Jackson's death not as sorry or sad as Lennon's

Frankly speaking, the death of pop icon (some called him king) Michael Jackson did not strike me in the same way that the killing of John Lennon did. Indeed, the death of Princess Diana probably made me more unsettled.

Maybe because the deaths of John Lennon and Princess Diana were far more senseless than the death of Michael Jackson. Lennon was shot by a crazed person and Diana died in a car crash in the middle of a high speed pursuit by crazy paparazzi.

While the exact cause of Jackson's death is still to be determined, rumors of possible accidental drug inducement are already swirling, thus diluting what could have been feelings of sincere anguish by his fans.

Beyond that, however, I believe Michael Jackson just did not strike people the way John Lennon or Princess Diana did. I think the main attraction of Jackson simply dwelt on his songs and the skills with which he delivered them.

Beyond his songs, many people were turned off by his eccentricity. Some would even insist on something akin to madness and any argument to the contrary is soon stifled by those unnerving images of him dangling his baby over a balcony at a height of six stories.

Lennon was probably just as eccentric as Jackson was. But there was a certain sincerity in the way he projected his eccentricity that people realized that was just the way he was. In Lennon people saw that all great beauty always had some strangeness in the proportion.

I have not really followed Diana, so I will not pretend to have any expertise in analyzing why people suffered the way they did when she died. All I am saying is that the way people took the death of Diana and the death of Jackson was simply worlds apart.

I believe than in John Lennon and in Princess Diana, people the world over felt they truly lost a person. In the case of Michael Jackson, people merely lost an icon. And there is a whale of a difference in that.

Of course I may be a little biased since I am a Sixties man. And while the Jackson Five, that band of brothers that launched Michael Jackson into the music world, was also a Sixties group, it was not really until the Seventies and the Eighties that he became what he was.

Besides, while the Jackson Five came to being in the Sixties, they were not truly a Sixties group in the sense that all the other bands of that great decade were defined and appreciated.

The Jackson Five was a great singing group, but they just did not fit into the same mold the way The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, The Dave Clark Five, Herman's Hermits and so many others did.

In fact, they were in effect a Seventies group that came in the Sixties, ahead of its time. They probably laid down the early foundations for what was to be the Motown sound-based disco generation that exploded in the Seventies and spilled over into the Eighties.

The songs of Michael Jackson may electrify you to the point of dancing. And there is great power in that. It is this great power that drove people to make his "Thriller" album the greatest seller of all time.

But pray tell what song or tune Jackson has in his vast repertoire that can equal, much less surpass, the beauty, the grace, and the raw power of Lennon's "Imagine." The difference between the two is that Jackson has great songs, but Lennon had great music.

And that is why I go back to what I said earlier, that when John Lennon died, the world lost a real person but when Michael Jackson died, we merely lost an icon. And that explains the great disparity I noticed in the public reaction to both losses.