Thriller was the first album I actually owned. Beginning at age three, I listened to and became familiar with my parents’ Beatles albums, but I couldn’t claim them as my own.

When I was seven and Thriller was released, I begged my mother for it, and she was all like, “Why don’t you just have Uncle Henry make a tape of it for you?”

“That’s not the point!” I whined. With all due respect to my uncle Henry—definitely one of my hipper, more musically aware uncles— I wanted the official album on tape, the complete package: that shimmery white suit reproduced in a tiny 3×4″ format, and the ugly beige cassette itself, with the song titles and everything stamped on the plastic. That was my holy grail.

So I wore my mother down and eventually got it, and played the hell out of it, and eventually lost it, and a couple years later moved onto the second album I ever owned, Songs From the Big Chair. But that album, the video for “Shout,” and the ensuing 25 years of pop music couldn’t have existed without Thriller, or the man who created it.

As soon as I heard the news yesterday, my brain performed that curious elision that allows adults to reckon with nuance, controversy, and cognitive dissonance: I immediately forgot the past 20 years of Michael Jackson’s narrative—the weirdness and the plastic surgery and the baby-dangling and the allegations of impropriety—and thought only about Thriller and Bad, about being a single-digit age in the 1980s—an era I consider more frequently even as it continues to recede.

The bells at Minneapolis’ City Hall are playing Michael Jackson songs. You can hear them all over downtown. I recorded them playing