Michael Jackson

The singer from Gary, Indiana who went to work at six and never really stopped. Michael Jackson was fronting the Jackson 5 in 1964 and had four solo albums out on Motown before he turned seventeen, all of it while still a member of the group. What changed everything was meeting Quincy Jones on a film set and persuading him to produce a record. Off the Wall arrived in August 1979 and turned a former child star into an adult artist; Thriller followed in November 1982 and became the best-selling album ever made, carrying Billie Jean, Beat It and the title track into permanent rotation.

The videos were half the argument. Jackson treated them as short films rather than promotional clips, paying for Beat It himself when his label refused, and the results forced American television to broaden what it would show. Bad in 1987, Dangerous in 1991 and HIStory in 1995 kept him at a scale almost no one else has operated at, and Invincible in 2001 was the last of ten studio albums. He sold more than 500 million records worldwide, with ninety million certified albums in America alone. He died in Los Angeles on June 25, 2009, at fifty. The catalog runs from a six-year-old singing Motown to some of the most carefully constructed pop records anyone has made.