Michael Jackson wasn’t just the King of Pop. For 40 years, he was pop. Not only popular music, but popular culture as a whole began and ended with him. And now that he’s dead, pop is dead, as well.

MJ was a great entertainer. In his musical way, Jackson was larger than life, a towering artistic presence, and a trend-setting force in American culture. He started small in Gary, Indiana, and with help from friends and family rose to stardom. His is the quintessential American fairy tale. Rags to riches.

Jackson’s failures were equally as great. He was accused of molesting children. He was narcissistic to the core. And upon his death, we learned he was addicted to prescription drugs.

Jackson’s rise in the 1970s and ’80s mirrored the rise in importance of popular culture. Pop culture is the less newsy or serious side of American life, where trivial pursuits like celebrity, music and movies are of supreme importance. As Americans became suburbanized and bored, they escaped into popular culture, the biggest icon of which was Jackson on both TV and radio. It’s ironic, therefore, that Jackson has died just as superficial popular culture is giving way to serious pursuits such as the economy, nuclear showdowns and the green revolution.

It’s also ironic that Michael Jackson stole the headlines. Not only did Farrah Fawcett’s death get pre-empted, so did the protests in Iran, a possible nuclear strike on Hawaii from North Korea, and a hugely important greenhouse gas emissions bill in Congress. For a moment, the real world went back to the way it was when Jackson was all the rage in the 1980s, when pop culture was all-important.

Jackson is the perfect personification of pop culture. As he faded in popularity thanks to his own self-destructive and career-sabatoging acts, Michael Jackson mirrored the fall of popular culture. Jackson started out as Superman. At the 25th anniversary of Motown Records in 1982, Jackson set the stage and world on fire with his Moonwalk. Upon seeing the fabled Moonwalk, kids, myself included, immediately set about perfecting the art themselves, making their bodies move with perfect fluidity just as Michael had. But what he did effortlessly, many of us could never do. Nevertheless, mastering the Moonwalk became every Gen-Xer’s goal.

Would the Moonwalk craze happen now? Kids nowadays act like they’ve seen it all, like nothing can ever impress them, not even a man floating backwards like a god. How about that diamond-studded glove Michael wore? What would modern kids think of that? These gimmicks transfixed and mesmerized us Gen-Xers, but for some reason they don’t work on Generation Y.

Maybe it’s because pop culture is for the naA? ?ve. It’s for people who have the time and resources to spend wasting their lives. We’re in a new time now, in which people are fighting for survival and kids lie awake at night wondering what bad things could happen. The relative safety and innocence Generation X felt is gone, replaced by fear of the economy, the climate, the Middle East and terrorism.

Also, what still remains of popular culture is just a shadow of its former self, and this makes it less relevant. The music, movies and Broadway plays of yesteryear had a sense of quality that is lacking in today’s cultural offerings. Jackson and his fellow 1970s and ’80s pop icons were amazingly talented individuals. The creativity present in Jackson’s albums and videos was an original art form on the same level as Picasso or Twain. That just doesn’t exist today.

If Buddy Holly and friends’ tragic airplane crash represented the day the music died, Jackson’s death is the day pop culture died. His life drove and defined American culture for decades. He was a child star. He had all the money in the world. He was huge on the radio. He was huge on TV. He had the requisite glam court battles, out-of-court settlements, high-profile marriages and divorces, all of which played out for you and me on Entertainment Tonight, every night, for years.

Pop culture and Michael Jackson were one and the same. R.I.P. to both.

John Balentine, of Windham, is a former editor of the Lakes Region Weekly.