Celebrity deaths offer us an opportunity to reminisce about more innocent times, to laugh at ourselves and what we thought was cool back then, to take stock of where we’ve come. They also offer us a chance to post YouTube videos.

I have to show my age here and admit Farrah Fawcett was a bit before my time – I mostly know her from cultural histories and stuff as the poster that graced every teenage boy’s wall in the ’70s – but I heard that the documentary she did a few months ago about her battle with cancer was incredibly moving. It’s a shame she passed away only a few hours before…

Michael Jackson. The King of Pop. The very epitome of cool when Charlie and I were young. (Danny was too young and missed this, I think.) I remember the first time my dad got a car with a cassette player, one of the first tapes he had in there was Thriller, and I swear we wore that tape out. I remember being confused because Michael was singing a song about a dude named Billie Jean but referring to him as a “she.” The lyrics of that song didn’t make a lot of sense to me back then. Regardless, in my youth, there was nothing cooler than Michael Jackson.

Of course, in the ’90s, he got weird. I imagine the adults around me had some inkling that growing up without a childhood and living under constant pressure to perform was only bringing him closer to some kind of breakdown, but he got weird at about the same time as we hit the teenage years… and we turned on him. (Not that he made it that hard, what with the plastic surgery and Neverland Ranch and the constant allegations of pedophilia.) I know that throughout my teenage years, I chalked up my once thinking he was cool to my being a kid and not seeing all the weird that had been there. (That, of course, also wasn’t helped by the rise of grunge and the fall of the ’80s pop-glam look that MJ personified.)

But, of course, all that was before the rise of YouTube… which, judging from the top videos tonight, is reintroducing a whole generation to the earlier MJ – the one whose moves we spent our childhoods trying to emulate, the one whose songs make it impossible not to start dancing a little. And I have to say, for the record: Man, did that guy have it back in the day.

Sure, his music was tinged with all that ’80s optimism and “Heal the World” myopia, but there’s an anger in his voice that I don’t think I’d noticed until I rewatched some of his stuff tonight. The later MJ, the one I came to know and mock in my teenage years, was saccharine-sweet, in a constant race to recapture the childhood he never had; the MJ of the early to mid-80s had an edge, a passion, some fire in his eyes.

But that MJ is no more, and the weird MJ is also gone; it’s now up to us to construct how we all want to remember him. As for me, I’m going to remember the earlier MJ, the one who always made me tap my feet, the one who got me and Charlie and my cousins and all my neighborhood friends trying to do the Moonwalk on solid-wood floors in our socks.

Rest in peace, Michael Jackson.