Michael Jackson is the reason I can't take shows like "American Idol" seriously. I'm old enough to remember the Jackson 5's appearances on the variety shows of the late '60s and early '70s like "Sonny and Cher" and "The Flip Wilson Show." They were major events because of (a) the paucity of black people on television and (b) the precociousness and charisma that a boy only a few years older than me exuded as the group's lead singer.

There was nothing "sexless" about Michael Jackson in the early '70s as far as I was concerned. The preadolescent Michael Jackson was a very real "rival" for the affections of Renee W., the girl who sat next to me in the fourth and fifth grades.

Michael was an impossibly handsome brown-skinned boy who affirmed the value of brown-skinned boys just by existing. It was his songs I lip-synched when I daydreamed about Renee. It was his voice my imagination appropriated in the desperate hours as summer vacation approached and I realized I wouldn't see Renee again until September.

So I sang "I Want You Back" in the karaoke bar that was my living room, straining to hit as many notes as someone with no singing talent could do before running for the school bus. If I could sound as sincere as Michael did on "Never Can Say Goodbye" or "Got to be There," Renee would instinctively understand why I avoided eye contact with her, even when she was moved to laugh at some accidental cleverness on my part.

By providing the definitive soundtrack for our adolescent longings, Michael Jackson made an indelible impression on my generation, which included a young boy then living overseas named Barack Obama.

Michael's voice became an inextricable part of our cultural hardwiring. We envied his large, billowing afro, eclectic fashion sense and silky dance moves. Though his Saturday morning cartoon featured a ridiculous dancing snake and two rats, we still watched it because it featured a successful black family starring a boy our age. We aspired to be everything we thought he was at the time: confident around girls, massively talented -- and rich.

We didn't know that despite its chart-topping success, the Jackson family barely got paid thanks to some creative bookkeeping at Motown Records. We didn't know that behind his mannish poise on stage, Michael Jackson was also a victim of the kind of emotional abuse at home that sticks with a person far into adulthood.

We would have been shocked to learn that he wasn't all that confident around, or particularly interested in girls, either. We didn't know that just beneath the surface of the Jacksons' Ebony magazine photo spread of the perfect black nuclear family was a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare or Goethe's "Faust."

Michael Jackson is dead. Those of us who invested so much in him decades ago are feeling our mortality as a result, too.

We're the generation that was in our teens when Elvis died, bloated and underrated at Graceland. We were college students when John Lennon was murdered. Michael's death catches us in middle age when we're more inclined to forgive his odd and self-aggrandizing behavior that alienated us throughout the 1990s and most of this decade.

We're beginning to hear reports that he died an emaciated man with thinning hair and a prescription drug habit. He was no longer the beautiful dark prince of the pre-"Thriller" videos we watched on YouTube and on cable music channels in our collective grief.

The enormity of Michael Jackson's death struck me while watching the video of the Jacksons performing the old Holland-Dozier-Holland classic "Forever Came Today" live in Mexico in 1975.

As tall as his brothers by then, Michael remained first among equals as they danced in perfect formation across the stage in white sequined suits. I can't watch it without misting up. It captures the brothers right after they left Motown but years before the solo success of the zeitgeist-distorting "Thriller" turned him into a fame-addicted recluse.

I liked "Thriller," but the songs on that album never moved me the way his earlier songs had. I appreciate the fact that for millions of people, his career began with "Billie Jean" and "Beat It." Still, I could never shake the feeling that "Thriller" was designed to be music you worked out to at the gym.

Michael Jackson didn't do the terrible things he was accused of during his 2005 trial. If I thought for a second that he was guilty of molesting a child, especially a boy with cancer, it would be difficult for me to mourn his passing.

Still, a weird etiquette is at play when we talk about the difficult final decade of his life. We use euphemisms and jokes instead of saying the obvious: The charges were bogus, but based on a reasonable suspicion given Michael Jackson's reckless behavior.

The jury that exonerated him made the best judgment possible given the strangeness of his accusers and the inconsistency of their testimony. Still, Michael Jackson was also partially to blame for his spirit-breaking predicament. He had been warned by friends, lawyers and family to find age-appropriate friends.

He didn't. Now terms like "Jesus juice" have entered the lexicon for good.

His legacy will always be tainted by it. His three children will have to deal with the weight of their father's criminal immaturity. What will they think when they begin reading about it in a few years?

If massive fame and wealth had never happened to Michael Jackson and he had been just another mid-level performer stuck with his original face, he wouldn't have attracted the vampires and sycophants who helped kill him and his career.

Without "Thriller," he could have quietly gotten the counseling he desperately needed. Perhaps he would have ended up with someone who truly loved him. He certainly wouldn't have been in the indefensible position of sharing his bed with children, because no one would have tolerated that from a guy carrying his own bags to a gig. Half the lawyers in L.A. would be a hell of a lot poorer as a result.

In a world without "Thriller," Michael Jackson would still be with us. We'd gladly buy front-row tickets to his next show so we could sing "Forever Came Today" along with him.