Jackson was one man with a thousand public personas

The song that popped into your head the minute you heard Michael Jackson was dead reveals something about you. If it was a Jackson 5 song -- "Never Can Say Goodbye," for example -- you're probably over 40. You have memories of Jackson as a little black boy in an Apple cap, and believe that the kind of "real" soul music he made then can heal wrongs. You're kind of a hippie, maybe, or at least a believer in the rootsy and the pure.

If you thought of "Thriller," you're probably younger. Your Michael wears the white glove and has paler skin. You grew up in the age of hip-hop and global pop -- music, for you, is rooted in the glittery artifice of videos and the unexpected juxtapositions sampling made possible. You don't care about purity, but do hold stock in velvet revolutions: in border-crossing culture as a source of better human understanding, if not real social change.

But what if you thought of "Childhood," that saccharine yet baldly confessional ballad in which Jackson coos about loving "elementary things" because he was robbed of his own youth? Or "In the Closet," a tough dance track that runs on the fumes of sexual repression and rage?

Are there people out there who got misty while humming the creepy "They Don't Care About Us," in which Jackson uses language many thought was anti-Semitic to conflate his feelings of persecution with hate crimes?

A listener can find troubling material within every phase of Jackson's musical career. The early stuff, sweet and breezy as it can be, gained some of its frisson from its seductiveness, so startling from a child.

"He had a knowingness about him that was incredible," said Motown founder Berry Gordy in a statement issued yesterday. "When I first heard him sing Smokey [Robinson]'s song 'Who's Lovin' You' at 10 years old, it felt like he had lived the song for 50 years."

Jackson wasn't the first child to be made into a product and a sex object, however chaste. Shirley Temple, Judy Garland and his friend Elizabeth Taylor knew that road. But when Jackson grew up, he carried that inner disruption with him, and it marked his greatest work, as well as his failures.

Some kind of violence within him added energy to songs like "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' " (in which he compares himself to a buffet, there to be fed on) or "Black or White" (a cry for universal understanding whose original video included a startling dance sequence in which Jackson, morphing from a black panther into himself, laid waste to a hotel facade and a car).