When James Brown died, I wrote that the bad things that he did in his life shouldn’t be forgotten or swept under the rug, but that once someone is gone, the best thing for the rest of us to do is look at a life and take what lessons, and what inspiration, we can out of it to help us with the life we have left.

I’d say the same about Michael Jackson, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what those lessons are.

His talent was otherworldly, and he worked to make it look that way. He seemed to exist on another plane. In a lot of ways, he did. You could marvel at Jackson; you could wonder at him; later in life, people made jokes about him. (One radio smart-aleck was already back at it on Friday night.)

But I don’t know that you could identify with him, or put yourself in his place. Because the man didn’t live anything resembling what we would call a normal day. Not one day.

From the age of 6, he was being pushed by his abusive father to be a better and better performer. By 11, he had his first hit record — the joyous “I Want You Back,” with his brothers in The Jackson Five. By 13, he was making solo records (although the group was still together).

“I Want You Back” is close to the last great Motown hit. It is grand and glorious, a sugar rush that’s over in three minutes and leaves you feeling better than you did before it started. Jackson would have had a place in musical history if he’d stopped after “I Want You Back,” “ABC,” “The Love You Save” and “I’ll Be There” — the first four Jackson Five singles, all of which went to number one, a record.

Watching him doing those songs on YouTube, you can tell that this kid has more than “got it.” “Got it” implies that he’s got something the great ones have. Jackson, all of 11 years old when these songs came out, had something no one else had.

There’s a lot to be said for the effects of age and experience on a voice. We listen to an old master of blues or soul and think, “No young kid could put that kind of feeling into a lyric.” And that’s true. But give a listen to the last choruses of “I’ll Be There,” or any part of “Got to Be There,” and there’s a quality to Jackson’s voice that an adult could never match.

But what are we supposed to take from any of this?

I was out with my son, who’s 10, when the news of Jackson’s death hit us. I was more shaken than I thought I’d be; my son agreed that it was a sad thing, but casually mentioned that not only did he not know any of Jackson’s music; he had only recently learned that Jackson was a singer in the first place. In his school, Jackson was a boogeyman. After a while, he said, one of the kids got a laugh out of the lunch room simply by shouting “Michael Jackson!”

By the way, if we’re going to remember the unpleasantness that surrounded Jackson’s life, we should also take a moment to remember that in the mid-’80s, with his fame at its height, he was one of several celebrities who befriended and supported Ryan White, the Indiana teenager who was kicked out of school because he had AIDS. At a time when White’s newspaper-delivery customers were canceling their subscriptions because they thought they could catch AIDS from newsprint, Jackson sat in an Indiana courtroom to show support for White. And that was far from Jackson’s only humanitarian move.)

Anyway, here’s hoping that the outpouring of attention to Jackson in the wake of his death can put the attention back where it belongs. He was one of the musical giants of this or any age, and whatever ill he may have done, he can’t do it anymore.

So who’s next? There’s never going to be another Michael Jackson, not exactly. The times are different; the music world is different. But there are a few candidates to fill that niche. Usher rings a bell, though his last album was nothing to shout about and was long in coming.

For my money, the best bet would be Chris Brown. I saw him twice in a two-week span in 2006 and said, “He could be the real thing.” A better-than-average singer (who actually sang, and didn’t lip-synch, in the two performances I saw), an electrifying dancer with a million-dollar smile, a few massive hits already … it’s possible.

Of course, the domestic violence charges against Brown in the beating of his girlfriend Rihanna earlier this year takes a bit of the star power off him, and lends an ominous air to the phrase “next Michael Jackson.”

Unfortunately, we’re getting used to that. But we’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, I’ll go back to listening to my favorite Jackson songs, especially the relatively less-appreciated stuff from the late Jacksons period — “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground),” “Dancing Machine,” and the early gem “Darling Dear” — and I’ll be sure to cut my son in on the fun. And I’ll make sure he understands that in one life, a person can do many different things.

rmassimo@projo.com