Pop stars die young. They die from bullet, self-abuse or accident. Even when they die old, they still seem to be young.

In the four decades of pop music he spanned, Michael Jackson seemed to be fighting old age and time at every turn, infantilising himself, searching for Peter Pan, creating his own fantasy Neverland in a hopeless search for lost youth, and yet his death was that of a prematurely-aged middle-aged man: a suspected coronary, at 50.

If there is one clear parallel in the grim pantheon of premature pop death it is with Elvis Presley. Like Elvis, Jackson had won everything and lost most of it, courted publicity and hated it, was mocked and adored in equal measure, lived like a king but died of a stopped heart in circumstances that seemed too grimly ordinary for an extraordinary life.

The deaths of pop stars usually come tinged in technicolour: John Lennon gunned down outside the Dakota; Karen Carpenter whittled away by anorexia; Jimi Hendrix choking on his own vomit; Buddy Holly crashing in the Midwest.

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But the day Michael Jackson’s music died seemed almost impossibly predictable, the chronicle of a death foretold, by him.

From the moment he achieved fame he seemed to be dying, in the public eye, through a series of grim and self-destructive images: his face changing from healthy black to skeletal white; in later years masked like a plague victim against the ordinary threats of the world.

Think of the images of Michael Jackson, and almost all seem presciently morbid: Jackson attending court on abuse charges; dangling his child, madly, over a balcony; giving a press conference in London to announce a tour that would never happen, but seeming to announce it as a valedictory, the last time.

A strange iconography seems to gather around the death of pop stars. Kurt Cobain, lead singer of the American band Nirvana, was found dead at his home in Seattle with a shotgun and a suicide note. The death certificate stated that death came from a “shotgun wound to the head”, and an overdose, and concluded that his death was a suicide. Immediately an entire cult of conspiracy theories grew around his death.

Buddy Holly’s death was so sudden and so unexpected that it immediately plunged into song and myth. In a 1978 interview, Bruce Springsteen said: “I play Buddy Holly every night before I go on; that keeps me honest.”

John Lennon’s murder in 1980, was so deeply shocking that it turned a nondescript 25-year-old man — “a nobody”, in his own words” — into an instant celebrity. (Mark David Chapman became somebody, and has been in prison ever since.)

For a man who had generated as many headlines for his lifestyle as his music, Jackson’s death seems, by contrast, strangely predictable, and the more tragic for that. The grim, public destruction of his life was so evident that his death was almost, but not quite, expected.

Other stars have seemed, with hindsight, headed for self-destruction – Hendrix, Brian Jones, but Jackson seemed to see it coming, which may be why he fought it so weirdly, and so sadly.

The Greeks knew that “Those whom the gods love die young”. Billy Joel lamented that “only the good die young”, while the The Who sang: “Hope I die before I get old”.

The Romantics made a cult of young death, epitomised in Henry Wallis’s 1856 painting, The Death of Chatterton, a stunning painting but also, a morbid celebration of pointless death and wasted genius. We have inherited that through, principally, the slow self-destruction of pop stars: witness the acres of space devoted to the spiralling self-harm of a Pete Doherty or an Amy Winehouse.

In a strange way one might see Jackson’s determination to make himself forever young, a child in man’s body, a different skin colour, a different voice, and a different face from the one he was born with, as fulfilment of Dylan Thomas’s exhortation to “rage against the dying of the light.”

When the actor Heath Ledger was found dead on his bed in a New York apartment last year, it seemed to fit an accepted litany of death: a gifted individual, dead before his time, destined to live gorgeously for too brief a season.

Jackson was different: he had been self-destructing in front of the cameras for so long, becoming ever odder, and thinner, and more unpredictable, that it seemed he would go on forever.

So much in Jackson’s life was lurid, embarrassing, and strange. Yet his death was none of these. A brilliant artist passed in a way that was, by contrast with his prematurely dead peers in the pop trade, almost mundane, an ordinary death from a common disease. Perhaps, in a way, that was Jackson’s vindication.

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