K-Punk has a wonderful passage about MJ's last great album, Off The Wall:

"The Motown sound," Mason argues in Meltdown , "seemed to sum up the deal Henry Ford's system offered the working class: hard work, frenetic leisure and a counter-culture that made everything else look uncool. Above all, it was a world of rising real income. If you work eight hours a day on a production line that does not stop, these three words - 'rising real income' - represent the most important single fact in economics." Up to and including Off The Wall, Michael Jackson's music belonged to that old black dream - music as leisure-convalescence, a utopianism confined to time off work ("gonna leave that 9 to 5 up on the shelf"), with the fortunate few, like Jackson, elevated into superstardom and then - like he and his brothers in the video for the awesome "Can You Feel It" - sprinkling a little stardust on the hardworking black population below.

Off The Wall is still in the grip of Saturday night fever, delirious with all the summer-sweet promise of disco. Here, Quincy Jones and Jackson constructed a song suite that did for late 70s black dance culture what Scott Fitzgerald's novels and stories had done for an earlier, whiter, richer American moment: they shaped the fragile evanescences of youth and dance into beautiful myths, laced with fabulous longings that they could neither contain or exhaust.

It is this that separates Motown from Deep Space. The first is about the industrial poor, the other the postindustrial poor. The first happens in peopled space; the other in unpeopled space. The first draws its power from the attractions of utopia; the other, from the repulsions of dystopia. The first is historical; the other is ahistorical. The first is in the real; the second is in the virtual.

The post also contains the best description of "Billie Jean" I have ever read:

"Billie Jean" is not only one of the best singles ever recorded, it is one of the greatest art works of the twentieth century, a multi-levelled sound sculpture whose slinky, synthetic-panther sheen still yields up previously unnoticed details and nuance nearly thirty years on. The only remote parallel I can think of in 80s pop is the sonic architecture that Arif Mardin designed for Chaka Chan on "I Feel For You".

Sometimes, the weariness brought on by hearing it so many times will make you twitch the dial when "Billie Jean" comes on the radio. But let it play, and you're soon bewitched by its drama, seduced into its sonic fictional space, the mean streets and chilly single-parent single-room appartments that now suround the still-glittering dancefloor like conspiring fate. Listening is like stepping onto a conveyor belt. And that's what it sounds like, as the implacable, undulating sinous cakewalk of the synthetic bass takes over the massive space opened up by the crunching snares Jones and Jackson insouciantly hijacked from hiphop.

The pleasure contained in this passage is much like one that's in the course of a brilliant essay about Tricky by Ian Penman.