I must admit, for the purposes of this W/O I have bent the rules a bit. I loved to buy tapes as a child, none of which I still own, and I honestly have no idea what my first tape was. It was probably Michael Bolton, Rick Astley, or even worse, Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers. Now, reviewing one of those albums under the heading 'where it all began' was just too horrible for me to contemplate, so I decided to go with my very first CD, Michael Jackson,
History. Well, my second CD actually. My first CD was a pirate collection of early Billy Ocean songs released on an obscure Spanish label, which I also don't own anymore, and can only remember one song, the sappy pop hook of
Love really hurts without you.
And it's breaking my heart, but what can I do without you…
…Oooh Ohh Ooohh Aaaaah, the good ole days.
Only looking back they can't have been that good, really. I look back on my childhood taste in music, and I despair, often wondering how I managed to become a successfully rounded individual (says me). Because, quite frankly, I was happily listening to
Placebo Black Market Music, and now I've changed over to Wacko-Jacko, it actually hurts my ears.
Well that's not fair actually. Opening with
Billie Jean, it's hard not to like it, whatever you may make of Jacko himself or his later years of musical nonsense. When I bought this CD, I already owned all of his albums on tape, and of course, loved every one of them. Back then, I adored pop, although the only childhood band I still stick with are the
Pet Shop Boys, who have always been pretty special. Now I hate all pop that gets thrown at you on MTV, which comparatively makes Jacko sound like the sonic equivalent of Manna from heaven. What happened to pop? Surely it wasn't always this bad? Was it always this prefabricated, this utterly devoid of emotion?
Anyway, I remember buying this newly released CD on holiday in New York, shelling out a substantial proportion of my holiday money on his new release in a huge HMV in the city centre. Two doors down I picked up Youssou N'Dour's own collection of hits, so you almost got a review of that CD, losing out to this one by about ten minutes. Another day perhaps.
I suppose what I really object to with this album is the almost Dictatorial cult of personality that Jacko had started to really foster. The double album cover art depicts an enormous silver statue of the man himself framed only by the open sky behind, with crossed bandoliers of ammunition over his chest and a stray lock of curly hair over one eye. Why? Unless it's fulfilling some kind of childhood fantasy of crossing Mr-T with Hitler, it's unclear what the whole police-state appearance is for. However, the whole thing spawned the priceless line from
U2's
The Playboy Mansion,
If Coke is a mystery
and Michael Jackson… History By this stage it was a growing probability that the increasingly unpopular man would vanish utterly from our consciousness. Although the new album gave him a great deal of success, he was starting to suffer child abuse allegations, and coupled with his increasingly ghoulish appearance, he disappeared until last years appalling (even by his standards)
Invincible.
Having said all that, the hits compilation still possesses the quality of being immensely charming and enjoyable, for the most part.
Billie Jean is a classic from the generally acceptable
Thriller album. Now, I haven't listened to this album is approximately five or six years, and I can still remember every note of that classy little tune. Obviously, even by this stage Jackson had lost all semblance of credibility.
Off the wall still grew from the Motown, boogie disco sound patented by the
Jackson 5, who also remain strangely fun after all this time. By the monolithic
Thriller, Jacko had for the most part lost musical credibility and traded it in for massive success instead. But compared to the facile treatment of race issues by
Black & White, he had even his fiercest detractors longing for the overblown dance routines of
Thriller.
Black & White still possesses a certain childish charm about it especially since it was probably my favourite song at its time. But that's about all it has left.
The way you make me feel, despite being from the commercially overblown
Bad was also not too bad. But two of the best cuts from this best of collection are unsurprisingly from
Off the Wall.
Rock with you is a gentle little disco influenced track that chunters along pleasantly, followed by the aching balladry of
She's out of my life. Impressively, Jackson sounds genuinely torn, his voice even breaking slightly at the very last breath of the song. Now, how many pop artists would let a breaking vocal chord settle onto disc forever, instead of editing it out?
Off the Wall shows the boy had potential, but his apparent psychological instability set him out on a course that would sink him in public opinion and talent -
Bad may be fun, but
Off the Wall was actually good.
Who's bad? Well, the irony of that question wouldn't hit home for years, and I still prefer Weird Al's
Fat. The album carries on with the heaps of successes from
Bad, including the mildly boring ballad
I just can't stop loving you in duet with Siedah Garrett.
Man in the mirror was always a personal favourite of mine, and still it holds a certain charm and Jacko undeniably has a nice little trembly vocal delivery. The synth washes and clumsy 80's effects mean that it hasn't aged terribly well, but then again none of it has. However, you can almost forgive the overblown explosion of
Thriller, probably the one song most worth owning over the entire double disc. Admittedly, it's even more fun with the whole video, but still always fun when it comes on the stereo. And that final evil laughter is fantastic – Vincent Price being an inspired casting choice.
A couple more cuts follow from
Thriller including the silly attitude of
Beat it and its bouncy improbable aggression, and a lovely little duo with Paul McCartney,
The girl is mine, back when they were still friends before Jacko bought the rights to all Beatles songs ever. That man knows how to antagonise and alienate people, that's for sure. And I don't know about you girls, but if I were you I'd go for Paul McCartney. He may be getting on, but he seems to be holding together better than Jacko, who has bits falling off at the moment.
Remember the time always puzzled me at the time, I was never quite sure why exactly it was a hit single, but there it is, basking in its mediocre glory.
Don't stop 'til you get enough is another superb track from
Off the wall. It actually has more attitude and a better pop hook than anything he released subsequently, and it's still intensely enjoyable to hear over and over. In fact, in many ways, it could be the only track on this best of album with real replay potential, whereas if I didn't hear the rest of this album for another six years it wouldn't bother me in the slightest.
Wanna be starting something is the opener from
Thriller and is almost as good, even though it started the journey towards trading in the real instrumentation for synths and other such nonsense. Still, it has a good strong pop hook, and is easy to sing along to. With the album closing on the nauseating preachy prattle of
Heal the world, it becomes increasingly clear that Jacko lost his way musically a very long time ago. I may have loved every song on this album for years, looking back on it, I see a handful of good songs, invariably from the first two albums, and a whole load of overblown messing about.
So in comes the new album coupled with the best of collection on the
History double disc. By now Jacko was a pop changeling, hooking up to whichever style was in. The new album attempts to blend the surge in grunge and rock in the early 90's, with an increasing popular side to rap and R&B gaining huge followings worldwide. Obviously, it doesn't do it very well, and it utterly denies any of Jacko's actual musical roots, which themselves were quite good. Instead, becoming less and less black by the second, he conversely decided to embrace the most popular tenets of popular black music by working rap interludes into most of his songs. Most annoyingly I found. It was like he was saying, 'look, look, another musical style that is alien from everything I came from and which I cannot pull off at all'. Just like his obsession with guitars coming through
Dangerous, even though what he thought sounded like metal just sounded like tinny processed garbled accelerated pop.
It was an astute attempt at redirecting pop music, and one that is still head and shoulders over the hordes of boy bands that proliferated in the late 90's, and which in no small degree has influenced the posturing of people like Britney, Robbie Williams and whoever else you care to mention with more than a token amount of success.
Scream in fact works for the most part, taking beats and R&B vocal overlaying, and occasionally working in bursts of bass and guitar soloing. The result was a undeniably pleasing if lightweight song that combined rock R&B and made a hybrid pop that the masses lapped up unflinchingly.
They don't care about us is likewise, a surprisingly pleasing drum machine rhythm combined with Jacko's apparently incensed list of all of humanities injustices to each other. It's certainly better than the turgid pop of
Heal the world, and in many ways this album sees Jacko fixing a lot of the clumsy fiddling of
Dangerous. Slash on guitar adds a lot of punch to the finale. Even a song like
Earth song is a lot better than it sounds like it should be, and for all of the lecturing, Jacko pulls it off on this occasion. Of course, it's wildly melodramatic, but nevertheless strange affecting, even though the listing does tend to drag itself out a little too much. But just like in those closing moments of
She's out of my life, it seems Jacko really means it. Of course, the format is power ballad in its extreme, but still strangely good.
The rest of the album isn't quite as successful, oftentimes dividing down the middle instead of blending. Stepping back for a moment,
Stranger in Moscow is just this, a pop R&B song that takes absolutely ages to go anywhere and certainly doesn't take you there interestingly.
This time is an upbeat R&B inspired track, with just a hint of boogie in the guitars. But again, it's all to little avail since the melody is so instantly forgettable.
D.S. goes the whole other way, with blasts of electric guitar as Jacko has a go at someone called Dom Sheldon.
Money is just another song, with a slightly different sound to the previous song, but not enough to spark much interest.
Come Together obviously stands out as a
Beatles original, and in spite of its arrangement still manages to be enjoyable.
You are not alone sees Jacko turning his hand back towards turgid pop crooning. What Jacko often doesn't seem to realise is that he actually has a great deal of talent when he's not writing to formulas. The exact reason why
They don't care about us is far and away the best song on the album is that it isn't at all what you expect, and you don't know where the song is taking you next.
You are not alone could be a song by
Westlife for all the melodic interest and originality it carries. Booooring.
Childhood (Theme from "Free Willy 2") is exactly as bad as it sounds, and quite possibly worse than
You are not alone.
Tabloid junkie jumps you awake after the last two snore-fests, but you quickly turn off again when you realise it's all just a remake of
D.S. and
Money. All of Jacko's righteous rage would be easier to deal with if he didn't have quite as much money and didn't regularly break records for expenses of music videos.
2 Bad is presumably intended as some kind of sequel to
Bad, and is possibly marginally more interesting than the blockbusting hit. The title track, pompously overstated as it is with its orchestral intro and unbelievably conceited title
History, follows up cutting through a series of important sounding radio broadcasts. It's actually quite originally structured, but the intersections between verses are actually far more interesting than the verses themselves, and the less said about the chorus the better.
The album is fortunately coming to an end by now, via
Little Susie and
Smile. The former has a long choir and orchestra opening, with a longwinded bit of child singing chasing it up. Eventually Jacko gets back on our shoulders about child suffering, and as laudable as his caring passion is, you do get the feeling he's preaching to the converted. Musically it's pretty close to turgid, and definitely melodrama without direction, unlike a oddly affecting crashing peak of
Earth song.
Smile has yet another orchestral opening as Jacko either imagines the album a classical piece or the musical score to his own personal movie. The song itself is a tribute to Chaplin and is taken from the stage version of the same song. It opens promisingly, capturing the spirit of the original, but Jacko once again manages to predict the
Westlife capacity to murder any good melody. By the end, it's dreadful.
Well, over my two day trip back into Wacko Jacko land, I can't say I'll be replaying this CD very much more in the next six years. As much as I may have adored it upon release, it hasn't aged well, and I've certainly grown out of it. That's not to say I don't occasionally see it's value. There's no question that the cuts from
Off the Wall and
Thriller are really quite good, and every so often another song surfaces that is actually extremely effective, like the anger of
They don't care about us. Most annoyingly, Jacko has (or perhaps had) talent, but so often subjects it to styles that
are not his. And his lyrical twist for anti-social angstiness rarely works, and became an overbearing obsession from
Dangerous onwards. Ultimately, I defer to the fact that
Thriller is still the most sold album ever. Obviously there's something in it.
With many many thanks to the wonderful
Lambchops for conceiving and hosting another great W/O. Why not indulge in the nasty secrets of other Epinions members? The full list of participants is below, including the rules and such like at Lamchops' member page.
http://www.epinions.com/user-lambchops Participating writers:
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