Remember the POLL: The Michael Jackson "Dangerous" Poll

Dangerous

brodie

Jam is a great opener, but...

Bad is better IMO

I'd like this one a lot better had they made it only 50 minutes long instead of like 150

Can't Let Her Get Away is damn funky.

A pretty great album but, yeah, maybe 3 or 4 songs too many.

So... how many singles were released from this?

Definitely prefer it to Bad on the whole.

"In the Closet" and "Remember The Time" both among his best singles ever, but I'm voting the paranoid title track.

"Who Is It" is MASSIVE.

It's a tribute to something or other that this and Rhythm Nation 1814 are to my ears as industrial and mechanized as anything released by Meat Beat Manifesto at the time.

guess I'll have to give it another listen. IMO this is an album that is probably worse than the sum of its parts. If you comine this and HIStory and add in that track "Supafly Sister", then cut all the filler, that's an insanely good album

who is it is INCREDIBLE

also despite it being in some (many) ways awful i actually liked heal the world a lot

Great first half and good singles, drags a bit overall though. Like the production.

I tend to forget how sexy the Slash-anchored "Give In To Me" is.

The duds: "She Drives Me Wild," "Keep the Faith," "Heal The World," "Gone Too Soon."

sorry i take that back, Heal The World is a BAD single

I don't think I've heard this in its entirety. Think I'll check it out.

would probably pick Remember The Time or Why You Wanna Trip On Me overall

"She Drives Me Wild" is great and only 3 minutes.

"In The Closet" is one of my favorite songs ever, so that one. That beat! dry, toxic; & Jacko's hushed intimacy, so small next to it, hiding behind it.

Production of Who Is It? is pretty epic -- bass intro at like 0:25 is jarring and slow build of (synth?) strings over the next half a minute is super cool.

MJ's gulps are at their most syncopated on "Who Is It."

btw I voted "Will You Be There?" just because it's weirdly epic and catchy in a way that most of the other tracks aren't.

would probably have voted "Black or White" if they hadn't left on that dumb Macaulay Culkin part in the beginning, it makes no sense w/o the video

Serious Q: at 1:48 or 1:49 on 'In The Closet' there's a weird backing vocal, or something, and it sound exactly like MJ is saying "Jeremy." When I was a kid I, always thought that I was crazy for hearing this. But I just listened to it and I can still hear it. Can anybody else?

I once heard just the vocals isolated from the music when a friend was working on a remix of "remember the time" and it was kind of startling. Forgot how great a singer MJ was.

Serious Q: at 1:48 or 1:49 on 'In The Closet' there's a weird backing vocal, or something, and it sound exactly like MJ is saying "Jeremy." When I was a kid I, always thought that I was crazy for hearing this. But I just listened to it and I can still hear it. Can anybody else?

He says "Dare Me."

If we do this for HIStory, it's "Stranger in Moscow" by a landslide isn't it?

Can't imagine any votes for any other songs but the first three.

the video for "Stranger in Moscow" is especially poignant after his death

Man, I'd forgotten about "Stranger in Moscow." It's gorgeous.

maybe "Earth Song"? but yeah, that is one hell of a frontloaded album. i think most people just turn it off after the first six or so songs. how many songs can you name on the second half without looking?

Earth Song sucks BALLS. but yeah it's major major filler filled especially in the second half with fucking Childhood and Smile

^^^ not the right metaphor here

bad is totally better than this record.

Gross!

Both Bad and Dangerous are undervalued.

Most of Bad sounds pneumatic to me.

yeah Bad doesn't stand up to Thriller but it's still pretty good! the biggest crime against it is the production which is very "late 80's"

while Dangerous is really the first MJ album that's straight up boring in spots. I mean it's "Jam", "Black and White", "Will You Be There?", and a bunch of songs that sound like "Jam"

a good thing, I assure you.

But, seriously, "Who Is It" does not sound like "Jam." "Can't Let Her Get Away" doesn't sound like "Jam" – it's faster.

"Give In To Me" does not sound like "Jam." A far superior "Dirty Diana," yes.

1. "Give In To Me"
2. "Who Is It"

like I said I'll have to give it another listen, I just think Bad switched it up more and had stronger songwriting overall. a lot of New Jack Swing sounds the same to me.

had they condensed Dangerous to 40 minutes though, no doubt it would be the better album

Primetime new jack >>> Post-peak QJ

But there's still some great moments on Bad. You do not fuck with "The Way You Make Me Feel," "I Just Can't Stop Loving You," "Smooth Criminal" and "Man in the Mirror."

... album's strangely backloaded.

I always liked "Speed Demon", mainly because it always reminded me of the Sega Genesis.

That whole MJ/Sonic 3 thing is pretty damn interesting

epic storm of "give in to me" vs tense tautness of "in the closet"

WHO IS IT?!?

Missed this, but I probably wouldn't have voted anyway because I cannot pick a favourite. Two thirds of this album is superb, and the recording/mixing/general production is squeaky clean.

and no votes for "Black or White!"

listening to this today and it's still not better than bad but boy is "black or white" twenty times more incredible than it already is as it blasts out of "heal the world."

also i apparently have the version of this record where "black or white" is (rightly) the single edit

Dangerous feels much less dated than Bad to me. Also I can't stand Bad these days.

it's a shame Jam got no votes, but other than that GOOD WORK ILM

wtf is with a 4 day poll, give it at least a week! i feel terrible that my lack of knowledge of this thread resulted in a goose egg for "Jam."

featuring rap by HEAVY D

"Who is It" definitely deserved to come in second, no matter how many people participated. Song's got layers.

yea that song's hot.

IS IT A FRIEND OF MI-INEEEEEEEEEEEEE?

Just wondering if anyone thinks Bad is a better record than Dangerous. Because I wasn't sure.

poll

xp The intro skit on "Black or White" is the WORST

the sad part about having this version of the record is that it also cuts the intro to "will you be there"

I figured five days was long enough for an album as popular as Dangerous. I've started week and ten-day long polls which got less responses.

oh i know, i just wasn't online as much this week and was bummed i missed this. still think a week minimum should be standard though.

yeah really shocked at the 0 votes for "Jam". thought "Black or White" would at least get one too.

KEEP IT IN THE CLOSET

Popmatters publishes an admirable attempt to rescue Dangerous from Nirvana.

That article just reconfirms why I prefer Nevermind to Dangerous - it's simply more consistent. Right, all that death of pop stuff was/is baloney. But the author fails to convince that the momentum-killing ballads are worth anyone's time. In fact, he barely mentions them and certainly doesn't submit them to the same detailed analysis as the rhythm monsters. The first six cuts are my vote for MJ's finest ever moment so I particularly despise "Heal the World" for stopping the train.

Then again, Eric Weisbard wrote a provocative blurb in that year's Pazz disdaining "inhumanely consistent" product like Nevermind. I'm paraphrasing from fuzzy memory but basically, he claimed that Garth Brooks' Ropin' the Wind and Dangerous were better models for democracy because they contained genuinely godawful songs.

And yeah, best track here is "Jam."

The first six cuts are my vote for MJ's finest ever moment so I particularly despise "Heal the World" for stopping the train.

This, this time a billion. Fortunately we are able to DELETE the duds and be left with a wall of top treats.

This album is really good!! "Jam", "Keep The Faith", "Black or White", "Will You Be There", etc

the 33 1/3 on this is so far pretty good and very very mad

thread also sort of revived to talk about how massive "in the closet" is

'Why You Wanna Trip On Me'... great backing vocals.

http://www.vice.com/read/meet-the-guy-who-did-the-rap-on-michael-jacksons-black-or-white-213

wow!

I'm no music expert, but I can't think of an earlier example of a huge pop star having a rapper come into their song for a guest verse about two-thirds of the way through the track (something that has become pretty ubiquitous today, on everything from Rihanna's "Umbrella" to Justin Bieber's "Beauty and a Beat"). I asked Bottrell if he had been the first person to do this, and he said, though he had never really thought about it before, he couldn't think of a song where someone had done this before him.

hmmmm

Chris Molanphy pointed out on Twitter that "Black or White" wasn't even the first #1 hit with a guest rap. (That was "She Ain't Worth It," by Glenn Medeiros ft. Bobby Brown.)

Listening to this over the weekend, it struck me how much of an influence this album had over the following two decades. Justin Timberlake's Jacko worship hasn't gone underreported but it wasn't Thriller and Bad he was listening to growing up, it was this.

Does anyone else think "Will you be there" borrows a lot from "Lions after slumber" Scritti, at the end?

I'm reading the 33 1/3 book. pretty interesting (if not totally convincing on all theories and lectures).
I never really liked this album although I was a huge fanboy of MJ as a kid (circa Thriller mostly).
The book made me want to go back to it. I still don't find it great (production and songwriting are not on par with his best stuff to me) but I like it more.
Especially "Who is it" which I have rediscovered and which is maybe my favourite from the album now.
Also, I have tried to take it as a double album (no reorganization, album 1 simply ending with "Heal the World" and album 2 starting with "Black or White" - minus the horrible intro).
It makes a more digest album with 7 tracks on each disc, the 1 being the harder part and the 2 being the soulful part.

"Who Is It?" is fantastic, also my favorite song on the album.

^^^

And it doesn't seem to matter
And it doesn't seem right
'Cause the will has brought
No fortune
Still I cry alone at night
Don't you judge of my composure
'Cause I'm lying to myself
And the reason why she left me
Did she find someone else ?

I have finished the 33 1/3 book. good and original point of view and analysis.
It made me reevaluate the album.
after listening to it a lot lately I still find it far from OTW/Thriller but overall, it's stronger than I remembered.
I might like it more than Bad now : no real dud (compared to "Speed Demon", "Dirty Diana", "Bad" and "Can't Stop Loving You" for instance, "Gone too Soon" being the closest) and some good songs I didn't really like previously ("Who is It" being the main rediscovery, as said before).
Also, "Jam" is alright but a bit weak as an opener. A bit later, "Scream" was a better remake. They share the same approach and energy but the former has a better chorus.

I'll give you "Speed Demon" but IMO the only sin committed by those other songs off of Bad is that they are in close proximity to "The Way You Make Me Feel" and "Smooth Criminal", which are two of my favorite songs that MJ ever recorded.

Well I have always found "Bad" very average. Not awful but the production/sound is kinda cheap (which is a shame since it is one of the strongest aspects of OTW/Thriller. Just the sound of these albums gives me joy !).
"Can't Stop Loving You" also is not awful but meh.
"Dirty Diana" is annoying in the delivery and arrangements and not a very good song to begin with ("Give in To Me" is a better remake).
I have made a version of Bad without these tracks and it's much better !

The only thing I like about "Bad" is that it reminds me of Stevie Wonder's "Ordinary Pain" (the last part of the song) !

the synth bass runs in "speed demon" >>>>>>

there is literally nothing better on this album than Jacko screaming "remember...my BABYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY"

“Jam” is such an odd, hookless song. I’m still surprised that it was the lead-off single

"Black or White" was the first single.

Which was an even stranger move, but less strange than "The Girl is Mine" and "I Just Can't Stop Loving You" as leadoffs

remember how pissed off parents were at the extended "Black or White" video?

I remember how pissed off I was.

“Cut. What the fuck was that?”

-John Landis

lol....mom was yelling at the tv "HOW CAN FOX SHOW THIS WHEN KIDS ARE WATCHING? HE KEEPS GRABBING HIS CROTCH AND THRUSTING!"

to be fair.....it was pretty fucking weird

yeah esp since the song had already ended