Regardless of your opinion on Michael Jackson, whether you try to divorce the artistic career from the atrocity of a personal life or not, the news of his death at 50 from cardiac arrest has caused shock around the world.

Many of us have bemoaned, especially in the last 10 years or so, the extent to which our culture has become so celebrity and media dominated - 'living your life in the public eye' and the attendant pitfalls therein is the usual debating point when the latest reality tv star decides it hasn't turned out as good as they thought it might. With Michael Jackson, we had the very dictionary definition of 'growing up in public'.

Appearing on national TV with The Jackson 5 by the age of eleven and hardly ever being off the screen from then on, Jackson moved through his familial group's massive success to find even more in his solo career, redefining concepts such as fame, record sales, and media hype.

It has been posited on many occasions that the bizarre nature of Jackson's personal life was a direct result of his lack of real childhood and his desire to fill his adult life with as much as he could to make up for that. Perhaps more than any other pop artist, the increasing fascination with the man rather than the music meant the latter was almost a footnote, regardless of Jackson's self-proclaimed status as 'The King Of Pop'. However, the increasingly overblown and pompous nature of his work didn't help his musical legacy very much either.

Michael Jackson was, and should remain, in a league of his own as a pop star - but for good and bad reasons. We're unlikely to see albums selling 50 million copies ever again for one thing. Yet he is distinct from a Prince, a Bowie, even Madonna - outside of the fan base he won't be remembered as a significant artist, pushing boundaries that didn't just involve numbers and size. If anything, his video work was the most pioneering thing he ever did, notably his influence in getting more black artists on to the nascent MTV in the early 80's. Also, unlike Jimi, Janis, Cobain, we won't really wonder what his future output might have been - personally speaking, I was asked for my top 5 Jackson tracks, and I didn't get out of the 70's. Thriller was some mighty pop hits with a large dollop of mawkish filler, and from there everything became glossier, slicker, and increasingly self-serving.

And yet, I did feel a huge sense of sadness at seeing the footage of The Jackson 5 over the last few days, the innate talent, the wonderfully unaffected voice, the exuberance of youth ; similar feelings also came with the footage from the Off The Wall era, the 'grown up' Jackson looking to make his own way, in a similar vein to his Motown predecessors Stevie and Marvin. And he did eclipse both of them, in sales if not in quality - and yet where did it take him. Sad as the early loss of Michael Jackson is, what is perhaps sadder is that we were all, if we were honest, kind of expecting something like this to happen.

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