Peter Mills · @thedaddelusion
15th Jun 2013 from TwitLonger
The last word on the Michael album and Cascio tracks:
Let’s dig the corpse up, scratch ‘Dirty Paedo’ into the forehead of its skull, attach strings to its limbs and make the bastard dance for us again. It would be kinder. Although saying that, Teddy Riley has spoken in the last fortnight of how he believes Michael Jackson is actually still alive. But I don’t believe him. If Michael Jackson were still alive, the catastrophic event that is the first posthumous album (bearing the seemingly ironic eponymous title of ‘Michael’ – someone at Sony is having a right old laugh at this), would probably have more of ‘Michael’ actually singing on it.
The opening track, the subpar ‘anthemic’ ballad, Hold My Hand, introduces us to this leitmotif. It’s sold as a duet with Akon, but what it actually is, is an Akon song occasionally featuring Michael Jackson. It’s the first single and, frankly, a fucking embarrassment. It’s difficult to fathom why Michael Jackson ever chose to collaborate with Akon in the first place, but I imagine it has something to do with blackmail.
Heard of hot new superproducer Eddie Cascio? No? He’s a kid from suburbia, part of a family that Michael Jackson befriended (he never learned), and is responsible for three of the songs on Michael. One day, Michael Jackson decided to go round to their house and record the three shittest songs of his career in the style of a well-known Michael Jackson soundalike. Not only that, but he opted to experiment yet further by singing the songs through a piece of fucking pipe. This is true because Sony says so. Twenty-seven years ago, Paul McCartney released his Pipes of Peace album, on which belongs the unparalleled, irrefutably majestic vocal duet between him and Michael Jackson that is Say Say Say. Despite the title of this song’s parent album, I’m not aware of any rumours that either Michael Jackson or Paul McCartney sang through pipes on Say Say Say. I’m not sure when Michael Jackson decided to start singing through pipes, but I definitely think it was a mistake, as on the Cascio tracks it makes him sound much less like he had one of the richest and most soulful singing voices of all time, a voice nurtured and trained since childhood, and more like he’s doing spontaneous drunken self-parodying angry spastic karaoke.
The Cascio tracks – Breaking News, Keep Your Head Up and Monster – are fakes. This isn’t a matter for debate, it is a fact. Over the past twenty years, I have listened to Michael Jackson’s voice nearly every single day. As a working estimate, although it’s definitely more, I have listened to Michael Jackson singing around 80,000 times. I have heard his voice mature; I have heard his style change. Say what you like about my plainly evident, morbidly obsessive, autistic behaviour, but you have to admit, I’m probably a bit of an expert on what his voice sounds like. Years ago, on the Matthew Kelly programme, You Bet, a contestant came on whose task it was to identify a Michael Jackson song after listening to a one second clip of any randomly chosen Michael Jackson song. He got them all correct, and as entertaining as this was for any Michael Jackson fan watching, I personally thought the contestant was actually a bit slow. I could tell you with 100% accuracy which hiccup, yelp or hee hee comes from which song; a fact that makes it all the more grating to recognise some of them sampled and put onto these Cascio tracks. In Breaking News, for example, we find the hee hee hee from In The Closet; in Keep Your Head Up, they bizarrely sample some lyrically incongruous lines from the end of Earth Song.
The double-edged thing about all of this, however, is that some anonymous hero out there has launched a covert attack on the album, using the guerrilla tactic of leaking bona fide previously unreleased Michael Jackson songs, seemingly to be used as a comparison. And these are startlingly good. Two of them, entitled Do You Know Where Your Children Are? and Slave to the Rhythm, are better than most other Michael Jackson songs I’ve heard over the last fifteen years. It’s anyone’s guess as to why Sony decided to go with bogus, far inferior tracks for the album, but theories range from the conspiratorial suggestion that a vengeful Sony are purposefully attacking Michael Jackson’s legacy, to the perhaps more plausible theory that, after having done a $250 million deal to release seven albums over the next ten years, they have discovered that, for whatever reason, they simply don’t have enough songs in the vault, and hence need to flesh the albums out using an imposter. Sony aren’t so much milking all they can out of their most profitable cash cow, as they are maniacally bludgeoning its bones into bits, soaking the bits in water, then putting the resultant sludge into bags with little holes in them before squeezing out the shit and making really thin and sandy sausages out of it.
Meaning that there are just three up-tempo tracks on the Michael Jackson album called Michael that are actually sung by Michael Jackson. Even so, two of these have already been heard before in one way or another. (I Can’t Make It) Another Day, written and produced by Lenny Kravitz, and was leaked last year, features Michael Jackson’s unmistakable searing vocals at full throttle, as well as some great guitar. It has James Bond Theme written all over it. The other one previously heard is Behind the Mask, which is an adapted version of an original song by Yellow Magic Orchestra. Versions of the song by Greg Phillinganes and Eric Clapton also exist. But this is by far the best. And why? Once again, because of Michael Jackson’s unique, inimitable and unsurpassable vocals. So, in fact, only one truly new up-tempo Michael Jackson song exists on the new album called Michael by Michael Jackson. It’s called Hollywood Tonight. And thankfully, it’s a funky delight.
The other three remaining tracks on the album vary in quality. One, The Way You Love Me, had also been previously released, as part of 2005’s Ultimate Collection, and listening to it is a bit like watching someone in the first flushes of love walking down the street with a smile on their face after they’ve just left their new lover’s flat on a weekday morning. It’s nice to see and everything, but you’d almost certainly accidentally-on-purpose trip them up then kick them, given half the chance. Best of Joy is another ballad, but this one recalls a different type of flush, it being reminiscent of that strangely pretty turd you fleetingly raised your eyebrows in surprise at (but didn’t make you smile) before flushing; it briefly entertained you, but was instantly forgotten. The best ballad on the album is Much Too Soon, the closing track, a song Karen Carpenter would have been proud of. And it’s a suitably heartbreaking finale to the beginning of the rape of the legacy of Michael Jackson.
The thing, the worst, most irritating, most infuriating thing is, is that Michael Jackson has a fanbase like no other in terms of size and loyalty, and if these people united they could actually stop this happening. Unfortunately, a large section of the fan community is choosing to ignore this deception. In their desperation for a new Michael Jackson album, in their craving for some contact with their God, they are turning a blind eye. It is futile to attempt rational argument with these people. I’ve tried, and they have responded to my questions with such gems of logic as, “Michael would have accepted everyone's opinion.”, “Those of you who cannot embrace a non-perfect MJ album are just like his Papa Joe who cannot appreciate his son for his imperfect performances, thus hurting Michael so much as a child.” and “'I AM MICHAEL! WE ARE ALL MICHAEL! LET US HOLD HANDS TOGETHER!”
For some reason, Michael Jackson fans have very little credibility. And it is this that will allow the genuinely shocking inevitability of Sony succeeding with possibly the greatest cover-up in the history of recorded music.