But the lyrics - whether Jackson's or others' - could be as disturbing as the music was liberating. Sealed in the grooves were tales of deceit, paranoia, violence and victimization. Even before his life broke apart and the tabloids bore down, Jackson sang like a boy-man under attack.

"You try to scream but terror takes the sound before you make it," he warns on "Thriller," the title track to his all-time selling album and written by Rod Temperton. "You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes/You're paralyzed."

Jackson was almost 21 when his first "adult" record, "Off the Wall," came out in 1979. He had survived the childhood beatings and insults by his father and had already lived at least one life in show business, as the smiling, spinning prodigy fronting his brothers in the Jackson Five.

"Off the Wall" sold millions and shed the catchy, but impersonal persona of his child star youth. The title track, written by Temperton, was a lighthearted introduction to what would become Jackson's truest subjects: his strange life and the stolen innocence he wanted back. "The world is on your shoulder," the song advises, but "life ain't so bad it all/If you live it off the wall."

From:www.washingtonpost.com