Temperton wrote three of the songs that made it onto Off The Wall: “Rock With You,” “Burn This Disco Out,” and the title track. But Quincy Jones loved “Boogie Nights,” and he flew Temperton to Los Angeles to work on Off The Wall. He initially offered “Rock With You” to Karen Carpenter, who at the time was working on the solo album that would only see release years after she died. (“Boogie Nights” is an 8.) Temperton left Heatwave in 1978 to focus on songwriting. Temperton had written Heatwave’s biggest singles, including “ Boogie Nights,” the 1977 jam that had peaked at #2. “Rock With You” came from the songwriter Rod Temperton, who’d previously been the keyboardist in the UK disco-funk band Heatwave. For those of us who were mourning Michael Jackson on that day in 2009, “Rock With You” worked so perfectly because it’s very, very difficult to be too sad when it’s playing. It’s a lush and frictionless and joyous sunset-cloud of a song. But for all the bad things that Jackson may have done in the world - and, at the risk of turning every single Michael Jackson column into a referendum on the allegations at the man, I believe that he really did molest kids - I still have a hard time thinking of “Rock With You” as anything other than a force for good in the world. Michael Jackson’s legacy is vast and complicated. I love that I had my little two-second psychedelic trip to “Rock With You.” It’s not my favorite Michael Jackson song, but at least in some way, it’s the purest of them, the one that cuts right through to what made millions of people love the man. In an increasingly atomized media atmosphere, the death of the world’s biggest pop star was a unifying force, a monocultural last gasp. That day, everyone was listening to Michael Jackson it was all anyone wanted to hear. Something like this probably happened to a whole lot of people on that day in June of 2009. The music on my headphones was almost exactly in sync with the music in the outside world. For just an instant, I was totally unmoored, not sure if what I was hearing was real. It was almost at the same point of the song.

“Rock With You” was playing over the speakers in Sultan’s, too. As I walked into Sultan’s, I’d only gotten as far as “Rock With You.” When I walked in the door and pulled my earbuds out, I had one of those weird experiences where, for a few seconds, I wondered if I was hallucinating. I was working at Pitchfork at the time, and the office was only a few blocks away. That day, I walked to Sultan’s Market, the Middle Eastern takeout spot in Wicker Park, while listening to Off The Wall on my iPod. Walking around Chicago that day, I heard Jackson’s music coming from everywhere - cars, open windows, boutique speakers. The day after Michael Jackson died, it was beautiful out. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.

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