THIS writer has had a lot of time for mental doodling the past three nights, while the wife caught up on every Michael Jackson music video, with supplementary flashes of the Jackson Five.

Yeah, the first time round, I, too, appreciated the refreshing of the memory, but after that ... how many times do people want to watch Michael telling them to beat it while grabbing his it? Not to mention the tiresome media circus - live on-the-scene coverage of a wall inundated by flowers, no news and lots of speculation, camera panning to closed gates, cut to 10 commercials, back to the informative blank wall, ad nauseum.

From the sublime to the ridiculous.

You just wait, a couple of days later, we will probably be reading that a boy here and a girl there, afflicted with incurable heartache, have killed themselves.

For many of my generation, the Pavlovian musical response to news of a musician's death would be Don McLean singing of the day the music died. However, it's not relevant in this instance.

Shelves and stores may have been emptied of all of Michael's music, but you can bet factories producing for Sony are burning the midnight oil.

Twenty-five years down the road, we will read that someone has found a recording of Michael singing nursery rhymes at four; his rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star seen on YouTube (or whatever has replaced it) had over two billion hits the first day, and will be glowingly reviewed as showing a precocious knowledge of percussive possibilities heralding the supernova that was going to flare ... and burn out.

McLean's song touched on the plane crash that ended the music of Buddy Holly, J.P. "Big Bopper" Richardson and Ritchie "La Bamba" Valens. Before my time.

Sure, as a kid in first voice, I mindlessly sang Pat Boone and the Platters, but what did a seven-year-old twerp know about Luuurve? When music became more than pleasant sound, my attention was on Cliff Richard, well, not really, that mama's (and papa's) boy, but the band behind him, the Shadows.

There must be a whole generation of Malayan/Malaysian musicians whose curriculum was the hits of the Shadows and the Ventures, and a whole generation of Malayan kids, long before Guitar Hero, who have plucked the Shadows' Apache on badminton racquets while our voices twanged the lead.

I couldn't get into Elvis, because I was too young to appreciate rocking the jailhouse, and by the time Hank Marvin had come into my life, my introduction to Elvis was through those dreadful movies and the wimpy music. Wooden Heart was No.1 here. Yuck. That kitsch oom-pah-pah rhythm. What kind of music is that for a growing boy? U vun me to vere lederhosen and stuff my face with a blood sausage?

Then - 1963 - stepping into Form One in a school that will attempt to teach me about Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Yeats, and turning on Redifusion one day to hear a band who chose to spell things differently, who sang about love like many before them, but whose in-your-face yeah, yeah, yeah, miraculously didn't sound like the yowl of a vocabulary-challenged lyricist; instead, it rang like an anthem of difference, a line for the ages.

I was entering a school that declared the Elvis curry-puff and ducktail and the sideburn a sign of demonic possession, to be exorcised by an Indian barber in the middle of the quadrangle after Monday assembly (the crew-cut paid for by the victim), and here were four young men who showed that hair could grow longer than half-an-inch, that it would be ‘groovy' to cover the brow and droop over the collar. Yes, you will have to put up with taunts about being a girl, but that was part of its appeal - if it upset adults, great.

Soon after, when Jagger snarled his lack of satisfaction, my soul was sold to the devil. School and my parents may conspire to keep me looking like Andy Williams (before he tried to re-invent himself in the late 1960s with albatross-winged collars and bell-bottoms), but this werewolf was ready to sprout fur - university and Hendrix would trigger the next stage of my follicle evolution.

Back to McLean and American Pie. My generation could have sung it for Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison, but we never really did because the zeitgeist was to live fast and die young. Casualties were inevitable, and probably spilling over to the next generation's Mercury and Cobain.

The music died for me one day in the 1980s, when, mid-afternoon, I was yanked from the middle of writing a leader (I can't remember on what - Beirut, the PLO) to be told to drop it and respond instead to the gunning down of Lennon.

It was one of my most uninspired bits of writing. It could have been that I couldn't switch from pontificating on a distant tragedy to expressing what it meant to lose part of the soundtrack of your youth. This was someone who had taken you from the simplicity of the early love songs to the complex soundscapes of Sgt Pepper's, back to the stripped-down essence of Imagine.

Instead of grief, I was numb. I needed heart, but the heart, at that moment, didn't know how to cope. Without heart, there is no music.

● Thor Kah Hoong (khthor50@gmail.com) is young enough to have had Michael's ‘Off the Wall' playing in his car for a few months - until the car was stolen.