Yes, Michael Jackson is reprehensible – but what should I do with my records?

His statues are being hoarded way, some radio stations are no longer playing his vast back catalogue of music. Can we stop there? Or is the task of expunging him too great?

What am I going to do with my Michael Jackson records?

Sounds trivial, I know. It is. But it is also something that touches many a household, certainly in the western world, such was the ubiquity of the fallen King of Pop. Thriller, for example, sold 47 million copies, the second highest selling album ever, and he shifted another 19 million pressings of the now-ironically named Bad. It’s quite hard to hang around in a bar of pub without hearing one of his very many hits. I heard one on a jukebox the other night, but someone cut it off. Bad taste.

So, there was a pub manager making a moral choice about Jacko. If they’d let “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” play on, that would itself have been a moral decision, of sorts, too. Thus, even if you just decide to do nothing with your Jackson CDs, vinyl, cassettes, videos, DVDs and downloads, you are making an important choice, a statement to yourself at least.

If a stray few bars of “Beat It” plat on the radio, do you leap to hit the off button? Do you dig out your long-lost old Jacko posters, take them outside and burn them, Satanic Verses-style? And what about The Jackson 5, The Jacksons, or Jacko’s collaborations with Paul McCartney (“Say, Say, Say”)? Is the shame of owning those diluted by the involvement of innocent others?

It’s often said that the worst way to approach art is the biographical route. If Philip Larkin was a terrible man, as now seems plain, that doesn’t mean his poems were. If PG Wodehouse was a Nazi sympathiser, or even a traitor, we can still laugh at Jeeves and Wooster. Caravaggio was a bit racy, by all accounts, but even I, can be mesmerised by The Supper at Emmaus.

All, true, but there is something about Jacko’s stuff that just makes me feel queasy now. That, I think, is the test, rather than some arbitrary intellectual criteria: your gut instinct. I haven’t binned my Jackson records, gathered over many years, because I cannot work out what to do, and I can’t bear to let them go, to be honest. I could flog them on eBay for charity, and send the proceeds to a good cause I suppose. The market for Jacko material seems surprisingly resilient, considering.

Jackson’s statues are being hoarded way, perhaps to be melted down in due course. Some radio stations are no longer playing his vast back catalogue of music, the royalties on which still earn the Jackson estate millions of dollars (and thus might also usefully find their way to a fund for payments to his victims).

But should we be consistent? Can we be? Expunging Jackson would need to go much further.

Should eBay and Amazon – and every other retailer, music store and second hand shop – ban Jackson-related stuff?

What would the pop museums and private collectors do with the ill-starred bits of Jacko memorabilia they have accumulated over the years – gloves, jackets, hats? Shall we euthanise his blameless chimp, Bubbles, now 52 and living his life out in an ape sanctuary? (The stories he could tell, eh?).

I wonder too, by extension, whether we could boycott any movie that has had anything to do with Harvey Weinstein? Would you be prepared never to have your eyeballs polluted by, say, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Pulp Fiction or Shakespeare in Love?

I have no doubt that Jackson was a vile paedophile monster. It’s fair to add that he is dead, so he cannot give his story – mitigating circumstances or whatever.

I also acknowledge that his family, or most of them, vociferously deny the claims. Maybe not every allegation is true.

We are where we are, though: Looking for some justice – by which I mean a mix of redress, recompense and retribution.

Chucking some old records in the recycling seems beside the point. I think, though, that mine will be making their way to the cupboard under the stairs with Gary Glitter’s discography and the Jim’ll Fix It Annual 1980 live. The Jackson Five can stay though.