The seventh of nine children, growing up in a two-bedroom house on Jackson Street in Gary, Indiana. His father Joseph, a steel mill worker, drove the boys relentlessly. Rehearsals after school until midnight. Belt whippings for missed steps. The Jackson 5 played strip clubs as children. They played the Apollo and won. They signed to Motown, and their first four singles all hit number one -- a feat nobody had accomplished before. Michael was 11 when he sang I Want You Back, and the voice -- that preternatural boy soprano, impossibly precise, impossibly soulful -- made you forget you were listening to a child.

The solo career was the plan all along. Off the Wall in 1979, produced by Quincy Jones, was the most effortlessly funky album Motown's prodigal son could have made. But Thriller was something else. Seven top-ten singles. 70 million copies sold. The moonwalk on the Motown 25 special. The video for Thriller, 14 minutes long, directed by John Landis, that turned MTV from a rock station into a cultural force. The glove. The red leather jacket. The lean. Michael Jackson at 25 was the most famous human being on the planet.

Then Bad. Then Dangerous. The tours got bigger. The plastic surgeries multiplied. The skin lightened -- vitiligo, he said, and the autopsy confirmed it, but by then the tabloids had already written the story they wanted. Neverland Ranch. Bubbles the chimpanzee. The hyperbaric chamber. The allegations. The second trial. The acquittal. The exile to Bahrain. The comeback that never came. He died at 50 in a rented mansion in Holmby Hills, killed by his personal physician's negligent administration of propofol -- an operating-room anesthetic being used as a sleep aid. The doctor went to prison. Michael went into the ground.

The music is still there. Billie Jean. Beat It. Human Nature. Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough. Man in the Mirror. The voice that could go from a whisper to a scream to a hiccup in the space of a bar. The dance moves that defied physics. The songs that fill dance floors in every country on earth. Michael Jackson's life is a cautionary tale about what fame does to a person who was never allowed to be a person first. But the records don't care about the caution. They just play.