Britons mourn the 'king'

I happened to be driving late into the night, listening to the radio, on the day Michael Jackson died and it was obvious that the disc jockey was completely out of touch with his audience.

The station repeatedly carried the news that the 50-year-old star was dead, and then the presenter would add that they did not usually play his records because - we gathered - they were much too hip to do so.

The most he would offer, as a special favour to Michael Jackson fans, and in recognition of his "iconic" status, was to play one of his hits every hour.

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But as the night wore on it was clear that the position was untenable. The presenter plaintively reported that the station was being flooded with texts, e-mails and calls. The listeners wanted Jackson. The snooty old code was bowing beneath the weight of popular demand.

Like the courtiers of Buckingham Palace who eventually caved in and flew the flag at half-mast to mark the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the radio producers decided they could hold out no more.

As I tapped the steering wheel to Thriller and Billie Jean, it was clear that something was growing out there in the noosphere, and that the death of Michael Jackson was unleashing significant emotions in the popular consciousness.

In the intervening days it has become clear that the hysteria has not gone away. In tribute to the rhinestone-studded uniform of the late performer, Lily Allen is apparently to be seen wearing a single white glove at the Glastonbury Festival.

Candlelit vigils have begun at the hospital where they failed to revive him. The BBC has already flown Newsnight's Emily Maitlis and a vast taxpayer-funded retinue to the scene of the tragedy, and the ether is being churned with her heavyweight political and cultural apercus.

And who can fault the BBC's news judgment? By the middle of this week, senior politicians will no doubt be chivvied in front of the camera to confirm that he was the prince of pop, or the people's prancer, and Gordon Brown will probably moonwalk into prime minister's questions.

Now you or I may not share these emotions. We may not be the kind of people who queue to place flowers at the Neverland ranch, or hurl ourselves sobbing at the foot of his catafalque. We may not feel a sudden gap, a strange hollowness, in our lives. But some people do. Lots of people do.

In the face of this kind of authentic feeling, we would be mad to sneer. It is the function of this column to hold up a mirror to our society, to analyse, to explain.

There is no doubt that Jackson was astonishing as a singer, a dancer, an all-purpose musical talent. He was the first black performer to make it on to MTV.

But was he notably more gifted than Otis Redding? Was he a better singer-songwriter than Marvin Gaye? Absolutely not. And yet the BBC didn't fly out Jeremy Paxman when Marvin Gaye was shot by his own father, and the crowds didn't come out for Otis - or not in the same way.

To understand the cult of Michael Jackson, we need to go back to Thriller, the 14-minute masterpiece directed by John Landis in 1982. Jackson hired Landis after seeing An American Werewolf in London and he told him: "I want you to turn me into a monster."

That is what happens. It is an extraordinary piece of music-TV and it helped the album to sell 65 million copies. Jackson does his breathtaking dance routines, and then morphs into a lycanthrope, his physical features changing almost beyond recognition, so that what was once charming becomes downright scary.

Which is what happened, of course, to Jackson himself over the next two decades. He entered into a kind of abusive relationship with the tabloid press, in which his attention-seeking was matched by their prurience.

He mutilated himself with plastic surgery, and the world was treated to stomach-churning pictures of dislocated nostrils and drooping eyelids.

Michael Jackson spoke to the billions of people the world over who feel that they do not conform in some way to the Hollywood stereotype of good looks - either because they are too fat or thin or the wrong colour or have the wrong sort of eyes or nose. In a world dominated by a demoralising canon of physical perfection, he personified dysmorphia.

Never was someone so obviously and so literally unhappy in his own skin, and by his obsessional suffering he earned the potential sympathy of everyone who feels doubtful about their appearance, which is a fair chunk of the human race.

And by his musical triumphs, he proved the essential point, that you can look weird, feel weird, be weird - and still be a genius.

In one sense Michael Jackson was beaten by the star system, in that it made demands about how he should look and behave which he felt he could never satisfy. In another sense he beat the system. He beat it by writing Beat It.