look like."

Jackson's talent was based in part on a very energetic, strenuous and almost balletic dancing. I think he did a lot of things to his body to preserve his preternaturally slender physique, and the dancing itself took a toll on him. He was known to practice incessantly. My guess is that like a lot of dancers he was in constant pain, so the fact that he might have ended up addicted to painkillers does not seem surprising, and the growing narcotization of his mind may have contributed to his psychological decline in judgment and social awareness.