Michael Jackson album reviews from The New York Times

Off The Wall :

Michael Jackson album reviews from The New York Times

“Off The Wall” is Michael Jackson’s first solo album since the Jackson family signed with Epic several years ago, and it marks his ultimate transition from child star to adult singing idol. The album teams Mr. Jackson with producer Quincy Jones, the brilliant jazz and pop arranger-conductor-composer.

“Off The Wall’s” dance music is not merely kenetic but aurally exciting, with layered inner voices and scintillating percussion. The album’s first hit single, “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough,” is a masterful, all-out disco extravaganza. The dance cuts set off two shimmering ballads, “She’s Out Of My Life” and “I Can’t Help It”, the latter co-written by Stevie Wonder. Although at this point in his career, Michael Jackson may lack Mr. Wonder’s emotional depth, he’s already the equal of both Mr. Wonder and Smokey Robinson, the other obvious Motown prototype, in technical control. His high tenor voice is extraordinarily lovely, while in his ballad phrasing he is not afraid to take big dramatic risks, most of which work. “Off The Wall” is a true state-of-the-art pop-soul record, as well as an auspicious collaboration between two protean pop talents.

Stephen Holden

1979

Thriller :

Michael Jackson album reviews from The New York Times

Since he caught the public’s fancy as a bouncing, spinning, piping, 11-year-old mini-superstar in 1970, Michael Jackson has been a fullfledged celebrity, living a celebrity’s life. That’s worth remembering, because it means that today, one must guard against the assumption that he is a mature, fully formed artist and human being. He is certainly a seasoned veteran: His whole life has been shaped by entertainment, and he is a practiced – sometimes too practiced – performer, recording star and film actor. But he remains a young man, and with luck he will continue to mature.

One begins a review of Mr. Jackson’s new LP, ”Thriller” (Epic QE 38112), with this curious cautionary note because it is certainly possible to point out flaws in Mr. Jackson’s seeming perfection. Yes, he sometimes allows Quincy Jones to depersonalize his individuality with his superbly crafted yet slightly anonymous production. Worse, he sometimes hides his emotionality behind smoothly indistinctive pop songs and formulaic arrangements, defenses so suavely perfect that they suggest layers of impenetrable, gauzy veils.

But these are quibbles. ”Thriller” is a wonderful pop record, the latest statement by one of the great singers in popular music today. But it is more than that. It is as hopeful a sign as we have had yet that the destructive barriers that spring up regularly between white and black music – and between whites and blacks – in this culture may be breached once again. Most important of all, it is another signpost on the road to Michael Jackson’s own artistic fulfillment.

Even though the family group from which he emerged, formerly the Jackson Five and presently the Jacksons, still shows signs of some sort of life, Mr. Jackson has long since established himself on his own. As an actor, he accomplished that with a charming performance in the film version of ”The Wiz.” On records, his big breakthrough as a solo artist came with his last LP, ”Off the Wall,” in 1979. It stayed high on the charts for nine months, spun off several topselling singles and sold millions of records and cassettes.

There were solid reasons for such success. Chief among them is Mr. Jackson’s ethereal tenor. His deployment of that voice, which he mixes subtly with all manner of falsetto effects, is the greatest example of this sort of erotic keening since the heyday of Smokey Robinson. Ever since the craze for the castrato in the 17th century, high male voices, with their paradoxical blend of asexuality and sensuousness, ecstasy and pain, have been the most prized of all vocal types, and Mr. Jackson epitomizes such singing for our time better than anyone, in any musical genre.

A second reason for his success is his personality. One may legitmately wonder how Mr. Jackson, locked inside a celebrity’s cage since childhood, could possibly understand the everday dilemmas of life. But most such dilemmas are universal, and artistic empathy is hardly the prerogative of poor folksingers. Mr. Jackson seems, on the basis of his interviews, to have a genuinely childlike and emotionally open attitude toward life. Sometimes his fame seems to insulate him, but it also elevates him to fantasy status for his fans.

A third source of his success lies in his creative relationship with Mr. Jones, his producer. Quincy Jones’s work seems curiously variable. As a hyperactive record producer, he can slip into formulas inappropriate for the artist at hand, as in his efforts on Donna Summer’s last album. But with Mr. Jackson, his refined synthesis of the latest trends in soul, funk, rock and pop works very supportively.

It is that synthesis that offers a broader cultural hope. Black music lurks at the heart of nearly all American pop, but it is an old, old story that blacks tend to be slighted by white audiences, a few established older superstars partly excepted. Black performers’ mass success waxes and wanes, and in recent years it has been waning. The dangers of isolation -more particularly, of whites being cut off from the roots of what they perceive as their own music – have only been reinforced by radio, with its ”demographic” playlists that reinforce a musically insensitive and morally indefensible segregration.

Mr. Jackson’s appeal is so wide, however, that white publications and radig stations that normally avoid ”black music” seem willing to pretend he isn’t black after all. On one level, that’s admirable, in that color distinctions are often best avoided altogether. But Mr. Jackson is black, and while he sings a duet here with Paul McCartney, enlists Eddie Van Halen for a guitar solo and observes no color exclusivity in his choice of backup musicians, he still works honorably within the context of contemporary black popular music at its fervent, eclectic best. If this album is anywhere near as successful as ”Off the Wall,” it may remind white audiences of what they are missing elsewhere.

”Thriller” follows the same rough pattern of ”Off the Wall” in its predominantly brisk first side and a second side with a greater preponderance of ballads. There is no one show-stopping lament here on the order of ”She’s Out of My Life,” from ”Off the Wall.” But there is a subtler mixture of fast and slow – fast songs with caressing vocals, medium-tempo songs and slow songs with a catchy undercurrent – and one or two songs in which Mr. Jackson can deploy the full sensuality of his singing.

Perhaps the most striking of those songs is called ”Human Nature,” which occupies the same spot on the disk – third song on the second side -that was alotted to ”She’s Out of My Life.” This is a haunting, brooding ballad by Steve Porcaro and John Bettis with an irresistible chorus, and it should be an enormous hit.

But there are other hits here, too, lots of them. Best of all, with a pervasive confidence infusing the album as a whole, ”Thriller” suggests that Mr. Jackson’s evolution as an artist is far from finished. He is, after all, only 24 years old.

John Rockwell

1982

Bad :

Michael Jackson album reviews from The New York Times

From Elvis Presley to Michael Jackson: In the space of a month, the two most enigmatic icons of modern American pop have spawned back-to-back media frenzies that have an eerie symmetry.

Early August saw the further deification of Elvis Presley on the 10th anniversary of his death. The man who brought aggressive sexuality to the center of popular music was remembered as an unofficial American monarch, our one and only show-business ”King,” who died of his own earthly excesses. No sooner had his commemoration ended than the drums started beating for the reappearance of Michael Jackson, the delicate, androgynous man-child whose mystique revolves around a transcendence of the body. If Elvis Presley was modern pop’s symbolic king, Michael Jackson is surely its symbolic ”savior,” an ascetic angel-sprite to whom Elizabeth Taylor, E. T. and Jesus seem to represent equally divine ideals.

”Bad,” Mr. Jackson’s first album in nearly five years, arrived in record stores on the same day that CBS broadcast a half-hour prime-time promotional special, ”Michael Jackson – The Magic Returns,” featuring the Martin Scorsese-directed music video of the title song. In this 20-minute mini-movie, the first of the album’s several music videos, the star imperiously rebuffs the glorification of outlaw behavior by black inner-city youth. Filmed mostly in black and white, with gritty streetwise dialogue by Richard Price and direction by Mr. Scorsese that reprises the mood of ”Mean Streets,” this video is heavily tinged with the star’s disturbing mixture of messianic pretension, rampant paranoia and narcissism.

In it Mr. Jackson portrays a refined prep-school student returning on a vacation from New England to his New York ghetto neighborhood. Arriving at his tenement home, he finds his old teen-age buddies lounging on the building’s front steps. After they challenge him to prove that he is still ”bad,” he agrees to participate in a subway robbery. But at the very last minute, he foils the assault on an old man and turns on the gang, shouting rhetorical questions about good and evil and the meaning of the word ”bad.”

During the harangue, the black-and-white film turns to color, and the deserted subway station becomes the set for a rainbow-hued, singing-and-dancing extravaganza in which Mr. Jackson triumphantly struts his loose-limbed prowess as a theatrical rock hoofer. Then, in a final tense moment, we’re back in black-and-white hell, as Mr. Jackson faces the gang leader eye to eye. Will they fight? No, it turns out. They solemnly shake hands. Good has triumphed over bad.

While this mini-movie is a technically much-improved variation of ”Beat It,” the landmark music video from his 1982 megahit album ”Thriller,” in which Mr. Jackson’s spiritual powers and kinetic energy transform a gang war into a dance, Mr. Jackson’s demeanor in ”Bad” is disquietingly, sadly bizarre. Even the song has a masochistic undertone, as the singer implores, ”If you don’t like what I’m sayin’/ Then won’t you slap my face?”

The dark side of Mr. Jackson’s Peter Pan image is a self-flagellating, sullenly martyred outsider. In the years since ”Thriller,” the star has surgically altered his appearance to produce this image. He has added an odd little cleft to his chin and made his lips thinner, desensualizing his features and blurring his racial heritage. In the ”Bad” video, his skin has taken on an unnaturally ashen hue, and his heavy eye makeup and designer outfit of studded black leather present jarringly mixed messages. Capping the confusion is Mr. Jackson’s speaking voice, which even at its most forceful sounds like a wounded whimper.

Amid all the hoopla surrounding the new album, the big question being asked by the music industry is whether the record can possibly exceed the popularity of ”Thriller,” the best-selling record in history, with sales of 20 million copies in America and 38 million worldwide. By all accounts, Mr. Jackson is more obsessed than anyone with topping his own world record and dreams of selling 100 million copies of ”Bad.”

But unless Mr. Jackson’s freakish new image proves irresistibly fascinating, ”Bad” seems unlikely to match, or even approach, the sales performance of ”Thriller.” One of the most innovative pop albums of modern times, ”Thriller” summed up a moment in American pop cultural history when music videos were young and the science-fiction and horror movie cycles that inspired his videos hadn’t run out of steam.

”Thriller” was a pop-music answer to movie myths like ”E. T.” and the ”Star Wars” trilogy, offering romance and chills to kids of all ages. The songs on ”Bad” break no new ground either stylistically or in their subject matter. The record lacks anything as snazzily audacious as ”Billie Jean.” The new album’s attempt to duplicate ”Billie Jean” is a sourly misogynistic diatribe, ”Dirty Diana,” directed at a predatory groupie who entraps the passive-aggressive narrator. And the song’s reiteration of the word ”dirty” to describe the vixen has a snidely priggish ring.

On the positive side, the album sounds like the $2 million it cost to make. Quincy Jones’s richly dimensional production helps to turn songs with fragmentary, undistinguished lyrics into miniature soundtracks. And Mr. Jackson’s ballads, ”I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” and ”Liberian Girl,” are gorgeously sung and recorded reveries. On the uptempo songs, the gasping choked-up intensity of Mr. Jackson’s acrobatic vocals, which leap, skid and pirouette with a dynamism that matches his dancing, infuses even the most banal lyrics with a charge of high Hollywood drama.

Having crafted a disturbing, otherworldly image that is more memorable than the peace-and-love pieties he dispenses, Mr. Jackson is gambling that in today’s pop climate, a performer’s personal iconographic power can give his nursery-rhyme sentiments the resonance of Scripture. But what Mr. Jackson conveys through his image is pretty forbidding, since the distinctions of sex, age and race – three of the principal obsessions of pop music – are all obliterated.

Posing as a benign, alien star-child stranded somewhere between Disneyland and the astral home of ”E. T.,” he seems to want to demonstrate that spiritual salvation can only be attained by willfully evading reality and remaining a child. What a profoundly pessimistic message! For his self-transformation into a cartoonlike character of his own invention represents a rejection of the very humanity he has sought to help and enlighten through songs like ”We Are the World” and ”Bad.”

What we are left with is a staggeringly talented, terror-struck symbol of our collective longing for an occult solution to human suffering. As Elvis Presley’s role of ”king” eclipsed his vitality as an entertainer, Michael Jackson has already begun to disappear into his role of pop’s surrogate savior. If we think good thoughts and wish upon the stars hard enough, he would lead us to believe, maybe an extraterrestrial playmate will arrive in time to save us.

Stephen Holden

1987

Dangerous :

Michael Jackson album reviews from The New York Times

Of all the bizarre apparitions in current popular music, none is stranger than Michael Jackson singing ordinary love songs on his first album since 1987, “Dangerous” (Epic 45400; all three formats). He can barely choke them out. He gets across a word or two, just a syllable sometimes, before he gulps for breath; when he tries again, his voice quivers with anxiety or drops to a desperate whisper, hissing through clenched teeth. While he gasps out those broken phrases, machine-made music pounds and crackles around him, at times nearly drowning him out. The sampled sounds are unyielding, the beat relentless, claustrophobic. Give him a treacly sentiment about brotherhood or self-esteem, and his voice turns smooth and sure on a posh cushion of supportive music. But the love songs sound like they’re being extracted under torture.

Twisted as it seems, “Dangerous” only reinforces Jackson’s place as the most paradoxical superstar in pop history. After making the best-selling album to date, “Thriller” (1982), he works to secure vast popularity, with his face promoted around the world, while he guards a reclusive privacy. He is a great dancer, yet his songs proclaim a terror of the body and of fleshly pleasures; the title track of “Dangerous” is only his latest song about a predatory lover: “I felt taken by lust’s strange inhumanity,” he recites.

Jackson recognizes his freakishness with artifacts like the 1989 video clip for “Leave Me Alone” (which mockingly acknowledged all the tabloid articles about him) and the cover for “Dangerous,” an illustration that hides all but his eyes and surrounds him with pictures of his chimp, Bubbles, in a crown, P. T. Barnum and Tom Thumb. The original extended video clip for “Black or White” showed him screaming, smashing up a car, grabbing his crotch and dancing for four wordless minutes, a spectacle so peculiar that it was almost immediately edited out. Yet more than ever, Jackson’s lyrics aim to talk about the desires of the widest, tritest majority; they seem based on demographic research rather than experience or imagination.

“Dangerous” pushes Jackson’s paradoxes to the breaking point; it is his least confident album since he became a solo superstar. He may well be the richest and most financially secure of pop performers, with a new contract that reportedly guarantees him $50 million in advances for his next six albums. (At his current rate of one album every four years, that will carry him until the year 2015.) The deal reflects the popularity of “Thriller,” which has sold 21 million copies in the United States and a reported 27 million more worldwide since 1982; its 1987 successor, “Bad,” sold 6 million copies in the United States and a reported 19 million more worldwide, a comedown but hardly a failure, although figures outside the United States cannot be verified.

Yet unparalleled commercial success has made Jackson, if anything, less venturesome. Nine years ago, he had the broadest appeal in pop; now, he sounds so eager to reclaim his popularity that he has ruled out taking chances. He does his duty; the album is 77 minutes long (exactly the length of a CD) including an uncredited minute of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as the introduction to “Will You Be There.”

But in most songs on “Dangerous,” the sentiments are dogmatically ordinary, rejecting even the marginal oddity of previous Jackson hits like “Smooth Criminal” or “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” Titles like “Remember the Time,” “She Drives Me Wild” and “Give in to Me” tell the lyrics’ whole story — though they don’t suggest the wretched tone he has when he sings them. “Will You Be There” hints at a confession: “Seems that the world’s got a role for me/ I’m so confused,” Jackson sings. But while the song is a pop-gospel hymn, its closing narration, delivered in a tearful, sobbing voice, seems to conflate God and the audience: “In my deepest despair/ Will you still care?” he asks, and concludes, sniffling, “I’ll never let you part/ For you’re always in my heart.” Elsewhere, Jackson doesn’t make personal statements; he commissions them. “Why You Wanna Trip on Me,” a song Jackson didn’t write, complains that with “more problems than we’ll ever need” — world hunger, AIDS, homelessness, drugs, etc. — there are better things to worry about than the singer being “different.” (The songwriters don’t understand that Jackson is considered a diversion, not a problem.)

Jackson’s music, which outstripped trends on “Thriller” and sidestepped them on “Bad,” now tries to keep up with what’s current. His most prominent collaborator on “Dangerous” is Teddy Riley, the architect of new jack swing, which attaches lover-boy crooning to the choppy, electronic beat of hip-hop. Because Jackson’s albums appear so sporadically, each one has faced a different commercial era. “Off the Wall” (1979), his first blockbuster solo album, was an apotheosis and farewell to disco; “Thriller” rode the rock-funk merger promoted by MTV; “Bad” tried to come to terms with highly synthesized dance-pop. “Dangerous” lags behind; most of the songs that don’t echo “Bad” and “Thriller” might be follow-ups to “The Future,” Riley’s album with his own group, Guy.

The first half of “Dangerous” unveils the new jack Jackson. The singer performs in a sonic machine world: synthetic basslines, swooshing scratched records, clanking metallic noises, drum-machine percussion like computerized artificial respiration. In verses, Jackson faces the mechanical beat alone, with his inhalations and yelps as added percussion; when the choruses come, his own harmonizing, overdubbed voices add a layer of soothing humanity. Now and then, a rapper adds a few words.

Jackson often sounds nervous amid the arid electronic cross-rhythms. In “Jam,” a declaration of confidence that “I found peace within myself” and “It ain’t too much for me to jam,” he moans his words ahead of the beat, adding to the song’s rhythmic tension yet completely undermining his message. “Can’t Let Her Get Away,” with its James Brown syncopations, has more melodic cushioning from keyboards; this time, Jackson’s pained voice comes closer to matching the song’s masochism: “Just say it and I’ll do.” “She Drives Me Wild” builds a rhythm track from sirens, motor noises and car horns, but has Jackson stooping to quoting commercials (“She’s got the look/ You wanna know better”) to convey lust at first sight.

One way or another, desire gets thwarted in most of Jackson’s new songs. “Who Is It,” an imitation of “Billie Jean,” has him sighing “I am the damned/ I am the dead/ I am the agony inside the dying head” over a woman who left him; “Give in to Me,” the kind of power ballad regularly dispensed by bands like Poison, tells a recalcitrant woman, “Don’t try to understand me/ Just simply do the things I say,” though it doesn’t seem to get the singer anywhere.

Where “Bad” offered “Man in the Mirror,” “Dangerous” has its own banal, uplifting anthems: a sticky-sweet ballad called “Heal the World” (“There are people dying/ If you care enough for the living/ Make a better place/ For you and for me”) and a secular-humanist gospel tune called “Keep the Faith” (“All you need is the will to want it and uhh, little self-esteem”). “Black or White” uses a denatured but still invigorating Rolling Stones guitar riff to carry a song that concludes “It don’t matter if you’re black or white.” Along the way, Jackson allows himself a little fashionable rancor: “Don’t tell me you agree with me/ When I saw you kicking dirt in my eye.”

But the oddest, and best, song on the album is “In the Closet.” Only Jackson would use that title for a heterosexual love song that opens by saying, “Don’t hide our love/ Woman to man.” It’s one of the new jack tunes, with an electronic beat built from doors shutting, popping fake drums, blips, heavy breathing and a loop of five scat-sung syllables; the chorus melody circles but never resolves.

Once again, Jackson faces a temptress, embodied by a girlish voice saying things like “If it’s aching, you have to rub it.” Not only does she want to seduce him, she wants to “open the door,” while he insists (contrary to his introduction) that they “keep it in the closet.” The singer is torn, wanting “to give it to you” but holding back; his final whispered words are “Dare me,” followed by the sound of a door — shutting, or being thrown open.

It’s the kind of song that made Jackson a megastar as the age of AIDS began, all about desire and denial, risk and repression, solitude and connection, privacy and revelation. Those are the tensions that Jackson masks with pop conventionality for too much of the rest of the album. But his voice won’t let him get away with it, and rightly so. It’s not Jackson’s pop skill alone that draws listeners in, but the weirdness that peeks out behind it. The problem with “Dangerous” isn’t that Jackson is “different”; it’s that “Dangerous” keeps too much of his weirdness in the closet.

Jon Pareles

1991

History :

Michael Jackson album reviews from The New York Times

Michael Jackson is back, and he’s furious. On his new double album, “HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I,” his rage keeps ripping through the sweet, uplifting facade he has clung to throughout his career.

He’s not pretending to be normal any more. In his new songs, he is paranoid and cagey, messianic and petty, vindictive and maudlin. Comparing himself to John F. Kennedy and Jesus Christ, he’s a megalomaniac who feels like a victim. Yet he remains one of the most gifted musicians alive. And somehow, with the strange synchronicity of pop culture’s longtime survivors, his private distress may have put him back in touch with a public mood: there are a lot of aggrieved, belligerent people who feel just as victimized as he does.

It has been a long time since Michael Jackson was simply a performer. He’s the main asset of his own corporation, which is a profitable subsidiary of Sony. Sony executives have said that they hope to sell 20 million copies of “HIStory,” which retails for $32.98 for the CDs ($23.98 for the cassettes). They’re going to spend $30 million to do it.

Half of “HIStory,” titled “HIStory Begins,” is a sure thing, a collection of greatest hits from three of the best-selling albums of all time — “Thriller” (1982, 46 million sold worldwide), “Bad” (1987, 22 million) and “Dangerous” (1991, 23 million) — and from their predecessor “Off the Wall” (1979, 11 million). The other half, “HIStory Continues,” is a collection of meticulous, sumptuous, musically ingenious new songs, nearly all written by Jackson himself. But it’s also the sound of bridges burning.

In the first of the new songs, “Scream,” Jackson jeopardizes his commercial safety zone, the G-rated kiddie audience, by using profanity. In the second, “They Don’t Care About Us,” he gives the lie to his entire catalogue of brotherhood anthems with a burst of anti-Semitism: “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/ Kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me.” While he does manage to calm down for an occasional ballad or love song, he can’t stop lashing out at tormentors named and unnamed, chief among them the news media that he could no longer manipulate.

“Stop pressurin’ me,” Jackson yelps in “Scream,” adding, “Tired of you tellin’ the story your way.” In “This Time Around,” he mutters, “They thought they really had control of me.” In “D.S.,” he accuses somebody named Dom Sheldon (though he pronounces it like “Tom Stephan”) of being tied to the C.I.A. and the Ku Klux Klan. And in “Money,” he whispers, “You’ll do anything for money.” With his paranoia, his anti-Semitic lyrics and his endless supply of uniforms, Jackson may be ready to join a militia.

Over the last two years, Jackson became a media sensation for all the wrong reasons. Things had been going well; “Dangerous” was an international hit, and Jackson had signed a new deal with Sony worth at least $50 million. When he billed himself as the King of Pop, no one contested the title. He garnered sympathy, and high Nielsen ratings, for an interview with Oprah Winfrey in which he suggested that he had been abused by his father and announced that his pink skin tone was the result of a discoloring disease, vitiligo.

Then, in September 1993, A California boy accused him of child molestation. Jackson cut short a world tour and disappeared, stating he was undergoing treatment for addiction to painkillers. Eventually, he returned to California and in a teary televised statement announced that he had “submitted to a dehumanizing and humiliating examination” and had been photographed naked by police investigators reportedly searching for telltale genital features. But there was no trial. Jackson settled the boy’s civil suit for reportedly more than $10 million, and without the boy’s testimony a criminal suit was dropped.

A new tabloid frenzy ensued when Jackson married Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s daughter, last fall. At the same time, Jackson was working on a few new songs to add to a greatest-hits collection, but they multiplied; the new songs now fill “HIStory Continues,” which might better be called “Case History.”

From its packaging to its songs, “HIStory” is a psychobiographer’s playground. Everything is on a gargantuan scale. On May 22, MTV began showing a “trailer,” presumably for the videos and hype to come. The trailer shows Jackson leading what looks like the Red Army down a broad boulevard, while workers ready the tombstone-white statue that appears on the CD cover: Jackson, with his fists clenched, in one of his paramilitary uniforms with a “police” insignia on one arm.

Then come noise and darkness. Black helicopters out of a far-right nightmare swoop over the city, shooting out lampposts. Children scream. The shrouded statue is raised, dwarfing the monumental buildings around it. A child shouts, “We love you, Michael!” as a commando team removes the shrouds. A helicopter flies out between the statue’s legs. (Hello, Dr. Freud?)

The CD booklet insists that Jackson is popular, beloved, important, good. It includes endorsements from Stephen Spielberg and from Elizabeth Taylor, and it lists every award that he has ever won. He’s photographed with Presidents from Carter to Clinton and, of course, surrounded by adoring children.

The booklet also includes a baby picture of Jackson with his genitalia revealed — celebrity child porn? — and an illustration he drew to go with a new ballad, “Childhood.” The drawing is of a boy huddled in a corner with a microphone, looking scared. A child’s letter to President Clinton asks him to end war and pollution and to “stop reporters from bothering Michael Jackson,” clearly a matter of equal importance.

It adds up to a fine-tuned contradiction: Jackson the megastar, the world leader by association, is also Jackson the powerless, suffering child. With all the photographs and testimonials, the booklet has no room to print the most hostile lyrics.

But they’re the core of the album. Fearfulness used to be part of Jackson’s appeal; the vulnerability of his singing voice and his shy offstage demeanor somehow balanced his mastery of music, dance and hype. He was immeasurably famous, but he was obviously paying a price for it; he was a freak who needed sympathy. Fear carries his most memorable songs, particularly those that made “Thriller” the best-selling album of all time. The hits half of “HIStory” starts with “Billie Jean,” in which the singer says he’s falsely accused of paternity (though the child’s eyes look like his). But most of it shows Jackson’s smooth side, singing about love and proselytizing for tolerance and healing.

On “HIStory Continues,” fear has turned to aggression. The music has polarized; it’s either clipped, choppy and electronic or glossy and sumptuous, only occasionally trying to combine the two. Most of the time, Jackson sounds as if he’s singing through clenched teeth, spitting out words in defiance of any and all persecutors.

In the song called “HIStory,” over a collage of vintage radio broadcasts (including the fall of the Berlin wall and the opening of Disneyland), Jackson tries to put a brave face on things. Harsh, clipped whispers spit out an individual’s travails, a rising march asks, “How many children have to die?” and then a gospel chorus and children’s voices preach, “Let’s harmonize all around the world.” But the song seems more obsessed with dying soldiers and “victims slaughtered in vain across the land” than with hope. The other social-conscience selection, “Earth Song,” is a complaint to God about problems that range from war to endangered whales.

Most often, Jackson is on the defensive, and he has decided the best defense is a two-pronged counterattack. On the “Dangerous” album, he whined, “Why you wanna trip on me?” Now, he snarls accusations of his own. First, there’s the Watergate defense: it’s not him, it’s the news media that are out to get him. In “Tabloid Junkie,” he comes close to rapping: “Speculate to break the one you hate/ Circulate the lie you confiscate.” He sings, “With your pen you torture me/ You’d crucify the Lord,” and then, with harmony vocals akin to “Billie Jean,” he tries to put across a catchy message: “Just because you read it in a magazine/ Or see it on a TV screen/ Don’t make it factual.”

The other defense shows up in “Childhood,” and it’s what might be called a Menendez brothers strategy: no matter what he did, he had an awful childhood that led him to it. Over tinkling keyboards and strings that could be sweeping across a Cinemascope panorama, he croons, “No one understands me.” He adds, “They view it as such strange eccentricities, ’cause I keep kidding around.” He invokes “the painful youth I’ve had,” begs, “Try hard to love me” and, with a breaking voice, asks, “Have you seen my childhood?”

Jackson usually keeps his animosity general. The two-faced, money-grubbing people who besiege him stay unspecified — “Somebody’s out to get me” — and he insists he’ll tough it out: “I’m standin’ though you’re kickin’ me.” For listeners, those songs could rally any number of individual gripes. But Jackson reveals a more distorted personal perspective in “They Don’t Care About Us.” When he’s not slinging the word kike, he calls himself “a victim of police brutality” and a “victim of hate” and insists that “if Roosevelt was livin’, he wouldn’t let this be,” later substituting “Martin Luther” (King, presumbly) for Roosevelt. A listener might wonder just who “us” is supposed to be.

To make the songs lodge in the ear, Jackson uses elementary singsong melodies — a “nyah, nyah” two-note motif in “They Don’t Care About Us,” a military-like chant in “2 Bad” — and he comes up with all kinds of surprises in the arrangements. He’s not above the obvious. “Scream,” written with Janet Jackson and her producers, simply picks up the sound of Janet’s “Rhythm Nation,” and elsewhere on the album there are obligatory guest raps (from the Notorious B.I.G. and Shaquille O’Neal). But where Jackson used to sound treacly during his uptempo songs, he has now pared down the music. Choruses are sweeter than verses, but just enough to set them apart, and the rhythm tracks kick and twitch with brilliant syncopation. The ballads are lavishly melodic. “Stranger in Moscow,” with odd lyrics like “Stalin’s tomb won’t let me be,” has a gorgeous chorus for the repeated question “How does it feel?”

In the new material, there’s only one conventional love song, “You Are Not Alone,” written not by Jackson but by the songwriter and producer R. Kelly. It resembles Mariah Carey’s “Hero” and sounds like a surefire hit. But along with “They Don’t Care About Us,” the creepiest new songs are the album’s lushest ballads: “Childhood,” “Little Susie” and a remake of “Smile,” which was a hit for Nat (King) Cole. The ballads deploy sweeping, larger-than-life strings behind Jackson’s most tender voice. “Little Susie” uses a tinkling, music-box waltz (something like “Sunrise, Sunset” from “Fiddler on the Roof”) to tell the story of a murdered child, as Jackson details “the blood in her hair,” in a deliberately gruesome lullaby.

He closes the album with “Smile” (“though your heart is aching”) a dramatic tour de force. Over quivering strings and a nonchalant piano, Jackson sounds like he’s barely holding back tears. His voice trembles, breaks, pulls itself together and heads for another emotional brink. It ends with an indrawn breath, a sob on the verge of a crying jag.

The song, and the album, are the testimony of a musician whose self-pity now equals his talent. Jackson seems intent on making the whole world feel sorry for him. But the album’s ultimate popularity will depend on a different factor: whether people who feel sorry for themselves will hear the album as a superstar’s tantrum or as a voice for their own bitter resentment.

Jon Pareles

1995

Invincible :

Michael Jackson album reviews from The New York Times

Which kind of weirdo is more unsavory: the one who rants about the way the world is out to get him, or the one who won’t stop trying to cozy up to women and children? That’s the choice offered by Michael Jackson’s ”Invincible,” his first full-length album since he attached a disc of new material to his 1995 greatest-hits collection, ”HIStory.”

Between albums, pop has given him a cruel tribute. The teenypop that was once his domain has been revitalized and taken over by acts like ‘N Sync, who owe him nearly everything. Along with the other boy bands, not to mention Britney Spears, ‘N Sync and its brain trust of producers and songwriters have reached a new generation of squealing girls with untortured, sweetly romantic, precisely choreographed variants of Mr. Jackson’s music from the 1980’s. Surrounded by echoes of the Jackson 5 and his old albums, Mr. Jackson just might want his audience back.

”Invincible” (Epic EK 069400) has clearly been worked over and then some. Its release was once planned for November 1999, and it reportedly cost $30 million, while a dozen producers and songwriters signed on, made songs and had them shelved. As he has been trying to do in all the sequels to his 1982 album, ”Thriller” (which became the best-selling album of all time until an Eagles greatest-hits collection recently edged it out), Mr. Jackson once again strives to reconstruct the pop album as both self-expression and something for the whole world to buy. Too much self-expression has been risky, though. When Mr. Jackson really started howling about his troubles on the second ”HIStory” disc, and on a handful of new songs on the ”Blood on the Dance Floor” remix album in 1997, fans backed off. Morbid curiosity was no substitute for affection.

On ”Invincible,” Mr. Jackson applies obsessive craftsmanship to the music as he zeroes in on one demographic quarry after another: dancers, rockers, the ladies, the children. But there’s a barrier to the sense of identification that makes people hear themselves in pop songs. The obstacle is something he has devoted most of his life to building: his fame. One of Mr. Jackson’s imitators might sound sensual delivering the heavy-breathing come-ons of ”Break of Dawn,” but the man himself, with all his quirks, comes across like a stalker.

With all the resources of multinational corporate marketing, Mr. Jackson has constructed a public image that contradicts his gentle, humanistic public statements. The way Mr. Jackson’s songs and videos have told it, achieving the American show-business dream — celebrity, commercial success, autonomy, influence — has made him both miserable and messianic. In his songs he is insecure, lonely and vulnerable, all ready to be rescued, but he also harbors an inner monster. He wants to spread love and healing and hints at having divine powers. But cross him even slightly and he’ll turn vindictive.

His videos show wild megalomania — like the skyscraper-size statue of himself in the one for ”History” — and a long trail of damage and explosions. And someone whose career was made by his skill at turning himself into a multimedia product now can’t stop complaining about how much he suffers from media attention. Intolerance, poverty, disease and war don’t get him as worked up as overeager paparazzi. (On ”Invincible,” he sounds furious in ”Privacy,” which alludes to the death of Princess Diana on Aug. 31, 1997; the song calls it ”a cold winter night.”)

The new album tries to make Mr. Jackson approachable again. The main strategy is to trot out gambits that worked in decades past. ”You Rock My World,” the first single from ”Invincible,” harks back to the disco strings he used on ”Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” Dialogue in the extended video clip quotes past Jackson song titles, while the action is a hybrid of ”Smooth Criminal” and ”Beat It,” though with the destructive streak of Mr. Jackson’s later videos. By the time he has danced his way out of trouble one more time, a city block is in flames.

”Invincible,” like ”Thriller,” features a song about a monster, ”Threatened,” although this time Mr. Jackson makes himself the ghoul. (The celebrity voice comes from Rod Serling, whose ”Twilight Zone” narrations are edited into a rap.) It also has such Jackson staples as the she-done-me-wrong song (”Heartbreaker”), the change-the-world song (”Cry”), the melting love ballads (”Break of Dawn,” ”Don’t Walk Away” and ”Butterflies”) and the save-the-children song (”The Lost Children,” complete with children’s chorus).

But Mr. Jackson just doesn’t have it in him to be as innocuous as his imitators. A more inviting ballad, ”Heaven Can Wait,” turns out to be a declaration that if he dies before his lover does, he’s staying on Earth so she won’t be with anyone else. ”Whatever Happens” is more promisingly mysterious: a ballad featuring Carlos Santana on guitar, women singing ”sha-na-na-na” and the kind of whistling heard on old Ennio Morricone soundtracks, it barely explains what’s happening to its troubled couple. And ”Cry,” written by R. Kelly (who also wrote ”You Are Not Alone” on ”HIStory”), applies its grand buildup to one of pop’s strangest utopian schemes: asking everyone to cry at the same time, at which point the singer may ”answer all your prayers.”

There’s a skillful musician at work in the album’s multitracked marvels. Mr. Jackson’s voice has increasingly pushed toward extreme contrasts. One side is the ultra-smoothie, the ballad singer whose long lines and creamy overdubbed choruses sail weightlessly above sparse percussion in ”Butterflies,” full orchestra in ”Don’t Walk Away” and all by itself in ”Speechless,” which may be a love song to God.

His other voice is the staccato Mr. Jackson, the percussive genius who oversees startling rhythm tracks and breaks up his singing with grunts and breaths and yelps. He chants the generic complaints of ”Heartbreaker,” a collaboration with the producer Rodney Jerkins and others, against a rhythm track of electronic noises that ratchet and sputter like a truckload of joy buzzers on a rough road. But other uptempo tracks sound stale and airless.

A near-miss, ”Unbreakable,” could do more with its terse little piano riff, and it tosses in a completely tangential rap from the archives of the Notorious B.I.G., apparently simply because Mr. Jackson can afford it. The song lyrics are the same kinds of defiant assertions that ‘N Sync makes in ”Pop” and the Backstreet Boys make in ”Everyone”: ”No matter what you do, I’m still gonna be here,” Mr. Jackson squeezes out through gritted teeth.

But like the rest of ”Invincible,” there’s no joy or humor in it, no sense of release. Trying to make songs that will blanket the media universe again, pop that lives up to his past fame, Mr. Jackson is unwilling to get too personal but unable to escape his scars and ambitions. Pop is a promise of pleasure, but on ”Invincible,” he’s so busy trying to dazzle listeners that he forgets to have any fun.

Jon Pareles

2001

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

random posts :

new posts