who wonder why the recently deceased Michael Jackson (RIP) has hoarded the virtual airwaves at a time when the Iranian uprising should be up front and center-stage. Well - for the same reason most people have no idea which year the Prague Spring occurred, but can fake their way through a karaoke of "While my guitar gently weeps" (both came in 1968).

Music makes people want to change the world way before they are able or wiling to understand the diluted, abstract concepts of freedom, democracy and liberalism. Jackson not only had the copious amounts of talent to make his music with, but star power right next to none, and a simple voice of a child he ever remained to speak it all directly to the 5-year olds in those of us who would yet wish to hear. Whatever one thinks of his personal antiques is irrelevant to the fact that his passing is, in a way, a rite of passage for a generation - he was the first voice with truly global reach, and reach he did.

Voice is power. R&B and New Jack Swing may not be your native idiom, but if you appreciate the Voice in Leonard Cohen yet can't hear another tinge of the same Voice in Jackson, you're not so much sophisticated as simply deaf on one ear. Indeed, it'd be a sad world where Chopin were remembered for his salon activism of the Polish independence rather than the Revolutionary Etude he wrote in its spirit, and images of people fighting their way to freedom with sticks, stones and gasoline cans would be valued higher than 4 mins of music that say the same thing: