Apex talent. Michael Jackson not only stands out among all musicians of the past century, but among all artists. He sang and danced, innovated, and inspired millions throughout his life. From the time he was a small child right up until his tragic death at the age of 50, Michael Jackson defined the word "superstar" for generations, and understanding why is not difficult. His music is awesome.
420 to 30: A Music Retrospective
Here's 7 of my favorites from Michael Jackson.
Week 59: MICHAEL JACKSON
#407/420 - Michael Jackson, “Maria (You Were the Only One)”
With the immense popularity of The Jackson 5, Michael Jackson was an immediate breakout star and it wasn’t long before he recorded his first solo album, released in 1972, Got to Be There. While much of his early solo material gets bundled in with Jackson 5 material in later releases, like the exceptionally good title track to this album, much of the rest of the tracks get lost in the shuffle, like this gem, one of my all-time favorites from Michael.
It took me a bit longer to get to some of his earlier solo albums when going after Michael’s full discography because I thought if I had the hits, I had the essentials already, but when I finally did get to the full albums, around the time I was in high school, I remember being struck by just how good some of these all-but-forgotten tracks were. This one in particular practically floored me that I had never heard it before, it’s so good, and Michael’s vocals are just fantastic. While normally he was singing with his brothers, here he is singing with himself (mostly), and it’s just remarkable to me that he could be this dynamic and fill the track to such a skillful level when he was only 12 years-old.
This track is a groove. I love how it grows and grows as it goes and how Michael’s vocals grow with it. It starts out in hollow despair, echoes down a hallway. “Maria!” The instrumentation is so cool here, and the percussion hammers down with it. It’s so interesting to hear these words from a young boy’s voice too, it is so sincere and yet loses so much credibility because, well, he’s just a kid. The feeling from youth is recognizable, but it’s like, boy, yeah, yeah, you have so much soul and passion and love, but you really just don’t know. The hallway is a school hallway, Maria is just a little girl, and yet, goddamnit if I didn’t feel this way about certain girls as a kid. It’s an excellent song.
Michael was well beyond his years in his early career, certainly in talent, but in his ability to convey emotions as well, and songs like these are real treasures to discover in his large catalog of music he left behind.
#408/420 - Michael Jackson, “Earth Song”
It could fairly be said that Michael Jackson was the biggest star in the world at many points throughout his career. I have always respected that with that kind of pressure to be successful and make money, he wrote and performed so many songs that had something universally important to say like “We Are the World”, “Man in the Mirror”, “Black or White”, “Heal the World”, and my personal favorite, this one, which serves as a plea for the environment.
Michael was capable of putting immense power into his songs through his vocal ability, and it really shines through here. He was also an excellent songwriter, as the sole author of this track, of which he was very critical and meticulous over, improving upon it over a number of years before completion and release. This is an epic song at almost 7 minutes long, featuring the Andraé Crouch Choir and London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the sound is tremendous.
This is one I have come back to many times in my life. One of my earliest memories is selecting it as the topic of a biology paper I wrote during high school concerned with science in art and pop culture. Later it was a song one of my best friends and I played repeatedly during a spur of the moment drive across America to Yellowstone for a weekend when I was about 21 years-old. I don’t believe my friend had ever heard this one before that, and I really enjoyed being able to share it with him and see his reaction and enjoyment of it. Michael had so many mega hits that even ones like this that reached number one in a dozen or so countries around the world, still can slip through the cracks for many when thinking of Michael’s best.
This song really incorporates a lot of what I love most about Michael Jackson’s music. Powerful messages, inspiring lyrics, top quality vocals, superb instrumentation, and choirs, man, I love when I he teamed up with choirs. While the 90s were the start of a lot of controversy and public shame for him, his music from this era is not to be overlooked by fans. HIStory has a huge amount of other great tracks like “Scream”, “Stranger in Moscow”, “Money”, and, of course, “You Are Not Alone”, to name a few, and its highly underrated and largely forgotten follow-up, Blood on the Dance Floor, with tracks like “Morphine”, “Ghosts”, and the titular track, are all well worth checking out!
#409/420 - Michael Jackson, “Bad”
It’s hard to believe a great song could begin with the line, “your butt is mine,” but that’s the 1980s for ya, and this was made right at its peak eightiesness, when guys like Michael and Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay could dress up in what could now fairly be called “costumes” and still be some of the “baddest” guys around. This song is about as bad as they come, when, of course, the 1980s definition of bad is applied, and I love it.
Michael had 14 number one hits in the United States (including “We Are the World”) and on this album, he had a record-breaking five of them. There was no one so popular, and he really could get away with making a song like this and having it be awesome in spite of its cheesiness.
His vocals here are lightning. The way he sings, “bad!” is one of the best lines he ever sang, and the way it’s slightly different yet equally impressive every time it is repeated throughout the song is just electric. The beat is so cool and so 80s and I love the mixing of synthesizers and actual trumpets and saxophones. The ending is just killer when the horn section comes in, this song is such a party.
The music video is also iconic, like an 80s West Side Story number, and was directed by Martin Scorsese, featuring Wesley Snipes. Pretty amazing.
Of all of Michael’s biggest hits, this is the one that my appreciation has continually jumped higher and higher for over the years and I am always happy to hear it whenever and wherever it may flip on.
#410/420 - Michael Jackson, “Thriller”
One of the greatest songs of all time. If I could nominate it for an official such distinction, I surely would. While it isn’t my personal, absolute favorite from Michael Jackson, man, is this song a masterpiece. Of course it is the best Halloween season song there is, in my opinion, and the music video is a luminary among all works of horror on film. It is legendary. Michael paired up with some of the masters of horror, most notably having Vincent Price contributing narration to the track, which is absolutely amazing, perfectly delivered, and Price’s laughter, my god! Legendary. How many times has that been sampled? Uncountable. It is the best. And then he got John Landis of An American Werewolf in London to direct and co-write the music video. How perfect.
I love the music video to this song. I has to be my favorite ever, and completely changed the game when it came to the medium and how far it could be taken. The dance moves are so good, and the imagery and makeup and everything is just top notch. In my first film I absolutely took inspiration from this and put my werewolf in a letterman jacket in honor of Michael, and even threw in my own dance parody in front of some zombies. Michael’s music and art has always meant a lot to me and been inspiring to me and it was really a privilege to be able to make appropriate nods to that in my first major project.
Over the years, this song has been such a great connection among friends. One of my favorite memories was staying at a hotel in Santa Marta with someone who became a dear friend. I had told her earlier that day she resembled Janet Jackson, and when we turned the TV on, this song came on coincidentally and we both started doing the dance and had quite a laugh. We were doing it in the street on the way to the restaurant that night too. It’s so cool how many lines this song crosses to bring people together and smile.
The album this song comes from is practically a greatest hits album too it has so many notable and iconic songs of Michael’s, “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”, “Billie Jean”, “Beat It”, “Human Nature”, etc., but they got the title right naming it after this one, because it really is my favorite of all.
The music is great, especially the full version with the super cool, chill intro, the vocals are fantastic, the atmosphere is superb. What more can be said? Rod Temperton wrote some great songs for Michael, but this one stands above the rest in my opinion, and firmly sits among Michael’s very best.
#411/420 - Michael Jackson, “Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough”
Another easy contender for Michael’s best song, this song is a blast, and I believe the best track of the disco era by any artist. At an epic six minutes long, this song doesn’t cut you off when you’re really trying not to stop dancing until you’ve gotten enough, and it keeps adding sections to synch up to, so it never grows tired—I especially love when those horns kick in. The full version is a must when listening.
This song really brought about and embodied a shift in Michael’s career from the young Michael Jackson, to the superstar. Many of his trademark vocal techniques debut here, his falsetto voice and the “ooh”s and the “uhh”s that became so imitable and iconic over his career. It was also his first hit he wrote for himself, and it reached number one in the United States. The entire album this song is also featured on, Off the Wall, is also my favorite of all of Michael’s albums. While Thriller and Bad play like greatest hits albums, Off the Wall really maintains a mood, flow, and sound like almost nothing else he ever made, save for maybe Dangerous. It’s a great listen and the track order is so well composed.
It is pretty amazing to compare the music videos from Off the Wall with what came next on Thriller with the giant productions of “Beat It”, “Billie Jean”, and “Thriller” especially. These almost come across as do-it-yourself karaoke videos, but I really love them nonetheless. Nothing but Michael dancing on a psychedelic background, but he just owns it in a way that no one else could. How he doesn’t look like a huge dork is a marvel.
Recently while living with my aunt and uncle in California, almost all of my family and some of their closest friends were all together at the end of an event/dance that my aunt and uncle organized with their local community fundraising club and I had the opportunity to make the last request of the night. Of course, wanting to milk our time on the dance floor, I chose this song, and it was really a great memory to have all of that side of my family out there dancing and having a great time during one of my last days living with them. I definitely don’t think we were able to avoid looking like dorks like Michael, but I believe we had just as much fun.
Love this song and all the joy and energy it has brought in my life over the years.
#412/420 - Michael Jackson, “Ben”
One of my ten favorite songs of all time, and what may have been my first “favorite” song in my life. This is a beautiful song. Michael’s vocals are just perfect here and the thundering piano and gentle guitar are emotional and grabbing. The lyrics are some of my favorites as well. It’s just such a sweet, kind song, and deservedly became Michael’s first number one hit as a solo artist at age 14.
Written and recorded originally for the film of the same name (the sequel to 1971’s Willard), for which it won “best original song” at the Golden Globes, the titular character of the song is actually a boy’s pet rat. As a kid, I was unaware of this, and listened to it many times over many years before learning this. I first heard this on a compilation of Michael Jackson’s childhood music that my mom had which included a few solo hits like this one, but was mostly Jackson 5 material. Of all the great songs on this cassette, this track stood out to me the most, and one of the most striking things to me about it, besides the music and emotion of the song, was that it seemed to be a boy singing about his friend in a very endearing way.
I had never heard a song like this. Most songs I knew that were sung about another person were about falling in love. This was about friendship. Without the reference of the film to go by, and the relative ambiguity in the lyrics as to who Ben is, I heard it as a song about someone who was an excellent friend, but was misunderstood by others, like a dork or something. I felt like I had a lot of friends who were really wonderful people like this, but were considered losers or treated unfairly by others, and this song expressed the importance of standing up for them and standing by them incredibly well. It was comforting to hear that this person didn’t care what others thought, they saw the value in their friend and nothing else was more important than that. Especially at an age where peer pressure and conformity to behave as and do what the majority thought was cool or acceptable, it was a powerful message to hear. Learning that it was about a pet rat made even more sense, and deepened the loneliness of its words, but it is such a well written song that it transcends the specific meaning of the film for Ben to be a person you know as well.
Beyond that, I think as Michael grew older, the song came to sound a bit like it was about himself too, misunderstood and mocked. I remember the day that Michael Jackson died. By chance I had listened to this song that morning. It was the last song of his I heard before learning he was dead. It was fitting and sad. I recall that night sitting with family and close family friends and doing nothing but reminiscing and listening to Michael’s music that whole night. It was a shock because Michael Jackson was larger than life. He felt immortal to some degree, and while he himself wasn’t, perhaps his music will be. It certainly is to me and many others.
I remember certain celebrity deaths from when I was young and where I was when I found out, people like Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, and George Harrison, but none affected me more than Michael Jackson. Even still, it feels unfair and incredibly tragic to know he went the way he did, and I was so looking forward to seeing him live when his new tour was announced, but it just wasn’t meant to be. Now I hear “Ben” in yet another way, in yet another form of comfort, that though the man is lost, his incredible gift and his hard work live on, and I will have this music to cherish for the rest of my life.
#413/420 - Michael Jackson, “Will You Be There”
A song that can always lift my heart and bring a smile to my face, this is my favorite Michael Jackson song ever, and one of my all time favorite songs by any artist. What a sound produced here. It has every aspect I love about Michael Jackson’s music and delivers them in such a powerful, emotional, playful, warm, and awe-inspiring way. It’s one of Michael’s best compositions and most dynamic vocal performances, and the choir, The Andrae Crouch Singers, is just the best, lifting and rising with such magnificent, heavenly, angelic harmonies with such gusto, such heart. The beat, the claps, it is an experience to behold. This song really just makes me very happy and connects with the person I am.
I appreciate the theme of this song as well, and, like “Ben”, it feels slightly tragic in hindsight to hear it coming from Michael Jackson. But separate from the artist himself and whether it should or should not be applied to him, it is a strong expression and plea to hear as imagined coming from anyone. Will you stand by me when things are tough, when I am imperfect, when I am confused, when I am lost, when I am lonely? Can I count on you to be strong when I am weak or weakened? It is a gentle but deep-cutting plea. To self reflect, can we be there and stand up for those in our lives? These are themes that really connect to my other favorite from Michael, “Ben”, and this is a bit like the grown-up version of that song.
There have been lots of times, especially in difficult or trying moments in my personal life in both shared and isolated experiences, where I have played this song and it has time and again served as music to cheer me up and others close to me and allow us to feel good and re-energized. It is pretty cool that a simple song can do that.
I am sure the first time I heard this was when I saw Free Willy in the drive-in as a kid with my family during a double feature with The Lion King, which I absolutely loved. As such, it is a song that really connects me to some of the earliest, fondest memories in my life spent with family and which were some of the earliest examples of opening my eyes to art in the form of film and music that would become my passion for years to come, and still to this day.
Maybe Michael’s little prose at the end is a little cheesy, a little sappy, a little saccharine, but it doesn’t detract from the song for me. It is the comedown after an incredibly emotional ride and it is the author expressing themselves in a sincere though disconnected way. And that’s what Michael Jackson really was after all. He was sincere, he loved, he cared, he wanted to change the world and in my opinion he did, but he was strange, he was isolated, he wasn’t what any of us could consider normal and he lived a life that none of us could ever imagine. His personal life had a lot of darkness to it, whether lines were ever crossed with the young people he cared for or not, there’s no denying that darkness and pain led him to build a fantasy world to escape to. I hope and I do believe that he was truthful in his denial of the ugliest of accusations against him, but I will never really know for sure. I only know the person I hear on records and that person has meant a lot to me in my life.
I am very grateful for Michael Jackson’s music and messages and art that he put into the world and his life’s works in the creative sphere will always be ones I hold in high regard and have a special place for. I have appreciated it all. “Gone too soon.”
It’s the final week now. It’s come down to my very favorite musicians of all. As much as I love the music of Michael Jackson, Radiohead, Marvin Gaye, The Flaming Lips, and all of these 55 other artists and so many more, there is no denying which artist is number one for me and has been since childhood. I have added up play-counts in spreadsheets in years past and discovered even ten years ago, I had literally spent full months of my life listening to this band in terms of minutes played from my computer’s music software alone, not to mention the radio, records, cassettes, CDs, mp3 players, listening with friends, seeing members of the group live, watching cover bands, singing the songs myself or as a member of a band, or just hearing the music in my head. Over the years, the more I discovered of their catalog, the more and more amazed I was by just how deep their high level of productivity and accomplishments went, and all within the span of only roughly seven years. They were lightning in a bottle.
It was perhaps the perfect pairing of four musicians there has ever been, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. What they each brought to the table and what it led to when combined was something untouchable, unprecedented, unmatched, and unbeatable to this day, and perhaps always will be. It was more than what they wrote and what they performed, it was also when they did it, and how they did, and how that changed everything in popular music and art forever. There are no musicians to ever exist in recorded media to have such a large volume of music that impresses me more or is so enjoyable for me to listen to.
Next week, at last, it's The Beatles.
420 to 30: A Music Retrospective
Week 2: The Jackson 5/The Jacksons
Week 3: A Tribe Called Quest
Week 4: Weezer
Week 5: Bob Dylan
Week 6: Led Zeppelin
Week 7: 2Pac/Makaveli
Week 8: Billy Joel
Week 9: Electric Light Orchestra
Week 10: Elvis Presley
Week 11: Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band
Week 12: The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Week 13: Nirvana
Week 14: The Doors
Week 15: The Rolling Stones
Week 16: Gnarls Barkley
Week 17: Gábor Szabó
Week 18: Galaxie 500
Week 19: Simon & Garfunkel
Week 20: Gorillaz
Week 21: Ennio Morricone
Week 22: The Moody Blues
Week 23: Koji Kondo
Week 24: Rob Zombie/White Zombie
Week 25: Paul McCartney/Wings
Week 26: George Harrison
Week 27: Phil Spector
Week 28: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
Week 29: Public Enemy
Week 30: The Love Language
Week 31: Barry White
Week 32: Frank Sinatra
Week 33: David Bowie
Week 34: Queen
Week 35: The Offspring
Week 36: Louis Prima
Week 37: The Notorious B.I.G.
Week 38: Nancy Sinatra
Week 39: Stevie Wonder
Week 40: Roger Miller
Week 41: Röyksopp
Week 42: N.W.A
Week 43: Sly and the Family Stone
Week 44: Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass
Week 45: Supertramp
Week 46: "Weird Al" Yankovic
Week 47: The Kinks
Week 48: Eminem
Week 49: Mort Garson
Week 50: Foster the People
Week 51: Pink Floyd
Week 52: David Wise
Week 53: Sam Cooke
Week 54: Wu-Tang Clan
Week 55: The Beach Boys
Week 56: The Flaming Lips
Week 57: Marvin Gaye
Week 58: Radiohead
View the full list of "420 Songs" here: https://tinyurl.com/y8fboudu (Google spreadsheet link)