This is the thread where you explain to me the "genius" of Michael Jackson

But it's unfair to just talk releases.. Jackson was king from 1983-1985, as far as live shows and videos.

My theory is that Janet Jackson consulted some major voodoo masters (which may or may not have involved Jam & Lewis) and sucked everything magical from Michael Jackson and subsequently released Control in 1986, and the new reigning Jackson was born.

Michael's Bad would follow and do well, but everyone would notice something "different" about Michael. Somehow though, Michael would at least squeeze out one last bit of goodness in the single "Black or White" off 1991's Dangerous then all bets are off after that.

Alas, the voodoo would wear out not too long into the 90s in all of the Jacksons' cases.

I also have that Number Ones DVD, and it's quite magical until the "Bad" video. Even then, it's tolerable. But I had to puke once the "Dirty Diana" video came on. Dear fucking lord. Jackson should not "rock". "Black or White" is cheesy, yet I'm still charmed by the ending of the video with the "Happy Happy Lookee Here Digital Face Morphing Ain't Technlogy Great For The Children?" moment.

He has no real identity, presence, or point of view in his material

anyone who hasn't noticed that a good deal of his material is in fact deeply paranoid and fucked up ("Heartbreak Hotel," "Billie Jean," "Beat It," "Wanna Be Startin' Something," "Leave Me Alone," for starters), and that it was so long before any of the National Enquirer-baiting shit started, isn't paying a bit of attention.

Even his career arc (this latest sordid cycle notwithstanding) seems to be borrowed from (or at least modelled on) a far superior and far more rewarding musician, Stevie Wonder.

could you actually explain this? because I'm not getting it at all.

Perhaps I'm a little biased -- you couldn't grow up lower middle-class and attend mostly-black schools in the '80s without worshiping the guy. He just NAILED urban euphoria for kids.

oh I'm just referring to the child prodigy --> goin solo Motown blueprint. A minor point, but Jacko's transition from the Jackson 5 to super-mega-solo star is sometimes treated as some kind of special, personality-shattering event and achievement.

Also, I find the paranoia Matos mentions to be there, yes, but its often presented in a belabored, silly, or light way. so it's impact is kinda lost... altho I can see someone making an argument for the genius of cloaking paranoia/bitterness in pretty pop tunes, but he just doesn't seem to pull it off, to me. The bitterness/paranoia subtext is just too submerged (at least early on. Post-Bad it's painfully obvious, and that doesn't work either).

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You know, I think he's got it.

oh I'm just referring to the child prodigy --> goin solo Motown blueprint. A minor point, but Jacko's transition from the Jackson 5 to super-mega-solo star is sometimes treated as some kind of special, personality-shattering event and achievement.

I don't see where anyone does that. I think the thing people notice there is MJ becoming THE MOST SUCCESSFUL HUMAN BEING IN THE HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC rather than his trajectory being a major thing in itself.

..also, obvious point, but while Quincy Jones and Rod Templeton's contributions were crucial to the success of those records, Jackson's delivery (as Matos explained very well) and his songwriting (yes, he did do some songwriting) were more crucial.

This is a very Momusian sentiment (seriously, he's said as much about MJ elsewhere.)

The genius of Michael Jackson in a small scope and a single anecdote:

"The Girl is Mine" is released as a single, I'm all, "Well this is nice and all, yeah, I guess." (I am 11 and vaguely know of the Beatles mostly through Lennon being killed and the Stevie Wonder collaboration Paul had done earlier in 1982.)

And then a couple of months later I hear the opening notes of "Billie Jean" for the first time and it's this sinuous dark minimal thing that might as well have invented microhouse for all I know and there's this echoed whisper that suddenly stabs into the mix and it's a long cold winter in February 1983 in upstate New York and goddamn it's great. And that's just the start of the song. Fine, you want to say, "Oh that's all Quincy Jones," be my guest, but that's not him being named by the local station DJs, is it? The only other person with a pop profile that *maybe* could have done something like that musically then *might* have been Gary Numan but he was a one-hit wonder in the States and already starting to shift into cheese hell for the mid-eighties. And much I love Gary, who is probably one of the most distinct and shockingly good singers I've ever heard for reasons that have nothing to do with general standards of 'good' singing, ain't NO way he was going to sound that crisp, that perfect, that sly, that gaspingly purringly sweetly dramatically demonically great as Michael Jackson did on that song.

Oh, would you stop, you dirty motherfucker! :-)

or Prince, actually, since 1999 mines a very similar vein musically. (incidentally, the Revolution used to rehearse "Cars"!)

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that's supposed to be "bad song," obv. (not Bad song, either, har har)

he opens "off the wall" with cackling witches and "she's out of my life" (wherein he considers suicide) with extreme-unction keyboards; "heartbreak hotel" has him stumbling into his personal purgatory amid crashing windows and violent grunts from his big brothers; "beat it," "torture," "dirty diana"," and "give in to Me" use scary effects and death-ray grunge from the planet's most famous guitarists to meld hard rock and r&b into a gothic kind of horror music--"beat it" opens with eddie van halen sounding like he's banging some pre-christendom mortuary bell, seven times. and "thriller," full of creaky doors and baying wolves and footsteps down the hall, is apocalyptic alien-night-creature music in the tradition of "supernature" by cerrone. it warns that anybody who refuses "the funk of 40.000 years" will rot in eternity.

"no real identity, presence, or point of view"? nothing "emotionally engaging"? sorry, but i beg to differ.

ultimate example within the realm we're in of the interpreter/songwriter thing: Marvin Gaye, whose best work was entirely done in collaboration.

Ner-ner-ner-ner..."OW-AH!"

Okay, no one but no one will ever believe this, but the implicaitons of that didn't even sink in!

I was just thinking about the singles and that song and realizing, "You know, that sucker is a (pardon me, Chuck, I'm borrowing a term I saw you use first) frost-pop classic in excelsis." It's like an ice castle with lights through prisms and this warm heart/voice that cascades down in the chorus.

Sadly though, that strategy of "just keep the machine rollin'" didn't work out for James eventually.. then again, James wasn't on the highest throne either.

Granted, the touring and the "Thriller" video were part of it, too. But Jackson, I think, had either a contractual agreement to do another Jacksons album, or was heavily persuaded to take part in it.. part of which probably made the guy quite mad. He did end up on Victory, albeit through a tossed off collab with Mich Jagger called "State Of Shock" (which I don't mind as much as almost every other living human does.. haha). Also, he was persuaded to sing backups for Berry Gordy's son Rockwell on "Somebody's Watching Me" because Jermaine was about to marry Rockwell's sister, or something like that.

(It almost kinda parallel's Brian Wilson's going mad during the Smile sessions... as far as phenomena goes...)

That's because you think that the pinnacle of Western civilization was Mick's TV appearances for "Let's Work." OH DON'T LIE.

"YEEEEEEEES AHM LUCKY, YYEEEESSS AHM LUCKEEEEEEEEEEH!!"

I don't know how you can say he didn't affect hip-hop either, he's been sampled all over the place. The only thing coming to mind is Nas with Human Nature, but can anyone else chip in with more?

Marvin Gaye, whose best work was entirely done in collaboration.

Matos, didn't MG do Sexual Healing (the song) all by himself?

Also: Captain Eo

Carry on...

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well said, though Gaye did basically that in 1970-72. And I suppose PE kinda did that as well ...

but Michael definitely integrated white-fright classic-rock ethos into black music, no question.

MJ + Teddy Riley = HOLY SHIT, especially the acapella-plus-drums (which, technically, is not acapella, but fuck it) breakdown in the video mix. It's a damn shame that he's been phoning it in ever since.

But, that said, I get chills when I hear "Stop (the Love you Save)," "ABC," or "I Want you Back." His young self was amazingly, amazingly talented, and much as he creeps me out to this day hearing the Jackson 5 pleases me more than most things. I'm with Jordan.

The Jackson 5 stuff is amazing, yes, but I haven't studied up on it as much, so I can't say what Michael brought to it other than total, unhinged exuberance.

Well, if we're going to conveniently ignore the entire oeuvre of The Jackson 5 and the Jackons too, then fine..

But I think one minor reason Off The Wall and especially Thriller propel Jackson is because more copies of those two albums were sold than each of the best albums of P-Funk, Stevie Wonder, Madonna, Beefheart, Elvis Costello, Kraftwerk, and The Smiths combined.

You may have not been one of those people who bought Thriller, but about one out of every three people around you at least 26 or older at least had a copy or a cassette copy of Thriller I'm guessing.. so he definitely touched a lot people as genius. *shrug*

How many records do you have to sell to count as a genius? Is it five million? Ten?

But album sales =/ critical mileage

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TO martin m: the post-Thriller MJ versus the post-Smile Brian wilson comparison was just a thought that entered my head.. there's certainly a lot of differences.. and certainly differences in the results, in higher detail.

But here we had two people regarded in the mainstream press as musical geniuses basically being torn apart due to extreme pressure for "the next product of genius", very high level of fame, and --most of all -- family pressure. I mentioned the siblings issues with MJ above. The Beach Boys themselves were almost all family anyway, enough to include Mike Love as a family member, even if he's not by blood. Anyway, I think that pressure eventually made both Jackson and Wilson cave in... It was this parallel that brought to mind the original analogy in the first place. It's hardly a great analogy.

Well, MJ's an anomaly in the sense that time has been a bitch -- a horrible, extreme bitch -- to the perception of MJ, mostly his fault mind you. But a lot of the ILX demographic contains folks who were around and well into music when Jackson was at his peak.. and as Matos, Chris O., and many others in this thread already mentioned, there wasn't any pop star/artists since Presley or the Beatles that had such majesty. It doesn't matter how much input or, more importantly, what the input MJ contributed to his career was. It also doesn't really matter whether that majesty has dated well or not... that's a subjective issue, anyway. The guy sold buckets loads of records, and will never be forgotten. The perception youth in the early 80s had about Jackson is that of perceived genius. That's my intepretation of the word in the context of MJ's phenomenon, at least. And as argued above, there were a lot of things MJ had in him that showcased a lot of talent.. not usually areas accepted in the "critical ILX canon" (which is far more of a melting pot of opinions than anyone gives the forum credit for.)

Now, it's worth mentioning that I listened to the bonus interviews on the Off The Wall and Thriller reissues, and Quincy Jones admitted at the very last seconds of the Thriller CD reissue that he and the team had been completely dumbfounded with the success of Thriller. This wasn't a case where Dr. Dre could just say "Yeah, my next album will sell a lot" and be right. Thriller was a gamble, just like most pop records at the time.
So, did the people who made Thriller know it was going to sell a gazillion copies? No. Did they know it was going to sell a decent amount of copies? Yes.

Same argument could be made about Prince and Purple Rain. Who in his/her right mind, as a record label exec at WB, would give a relatively successful pop/R&B star crossover a deal to produce both an album and a fully produced movie that tied to the album in every possible crevice? That was an EXTREME gamble compared to Thriller actually, but that paid off as well (even though Thriller sales still dwarf Purple Rain sales, though not incredibly). Prince, though, has an easier time with "the critical canon" so to speak, because he projected himself as a total independent/control freak who was a multi-talented musician and could prove it... which scores really high for the authenticity counters over at all the rock publications, who would give the same praise to Costello, The Smiths, Beefheart, etc.

(though it's funny how you snuck in Madonna in the list above, as she's more in MJ's league than the others, although Madonna has proven to be a smart business woman, much to her advantage... albeit one whose desperation to remain relevant and "young" is growing every year.)

nope. David Ritz, his eventual biographer, wrote the lyrics (a fact Ritz consistently trumpets in his author bios).

A lot of people are idiots.

Wow. So would I. Marvin played most of the instruments though, right? Wrong?

Off the Wall's singing is tres brill, yes. After that, it seemed to me like stylized, processed yelps with the occasional high flying legato that reminded you of the old days.

I could be wrong, but I just can't get up the energy to listen again to the Humber Humber of Pop.

How many people today remember The Boswell Sisters or Rudy Vallee? (If I ran the world they would be required listening.) MJ in a couple of generations will be remembered the way that people today remember Bill Tilden or Fatty Arbuckle. I'm not a Michael hater; that just seems like history's lesson to me: King of Infamy > King of Pop.

And Green because his voice, at is best, is as good as a human voice gets.

how much of what ? the dancing ? i wouldn't swear on it but i'd say, non e is quincy jones ! and seriously, on that quincy jones thing, as much as he's done, i find it kinda unfair to say all that's great about "thriller" and "off the wall" is all his... it's like saying georges martin made it all (i won't deny he made a lot). and after all, he also made "bad", then (not georges martin, though).

In response to the main question:

Don't Stop Till You Get Enough
Rock With You
Wanna Be Starting Something
Billie Jean
Beat It
Thriller
Bad
Smooth Criminal
The Way You Make Me Feel
Black and White
Jam
In the Closet
Scream
Unbreakable

and others are enormously compelling pop songs rhythmically, aided and abetted by Mad Jacko's rhythmic instincts expressed by his funk singing, of which he is as good as anyone has ever lived. His genius is abundant in the grooves of his funk songs, and many of his best songs are almost all groove. His weaknesses only matter when his shit gets mawkish, and I think he's generally lost his touch on ballads olver the last decade and a half.

Having said that, I don't blame anyone for not caring.

The Torme citation was partially snarky, in the sense that I got the flustering sense that people were claiming that Jackson just came out of nowhere with this new, unique brilliance, but like anyone else, he cobbled things together and was part of several aesthetic lineages.

Aside from his pedophelia issues, my prob with Jackson is the emptiness at the core of his pop comfits. Aside from the escalating persecution issues, and an interesting but underdeveloped alienation, there just isn't much there there. It's like pure sheen. Which is fine, but my interest wanders without something more chewy.

For evidence of Michael's "genius" I'd point to the 1983 Motown TV special -- easily the equivalent of Beatles on Ed Sullivan or Elvis 68 comeback speacial or Madonna on American Bandstand 84 -- and the full-length version of the 5's "Dancing Machine."

And the rest, as they say, is history.

I don't think MJ was truly the "king of pop" but he was definitely a singular showman -- a quality we tend to praise in obituaries of old-time vaudevillians but ignore in contemporary figures.

The theme/drama thing can come from all sorts of angles. Prince has you both uneasy and shifting back and forth in your sympathies as he battles between secular and decidedly non-secular topics. (Now that God has won in a traditional way, all you can really do is marval at how tight this version of the NPG is.) Johnny Cash singing "Folsum Prison Blues" is terrific; singing "Hurt" right before he dies is epic. (And shows how a 'bad' lyric suddenly becomes good uttered from the right mouth.)

In every phase of his career, Bowie has dealt with his terror of going mad. (I think his brother was in an asylum.) The 'chameleon' routine can be seen as both a method of dealing with and a symptom of this obsession. The devoted fan shares in the drama.

The theme can be extra musical. People love Judy Garland bcause of the ongoing demon fighting, the slips, the returns to grace.

In his music, MJ is 'just' an entertainer--the only drama is psychological forensics, a sad freakshow thing. The 'Thriller' video has been the subject of a zillion dissertations for good reason: it hints at as many pathologies as one can imagine, but ultimately, seems to admit to none in particular.

I'm not making a bogus rockist assertation regarding the need for 'depth' and 'authenticity' in popular artists. You can find themes, conflict, narrative in all sorts of great entertainers/artsist/whatever-you-wanna-call-em.