I don't get it

I think it's my age. I'm simply too old for Michael Jackson. Too much of my memory of him was Neverland, the pajamas to the courthouse, the pale face, the baby balcony thing. And as for his music and evidently his legendary status of having remade pop culture and pop music as we know it -- the only one who could dance and sing -- (Liza Minelli? Judy Garland? Gene Kelly?) I apparently have no real appreciation for that. This is the woman who thought James Taylor was hard rock.
I think that you go nearly anywhere in the world and you hear American music being played. We create the rhythmns and the sounds that reverberate. And to that end Michael Jackson captured something.
And I also think that news producers, anchors grew up hearing Michael Jackson and his death reverberated. I was standing in Moo Cow over-priced ice cream story at the Hotel del Coronado after a day on the beach when a young woman, with cell phone in hand, announced that Michael Jackson had died of cardiac arrest. She'd read the tweet. I was surprised and repeated it immediately to Ken. I'd learn much later that Farrah Fawcett had died too. But after the 12th hour of coverage I wondered what all the fuss was about. There hadn't been this much fuss when Paul Newman died. In fact, I was insulted that his death had created so little response.
I think it's my age. I'm 60. And I don't have my husband's or my children's affinity, taste, database for music, lyrics. I like Sinatra. I know all the words to Autumn Leaves, Misty, Fly M e to the Moon and most of the songs from Camelot and Fiddler on the Roof. None from Thriller and I just learned this week that a whole generation claim Thriller as the song that defines their adolescence.
Mine was Johnny Angel, the first 45 I bought at Kroger's in Kokomo, IN. from Jane Plotner's mother, who was a cashier there, when I was in sixth grade.