I was very upset when I heard the news; I knew he was in terrible physical shape for a long time, but it still came like a blow to the stomach for me.

I've been listening to his albums "Off the Wall" and "Thriller" for the past two days, even some of his Motown stuff. He's one of my favorite pop artists.
Despite a lot of the phsyical and mental problems he's had since that Pepsi fire and...well, I'm not going to go into the obvious *other* thing out of common decency...him and his music will remain loved. It's great that his influence on pop music and dancing is omnipresent in a lot of today's music, so even his sound will always be intact.