I always thought it was the other way around.
Eek! What I was thinking too.
Micheal Jackson (1958 - 2009), crushed under the weight of his own mania.
Thirty years ago, Michael Jackson was a groundbreaking genius, fired in the kiln of his Father's obsessive cruelty and desire to be rich. He became a man-baby, stripped of a childhood and forced to insanely run after one, long after other his age were grown up. Cursed by seemingly unlimited money, he never had to deal with the fact his Dad was a rat bastard, but instead crawled back into the womb, dragging other real children with him. If a poor person did half the things he did, those around him would have said, "Holy mama-jama on a pogo stick, you are SCREWED UP, DUDE!" However, his money made him not crazy, but "eccentric" in the way of old world royalty.
He had no real friends, but merely an entourage of hangers on. In the end, he lived and died ultimately like Elvis; sad, pathetic and a shadow of his once-impressive talent. His life was made meaningless by atrophy, he was a wright, a wraith of botched surgeries and bad financial management. He was born a poor black boy, and died a rich white woman, terrified of the outside world, and in almost every respect the specter of Nora Desmond, wrapped in the Sunset Boulevard of Neverland, waiting the final closeup that made people uncomfortably turn away, unsettled, and go back to worshiping the man he was three decades earlier, before he was devoured by demons all his own, and like the Thriller zombie that made him famous, dragged down to his ultimate judgment.
His records rise again, macabre, from the crypt of his talent, to strut and fret upon the stage of our memories, but he is dead, dead, dead, and is remembered as the crawling zeitgeist of a creepy old man with a plastic nose, a boogyman wandering the night in search of both his childhood, and his long lost talent.