Remember the time - you discovered the King of Pop

I loved Michael Jackson before I even listened to his songs or saw his photo.

Back in the early 1980s, my friends and I, in junior high, were still listening to cheesy ballads and synthetic disco from Taiwan, considered as outlandish then as wearing jeans. We longed for American pop, but had to wait until high school to get our hands on a tape called American Pop that included John Denver, The Carpenters, and Doris Day's Que Sera Sera.

Even though we doubted the tape's pop-ness, we worshipped the songs. In chorus competition, my class did serious rounds of Puff The Magic Dragon. Every guitar afficionado in school could pluck Take Me Home, Country Road. In English class we learned to sing Yesterday Once More.