The news lit up phone lines, flooded Facebook and Twitter and ricocheted through doctors' offices, airplanes on the verge of takeoff, sidewalk cafes where strangers quickly bonded.

Michael Jackson was dead at 50. And a generation was reeling.

Sure, there was Elvis before him, but if you were growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Michael Jackson stars in the soundtrack of your youth. Wanna be startin' somethin' You got to be startin' somethin' . . .

Remember record stores? Which one did you go to to buy the Thriller album? And where were you when you sat, eyes wide, watching Jackson's glittery moonwalk across a stage during the 1983 TV special celebrating Motown's 25th anniversary? Billie Jean is not my lover, she's just a girl who claims that I am the one . . . Were you lucky enough to go to a Victory Tour show in 1984, when Jackson was smashing through the sound barrier of celebrity to emerge as pop's supernova?

''I was 8 or 9,'' says Miami divorce lawyer Kira Willig, who spent Friday morning watching Jackson videos, playing as a tribute on MTV and VH1. ``I went to the Victory Tour at the Orange Bowl with my father and my twin brother. I wanted to marry Michael Jackson. It's a sad day, but in a way, we had been mourning him slowly as he clearly withdrew from reality and from society.''

As the Los Angeles County coroner looked into possible causes for the cardiac arrest that felled Jackson, on Friday afternoon fans were remembering the King of Pop's glory days -- and their own youths. Many had grown up watching Jackson's transition from precocious boy singer to sizzling superstar. That he broke the race barrier in the process -- his fans were of all colors, from across the world -- was so unquestionable it was rarely even addressed.

JACKSON TRIBUTES

As radio and TV stations offered Jackson tributes and local nightspots organized Jackson parties, fans celebrated his musical genius and tried to make sense of his disturbing later years.

'The first time I kissed a boy was to ABC,' said Miami Beach acupuncturist Lori Bell.

''He is an American tragedy,'' said Mario Artecona, 44, executive director of the Miami Business Forum and a longtime fan. ``I don't mean because of the death, but because of the fall. And as he lost his innocence, so did a lot of us. I can't shake the creepiness, but as the huge icon that he was, he helped mark time for our generation. I remember buying Off the Wall at Peaches and playing it ad nauseum, but skipping over She's Out of My Life because it was such a sappy song.''

The song may have seemed sappy to a tough teenage guy, but it became the fourth hit from Off the Wall, the first time an artist scored four Top 10 hits on one album.

''I wanted to give the song to Frank Sinatra, but Quincy Jones wanted it to go to Michael because he thought the song gave him adult emotion. He was about 19,'' said composer and producer Tom Bahler, who wrote the song and had worked with Jackson and his brothers since the Motown days.

'He cried at the end of the first take and said, `Sorry, fellas.' We did 12 more takes, all of them fabulous, because he was our generation's best entertainer, our Fred Astaire. But we just never captured what we had on the first take, which is the one we went with.''

Some are arguing today that maybe Madonna at her height was more famous than Jackson at his, but Bahler says there is no contest.

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