’One dramatic story of a Marley ’sighting’’ comes from a Cambridge professor who visited Tibet in 1979 after it had been closed for decades of Chinese occupation. At the Potola lamasert in Lhasa, an aging monk led the visitor through underground catacombs into a room carved out of rock, where a single light bulb and an old eight-track tape player were plugged into a single electric outlet. In the tape player, a Lebanese bootleg of Natty Dread played over and over-From the book On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison and Bob Marley by Gregory Stephens, scholar author and Marley fan.’’

’I was travelling in Sudan in 1980, clinging on the top of a truck on the road from Khartoum to Juba. The only person we saw for hours was a tribesman in the distance, holding a boom box in his ear. When we got closer, I heard what he was listening to: Bob Marley singing ’No Woman No Cry’’-Lucinda Chodan, editor-in-chief, Victoria Times Colonist, Colombia.’’

These are two of an array of accolades that front the book Bob Marley-A Life written by Garry Steckles on whose work I also drew at the beginning of what has turned out to be four columns on the world-rattling death of the pop music icon that was Michael Jackson. The intention here is not to forge a comparison but (a) to mark how lucky so many of us are to have been alive in the lifetime of these two giants and (b) to muse on whether MJ’s legacy will be more about the music than the madness of the man.

I do not use the ’madness’’ word advisedly. In Narcotics Anonymous (NA) we say that the nature of the addict’s insanity is doing the same thing time after time while hoping for different results. Michael’s pain-killer addiction in the public domain (I once had surgery in the Community Hospital and to relieve pain I was given what I now believe was a narcotic prescription that made me feel as if I was floating serenely on the bed.)

One morning as the prescribing doctor entered the ward I eagerly asked him when he was coming to my bed to make me feel good. He looked at me fixedly and must have decided there and then that I was in danger of getting hooked (and he did not even know that I had been certified as having an addictive personality) because I was never given that ’feel good’’ injection again. Two decades later, though, I still remember that floating experience with relish and, to be honest, I have some residual longing too.

Imagine, then, if you are Michael Jackson and you have not only all this money but also what we call in NA ’enablers’’, that is, people around you who assist you in assessing controlled or even prescribed prescriptions either because they genuinely want you to feel good by helping you to get high or because they want to use your highness to manipulate you for their own purposes such as getting a piece of all that money.

But not only was MJ ’mad’’ in the addictive sense but in the sense of all those brain-breaking issues, a CNN site sorrowing:

’Michael’s action in later years-from his serial plastic surgeries which removed all family resemblance (withering but witty commentary on the anomaliesunlimted.com site: ’he suddenly has cheek bones. In a mere year and a half his skin goes from beautiful cocoa brown to fish belly white), to his famous crotch-grabbing dance move-can be seen as lashing out at abuse. He resented his father...The behaviour didn’t stop with dance moves and surgery... most notorious and damaging were the charges of sexually abusing the young boys he befriended... The high-profile trial, and its lurid testimony, drove Jackson further down the path of anti-social behaviour...’’

All this, (to maintain the Jackson/Marley nexus I have been approximating) to me suggests that, over time, Michael has been going mad no ras and it may even be that his legacy, unlike Marleys, will be mixed, future generations, having the advantage of time having passed and the increasing inter-connectedness of this wired world luxuriating in the singing and dancing (in this he beats Bob hands down) even as they damn his lifestyle (in this Bob, whatever his womanising (with grown women, dammit!) beats him hands down, MJ’s lil boy-baiting, perhaps, preventing him in the long run from having the iconic status that the great dancer Nijinsky still has-that, according to Joan Acocella writing in my favourite New Yorker mag, ’of the misunderstood artist, of the mad genius, of the misunderstood homosexual.’’