Michael Jackson, the greatest pop artist that ever lived, has a career that spans more than 40 of his 50 years. The de facto star of Motown's boundary-breaking Jackson 5, the sensitive solo singer behind Seventies hits, the vanguard of the MTV era and the timeless voice behind some of the only multi-million-selling Nineties records you could safely call "slept-on." We've traversed his massive catalog to pick the 50 best.
The future King of Pop took on the legacy of the King of Rock & Roll on the Jacksons' 1980 take on "Heartbreak Hotel." Written by Michael, it has little in common with Elvis Presley's 1956 classic; it's a lithe disco-pop tune that takes the original's theme in a darker direction with lyrics about a hotel where relationships break up. "Heartbreak Hotel" became a Number Two R&B hit; then somebody at the Jacksons' label, perhaps sensing legal complications, changed it to the nonsensical "This Place Hotel."
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"I Want You Back" was a glimpse of Motown's future; its B side gazed at the label's past. A cover of a Smokey Robinson torch song (it first appeared as the B side of the Miracles' "Shop Around" in 1960), it was the sweetest fruit of the Jackson 5's collaboration with R&B singer Bobby Taylor, who brought them to Motown and produced some of their early songs. Backed by Motown house band the Funk Brothers, Michael pushes himself to the top of his range, ripping into every word of Robinson's heartbroken lyrics.
Even by Jackson's wildly ambitious standards, the theme song for the 1993 movie Free Willy, and the eighth single from Dangerous, was one of his most grandiose recordings. Written while sitting in his "Giving Tree" at Neverland Ranch, "Will You Be There" begins with a long orchestral prelude from Beethoven, performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, interweaving hosannas from the Andra Crouch Singers and climaxing with a tearful spoken monologue. It's a gospel song that continues a theme of his career: from "I'll Be There" to "Got to Be There" to "Will You Be There," summing up a journey from boundless confidence to fear and solitude.
Jackson had reached a breaking point after being accused of sexual molestation. The result was "Scream," one of his most confrontational songs, and his first ever to use the word "fuck." Written with his sister Janet, it reached Number Five on the Hot 100, thanks to an extravagant video that has often been credited as the most expensive music clip ever made. But while it was a hard period for Jackson, it wasn't all bad times. "I have had so much fun working with my sister," he said in 1995. "It's like a reunion. I'm closest to Janet of all the family members. We were very emotional on the set."
The Jackson 5's star had dimmed a bit by 1974: It had been three years since their last Top 10 hit. So producer/co-writer Hal Davis took the risk of pulling them away from kid-centered pop and giving them a full-on disco song with a burbling synthesizer. With the help of the spectacular "robot" dance Michael performed when the song debuted on Soul Train, "Dancing Machine" became a mammoth crossover hit and pointed in the direction the group would follow from then on. "I loved 'Dancing Machine,' loved the groove and the feel of that song," Michael recalled in Moonwalk.
As danceable pleas for universal understanding go, the opening track on Dangerous is shockingly tense and fragmented. The groove bears the signature sound of producer Teddy Riley, but Jackson came up with most of it. "He brought it to me as a DAT, and he told me there were things he wanted done, and I did them," Riley recalled. Jackson's voice takes its time creeping into the mix, and he stutters the chorus like his voice is being sliced to shreds; the most accessible moment of "Jam" is arguably the verse by Heavy D, Jackson's favorite rapper at the time. Unsurprisingly, the song stalled on the Pop charts but was a Top Five R&B hit.
In 1984, a recording of Michael Jackson reading the tax code would probably have charted. Keenly aware of this, Motown released an album of unused MJ material. The Farewell My Summer Love album was nine songs from 1973, overdubbed with new, Eighties-sounding instrumentation. "It's not fair," Jackson said. "I had no control over that music." The album's innocent title track became a Top 10 hit in the U.K. Fittingly for a song about adolescent sadness, Michael's performance is a snapshot of his voice just as it was changing; there are even some hints of his mature power.
Did Michael sleep in a hyperbaric chamber? ("I don't think I allowed Michael to have that thing in the house," said his mother, Katherine.) Did he pay a million dollars to buy the Elephant Man's bones? ("And why would I want some bones?" he asked Oprah.) Did he have weird pets? (Queen's Freddie Mercury once called his manager saying, "You've got to get me out of here, I'm recording with a llama.") This funky shuffle was Jackson's shot back at the tabloids, powered by dueling keyboard lines, not to mention Michael's own emphatic Stevie Wonder-esque synthesizer-vocal solo.
"You can go back to bed, but I know where I'm going," Jackson proclaimed on the 1971 TV special Goin' Back to Indiana, just before singing its rousing title song. The funky, horn-infused pop number was composed by the Corporation and, in addition to Michael's soaring verses, it features a chanted soul-rap from his brothers about their hometown of Gary, capped off by a helium-voiced "yeeaah" from Michael. "Goin' Back to Indiana" tapped a real sense of nostalgia that sounds strange coming from someone so young. Years later, he wrote in Moonwalk, "Our records had become hits all over the world since we'd seen our hometown last."
Jackson and Paul McCartney co-wrote the smooth yet urgent-feeling "Say Say Say" during the same sessions that yielded "The Girl Is Mine," and recorded it with George Martin at Abbey Road Studios. Jackson later recalled that he and McCartney "shared the same idea of how a pop song should work." He also added, "We worked together as equals and enjoyed ourselves. Paul never had to carry me in that studio." The song's snake-oil-themed video featured a cameo from La Toya and was filmed not far from an estate just north of Santa Barbara that Jackson later purchased and renamed Neverland Ranch.
Quincy Jones says it was a leftover from a session by the funk group Brothers Johnson. One of the Brothers, bassist Louis "Thunder Thumbs" Johnson, says it came from a home-recorded cassette of bass ideas that he played to Michael. Either way, the slap-happy collaboration is the hardest funking thing on Off the Wall. Even though Louis Johnson would play on three other Jackson albums, it was a high point he couldn't repeat. "What I'll always cherish is the fun and excitement of playing live together on the Off the Wall sessions," he said. "Michael and everybody laughing, knowing we were making magic."
Motown songwriting team the Corporation had to tone down the lyrics for "Mama's Pearl," which was originally titled "Guess Who's Making Whoopie (With Your Girlfriend)," so pre-pubescent Michael could sing it without raising parents' eyebrows. Musically, the track comes off like the scrappy cousin of "I Want You Back," with its bouncing piano and bass-y "doo-doo-doo" backup vocals, but Michael sounds as cute as ever trying to persuade a girl to fall in love with him. The track, which reached Number Two, remained special to Jackson decades later; in Moonwalk he wrote that it reminded him of his schoolyard days.
The best song from Jackson's last studio album is a bit of light, innocent, doting R&B, free of the dark undertones that dominated so much of his later music. The song was presented to Jackson in a demo with vocals from Marsha Ambrosius of the group Floetry, who was also one of the song's writers. "We originally demo'ed it with a woman singing, so it was hard for him to hit those notes," recalled co-producer Vidal Davis. "We did tons and tons of takes." The finished results recaptured the easeful soul of Jackson's earliest solo recordings right down to a rhythm track built around his finger snaps. Said Davis, "He had the loudest snaps in the world."
Jackson called this Paul McCartney duet the "obvious first single" from Thriller. But Quincy Jones has referred to it as a "red herring," since it only hinted at Thriller's power. Jackson offered McCartney the song, which has an easy, jazzy groove and shows off a breezy rapport between Jackson and the ex-Beatle, as a duet to "repay the favor" of McCartney giving him "Girlfriend" for Off the Wall. McCartney's one concern was the word "doggone," which he felt some listeners might consider "shallow." "When I checked with Michael, he explained that he wasn't going for depth, he was going for rhythm, he was going for feel," McCartney said.
"In the studio, Michael was silly and fun-loving," recalled Rod Temperton, who began working with Jackson during the late Seventies. "He never swore. He didn't even say the word 'funky,' he said 'smelly.' So that was Quincy's nickname for him: Smelly." His loose, playful side is on display during the title track, written by Temperton. "Off the Wall" was an ode to "party people night and day." It invited listeners to "hide your inhibitions/Gotta let that fool loose deep inside your soul" by hitting the dance clubs and "livin' crazy, that's the only way." But its succulent groove, swathed in Jackson's sumptuous overdubbed harmonies, was as smoothly seductive as the vision of dance music in his head. Temperton, who arranged the rhythm and vocal tracks, re-created the dance-floor vibe of his disco band Heatwave, and the song's growling funk synths were partly played by jazz and fusion keyboardist George Duke. The song was also strangely prophetic: In the decades after its release, the world saw how truly off the wall Jackson's life could become. 152ee80cbc