Rolling stone biography michael jackson

This story was originally published in the 2009 special edition dedicated to Michael Jackson.

He was, in the end, precisely what he claimed and struggled to be: the biggest star in the world.

Rolling stone biography michael jackson

If there had been any doubt, it ended on the afternoon of June 25th, 2009, when the news broke that Michael Jackson had died of apparent cardiac arrest in Los Angeles at age 50. The outpouring of first shock, then grief, was the largest, most instantaneous of its kind the world had ever known, short of the events of September 11th, 2001.

Though the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. affected history more, and the deaths of Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Kurt Cobain signified the end of epochs, no single death has ever moved so fast around the globe, or to the forefront of all news, as swiftly as Michael Jackson’s.

In the days that followed, news channels, TV specials, feature magazines and front pages tried to unde