Michael Jackson got big after I stopped listening seriously to rock n roll, i.e. after 1965. But he was huge. In all Kathryn’s paeans to dismal 80s hymnody, how has she missed him? There is a reason he owns the Beatles catalogue, or half of it, or whatever: he sold more records than they did. He was about one hundred times more talented than Madonna. Our fascination with him is how such a lively figure became such a moral and physical gargoyle.