Michael Jackson singles that didn't chart or break the Top 10 (in the US)

Stranger In Moscow by a freakin mile.

great poll idea.

dunno what's more of a surprise; Earth Song not going Top 10 in the States or it going to number 1 in the UK.

"Stranger In Moscow" is totally beautiful and is reworked from the music MJ composed for Sonic the Hedgehog 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55rtX4wCJPM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEEMi2j6lYE

"Earth Song" wasn't even released as a single in the US!

"Liberian Girl" has boring music the most utterly ridiculous music video ft. cameos by Beverly Johnson, Paula Abdul, Whoopi Goldberg, Brigitte Nielsen, Rosanna Arquette, John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Corey Feldman, Steven Spielberg, Debbie Gibson, Weird Al, Suzanne Somers, Steve Guttenberg, Dan Aykroyd, and a ton more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3V-7DEAgdc

Basically the video is a shit ton of famous ppl hanging around a film set waiting for Michael Jackson to show up so they can start shooting the "Liberian Girl" video

i love how some celebs are clearly talking without realising they're being filmed (Quincy Jones for one) and some are faking being unaware the camera is on them in cheesy fashion. ton of celebs talking over the top of the track probs didn't help its Top 10 chances any.

Live performances of "Earth Song" are v fun bcz he would constantly stand under fans and then during the "WHAT ABOUT US!?" call and response part he'd get on this platfrom that was LIFTED OVER THE FUCKING AUDIENCE with a crane, with a fan blowing on him the whole time, so grand, so strange

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq1HFfK6xJs

also the sad dirty looking children and then the tank that comes out at the end and the soldier with the machine gun who starts sobbing when a child hands him a flower

also sometimes ppl would get rly excited and join him

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0zhCB_3klc

Only one of these songs featured in Captain EO and that song is "(You're Just) Another Part Of Me":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flGvyXNM_EU

Oh man, "Stranger in Moscow" tears my intestines asunder.

'will you be there' was pretty huge that summer so not sure why it not being very lasting or whatever (???) somehow disqualifies it

also 'liberian girl' wasn't released as a single in the us

I really like late-period stuff like "Earth Song" and "Will You Be There" that is so fucking overproduced and laughably grandiose. "Will You Be There" has a 3 key changes! That's crazy! That song is in 4 different keys!!

yeah Earth Song really is doolally. UK mob really went for it because of the BRITS incident i.. guess.

I'm incl songs that weren't released as singles in the US and I'm incl "WYBT" bcz I rly like it

gotta love how Travolta is in down-on-his-luck mode so MJ throws him a bone by letting him appear in his video.. singing to Olivia Newton John.

wow at that Sonic connection. But yes this is "Stranger" by a mile

there are also parts of "Jam" in the Carnival Night Zone music

what's interesting about 'will you be there' is there had been this desperation surrounding dangerous, it not only wasn't another thriller it wasn't even another bad. 'jam' doesn't go top ten (which is kinda surprising to realize) and then 'who is it' sorta weirdly flops (i saw weirdly cuz it's a pretty great single, i'd probably have it third after easy #1 'remember the time' and 'give in to me'), 'heal the world' flops worse, they do another big promotional push for the album (well over a year after its release) and he does a primetime interview w/ oprah and premieres the video for 'give in to me' and then it isn't a huge hit and it looks like the cycle is over and then this fluke hit happens via the free willy soundtrack. go figure. that same summer swv 'right here' was the song of the summer so mj was kinda resurgent but then that august or so what was already a bad situation got much much worse.

voting 'earth song' which i used to just find ridiculous but now find kinda amazing and ridiculous (tom's writeup for popular recommended) but also love 'who is it', 'give in to me', 'jam', 'stranger in moscow', 'they don't care about us', and 'blood on the dance floor'. 'blood on the dance floor' truly flopping (and not just 'flopping' by michael jackson standards like alot of the dangerous singles) was pretty sad, that's when it was over.

Stranger in Moscow live is just otherworldly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6FxRFh9KFs

I had no idea that "Leave Me Alone" wasn't released as a single in the US (and Canada) -- the video was everywhere in '89.

oh yeah, I didn't either, that was huge

voting 'earth song' which i used to just find ridiculous but now find kinda amazing and ridiculous

this is me altho i'm torn between actually voting "Earth Song" and "Stranger in Moscow"

"Jam" was like the hardest song in the world that didn't have guitars to me when i was 10, so that

At an Xmas party recently someone put on earth song & the response slowly went from "this is so awesome :-D" to "shouldn't this have finished by now?" It goes on FOREVER

'Stranger In Moscow' by a mile, as pisces said.

"One Day In Your Life"? Topped the charts in the UK (his first to do so, albeit belatedly) but missed the US top 40.

Including "Will You Be There" under your technicality is weird, Stevie.

Voted for "Who Is It" over "Jam," "Stranger in Moscow," and "Leave Me Alone" w/out hesitation.

voting for "who is it" -- total jam and kind of moving.

honestly love a lot of these though, and glad to see "stranger in moscow" rightly being praised.

Surprised a bit at how many of these missed top 10, seems reminiscent of Princes 90s trend. Not as if MJ flooded the market with material at the time. Stranger In Moscow probably the last tune I cared for

hm I guess didn't realize "Will You Be There" was as big as it was (I was 5 when it came out)
I also didn't realize how many people have heard "Stranger in Moscow"! I don't think I've met anyone whose known what it was when I brought it up.

"Stranger" was a top 5 single in the UK which explains it from our end

"who is it" even though i also really want to vote for "blood on the dance floor" and "stranger in moscow"

"Stranger In Moscow" is totally beautiful and is reworked from the music MJ composed for Sonic the Hedgehog 3

this is my favorite sentence i've ever read on ilm

I have a soft spot for "Another Part of Me" (even if the recitation of the title musically falls flat after an amazing build-up), so it's this vs. "Liberian Girl", which is just lovely throughout.

re: balls' thoughts on Dangerous; that's really interesting. I've never been a fan of the album (it's wayyyyy too long, for starters) and think that his last great album was Bad, but I thought I was nearly alone in that regard. The singles from Dangerous don't seem to have had much of a shelf-life, at least over here in the UK; at least I haven't heard them, whereas I hear stuff from Bad all the time. What are the sales on Dangerous? As far as I can remember, it sold more than Bad...

To digress, why do you think the public didn't get with it in the same fashion as the singles from earlier albums? Burn-out?

Dangerous >>>>>> Bad

To digress, why do you think the public didn't get with it in the same fashion as the singles from earlier albums? Burn-out?

by early '93 the stories about MJ and children started to become commonplace, and the allegations/revelations supported the notion that "This is yet another example of how this guy is a weirdo, so we'll use 'Nirvana changed everything' as an excuse to withhold radio play."

btw in America Bad's singles were more successful than Thriller: five consecutive #1's.

Hadn't the album been out for about 18 months by then, though? I wasn't cognizant of the world at the time though, so if Jackson's weirdness had started to become off-putting by the beginning of the 1990s, then I wouldn't know.

Dangerous >>>>>> Bad

having listened to both back to back recently, i disagree!

came out of that experience with bad as my favorite mj album somehow

Yeah, Bad was a big hit in the singles department for sure.

Why do you prefer Dangerous btw? I think it's a real step down from Bad in many ways. It's wayyy too long, Jackson fell to the lure of the CD running time like so many other artists in the early 90s. That album should *not* have had a running time of 75+ minutes, a good number of the songs could have been trimmed down with little loss.

xxpost

"heal the world" and "gone too soon" are even soggier in experience than in memory

"who is it" is literally the best mj song so i'm sympathetic to alfred's view regardless

Rhythmically and vocally the Dangerous tracks are the most volatile of his career. I've said Rhythm Nation sounds like Jam-Lewis had been listening to industrial; Dangerous is actually closer to Consolidated or KMFDM. Of course it's way too long -- most expensive albums in the early nineties were.

otm, Bad *is* MJ's best album, though the "trilogy" of Off the Wall, Thriller and it are all extremely close in quality.

xxpost

iirc Earth Song was Jackson's biggest hit in the UK. I think its success predated the Brits incident by some distance (it was released around Christmas and the Brits are usually in February). The video must have cost millions so i wonder if there was a particular reason it wasn't released in the US.

I mean: "Jam," "Why You Wanna Trip On Me," "In the Closet," "She Drives Me Wild," "Remember the Time," "Can't Let Her Get Away"? An incredible sequence.

whereas "Bad" and "The Way You Make Me Feel," "Another Part of Me"? Rote. "Man in the Mirror" sounds better to my ears now than it did in '88.

those are good songs, (I especially enjoy the first three and "Remember the Time" but I dunno... it's not a BAD album by any means, but it's not my favourite.

Bad was my first MJ album that I've heard, so that's probably why it clinches it...

wtf is "Ghosts?"

A 30 minute horror short film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW9JYCK0GxI

This is the normal-sized video. This song is really good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh9Cp4rd7mI

"speed demon" kinda gums up the momentum of bad but i love those synth bass runs

"ghosts" and the other song in that short film, "is it scary," both rule. "is it scary" is jam/lewis incidentally. all of the jam/lewis history-era songs are awesome ime

This would be a good idea for a compilation. But "Leave Me Alone" would have to be added and "Will You Be There" taken off, if it was a U.S. comp. Otherwise, voted "Who Is It" over "Moscow". But some of these, looking back now, are pretty good.

Basically Toto playing on Moscow:

A background guitar was played by Steve Lukather while keyboards, synthesizers and bass are credited to David Paich and Steve Porcaro.

Dangerous had some amazing singles. Bad is a dull album (Smooth Criminal excepted)

c'mon "Leave Me Alone" was for all intents and purposes a single insofar as it had a popular video and got and still gets tons of airplay.

toto + mj was generally surprisingly good. "human nature" <3

Yeah when I was 8 if you asked me my favorite Michael Jackson song I probably would've said "Leave Me Alone." And I think my main exposure to popular music at that time was Friday Night Videos.

"Stranger In Moscow" is the 2nd best song here after "Another Part of Me."

Moonwalker movie *in full* here. saw this in an actual cinema, week of release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrBybkWZNG4

'leave me alone' was a cd bonus cut at a time when alot of ppl (esp young ppl) weren't in the cd market yet so alot of ppl only heard it for the first time when the video came out.

I love that sonic 3 version of stranger in moscow.

Remember when the KLF said in the manual that Jackson was great with a groove but didn't have that many killer choruses? "Earth Song", man. Fuck, it's huge. Voted for it, even though I hated it at the time.

(Re: "Moscow"'s Sonic instrumental, it's widely believed Jackson wrote it, but I think what the nerds think these days is that Jackson left production of the soundtrack fairly early and one of his collaborators - Brad Buxer - composed those chords or used them from something he'd earlier written, and then Jackson wrote the melody and lyrics on top of it. And did very well, thank you very much.)

there's a fairly recent video on some gaming website that goes into the whole mj/sonic thing in some depth

Very tough choice between 'Another Part of Me' and 'Stranger in Moscow.'

. . . .hmmmm. . . .

'Stranger in Moscow'

xp it's this one but it doesn't have any snips of MJ songs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFgnUa1v8uA

ah yes thank you for finding it :)

wow, not sure I've heard Stranger in Moscow before, really nice. Also (and I know it's been a part of other MJ songs), but loving the percussion sampled from his voice

KLF certainly wrong about "Who Is It" and "Remember the Time."

the manual came out before dangerous! they're still wrong though i am wondering now what's the closest mj came to an abbaesque classic pop chorus - 'beat it' maybe? talking solo, w/ the group stuff there's plenty of candidates (can totally picture frida and agnetha belting out the chorus to 'blame it on the boogie' and would not be shocked if at some point they did actually belt out the chorus to 'the love you save').

gonna be a landslide for Stranger In Moscow right?

played stranger in moscow not recognising the title & realized it was a song i haven't heard for like ~18 years, one of the tunes I loved when I was first getting into music via MJ. earth song is an ultra-classic bit of MJ transcendence w/ it's massive slow bassline, something appealing about grabbing a tree & stomping the world to rights, but i've heard it too much. cuz of when i got into him i've always loved his later records. i love smooth MJ where he just pours his voice over the song but mb even more i love intensely furious MJ when he sounds like he's going to explode, i'll never accept any shit-talking about bad or w/e, that lean punchy synth bass goodness is his definitive sound for me. voting for messianic anger of they don't care about us

they don't care about us > stranger in moscow > liberian girl > blood on the dance floor > another pwart of me

another pwart of me :)

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Kind of want to vote "Will You Be There" because its such a brilliantly ridiculous cheeseball, but like some others here, I'm not really crazy about its inclusion when "didn't chart of break the Top 10" is the established parameters. It's kind of "Jam" vs. "Who Is It" vs. "Give It To Me" for me otherwise; this run of non-charting Dangerous singles is far superior to the non-charters Bad.

*from Bad.

fwiw I actually owned Moonwalker on vhs and watched the shit out of it

same here

i saw Captain EO at Disney World, i think that's peak '80s

i think i saw captain eo at disneyland in like 94

as big a mj fan as i was at the time i think my evaluation of the experience at the time was "hm no"

yeah it was not good iirc

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

i am happy w/ these results

The problem with "Captain EO," which was back when I visited in early '12, is it includes "We Are Here to Change the World."

i am happy w/ these results

This is great, thank you ILX

happy to see a decent showing for "Jam," that's always been a favorite of mine

Pretty sure my first musical performance was doing vibraphones on "Will You Be There" at a middle school recital. We also did the "Jurassic Park" theme.

LOL @ the Liberian Girl video. Really cool to have Weird Al be the only one performing music in it! He sounds good!