When the news hit, WDKX DJ Atu Tramel knew what he had to do.

"I played a couple of Michael Jackson (songs).  I kept playing Michael Jackson, until I just realized, lets just play Michael Jackson.  Michael Jackson was the biggest thing ever."

It'll be all Michael all the time on WDKX, as Rochester remembers the time they first heard Michael.

"One of my first CDs I got was Thriller.  Listening to that, I thought it was the most catchiest music I've ever heard," said Rochester resident Collin Bourne.

His appeal was universal.

"I was big into rock, big into metal.  But there was always something about Michael Jackson that you couldn't dislike," said Joe Petrosino, a Rochester resident.

University of Rochester rock and roll historian John Covach says Billie Jean is Jackson's best song. 

But he says Jackson's universal appeal came from more than singing and dancing.

"A very reliable sense of style.  Who would have thought that one glove... and the whole thing that he was doing.  The moonwalk, the backward walk thing, would take off the way it did.  But it wasn't just that it was catchy, it was that it was so cool at the same time," said Covach.

Covach says Jackson changed more than music.  That he changed media altogether, with the now-classic music video, thriller.  At one time, MTV had trouble attracting viewers.  That is, until Michael Jackson.

"To sell the MTV service, you have to have things people want to see.  And people wanted to see those Michael Jackson videos.  And MTV had him, and nobody else did," said Covach.

The videos, the music, is seared into Atu Tramel's brain, as it is for so many others.

"He was the sound of my youth.  He was just the soundtrack of my youth," said Tramel.