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Can Michael Still Write Good Songs?

Cinnamon234 said:
For the people complaining that this thread is pointless, like I said don't waste your time replying if you don't like it, it's that simple. I don't go into threads I don't like just to say it's pointless.

Groove theory is pretty dead anyway and I don't see too many people trying to start discussions, so how about not complaining and start interesting threads yourselves instead of whining and complaining about this one?



Well that's true and again , I am not questioning all of Michael's talents, there's no doubt he can still sing and dance very well. He's proven that recently enough, but I was just very undrewhelmed with the songs he wrote/co-wrote on "Invincible". It seemed to me that he had lost his confidence in his ability to write because there were so many co-writers on many of the songs on the album. That wasn't the case with his previous albums, he never needed 5 people to help him write one song. If most of the songs, especially the uptempo ones, were actually good though, I wouldn't complain but most of them weren't. In the past however, most of the best songs on MJ's albums have been the one's that he's written himself which is why I was dissapointed with songs like "The Lost Children" and "Speechless" (which was basically "You Are Not Alone" part deux).

Michael seems like he's in a better place these days than he was during "Invincible" era though, so i'm looking forward to seeing what he comes up with on the new album.
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First of all, if u know my posts well sometimes i answer the question with sarcasm and jokes. Don't matter if it's needed or not, i felt like posting that and so there it is. And "can you stop now? Don't bother posting if u have nothing constructive to say" sounds mad and hostile to me lol My joke, to me was constructive cuz it effectively said MJ writing good songs is as natural as blinking..now and forever. I just don't appreciated peeps getting worked up over harmless jokes up in here. People are wayyy to serious lately.

Secondly, its all in the way u look at it. I don't think MJ is looking at a songwriter and says "man I NEED help with this and that. I NEED this writer or producer to be successful". Based on his past endeavors and what he has stated about songwriting in the past he likes to play with sounds. I don't think he feels he needs to constantly prove his songwriting skills just to show he's better than some peeps...i think he's quite confident in his songwriting skills. The fact that he DOESN'T do everything himself is even more likely that he's secure in his skills because he doesn't feel need to constantly PROVE himself in this area. He already did. The album right before Invincible was ALL him..hardly any collaborations or co-writers. MJ did a whole album pretty much by himself. He already did it, not a challenge for him anymore. Perhaps he wanted to move on to a new approach? Just like his comments about tours...not only did he say he didn't like to tour, but he said that he already DID it, its no longer a challenge for him. So he was more interested in see what he could do with a stripped down venue or stage or schedule.

If u think about it...MJ LOVES to experiment. And in order to experiment, things are interesting when you have different perspectives and ideas and talents. Its not AS interesting to constantly use ur own ideas..u know your own ideas backwards and forwards...but it's more of a CHALLENGE to incorporate others and see what can be created out of that. And i'm assuming, it's more fun to create something with other people. I think MJ's at a point, or has been at a point where he has done everything. He's not an up and coming artist where he needs to prove he can do stuff on his own...so he can work with and collaborate with who ever he wants now...and hopefully be a mentor to those artists like Quincy and Berry Gordy has done for him. I think its never just as simple as "i need so and so to help me". MJ knows he doesn't.

Look at the footage when he was with Will I Am in the studio for Access Hollywood. MJ knows he doesn't NEED freakin Will I Am to help him. :lol: MJ even said that he's trying to see if they have any chemistry while working together. To me thats not talk of a person who feels he needs someone else to help him. To me that's talk of someone who's testing Will I Am :lol: Experimenting with what Will brings to the table and what Mike himself brings to the table. Michael is the one who decides if the product is working-- not Will. He's experimenting with sounds, like what he said in that same interview. MJ did the same with Invincible.

Now opinions are opinions...just cuz Speechless and LC aren't ur taste doesn't mean it isn't a good song. If you really listen to LC, it is a creative and harmonic masterpiece. No it's not mainstream but i don't judge if a song is good or not by its mainstream success or appeal. And MJ didn't write YANA (neither did R Kelly :lol:) so i don't think Speechless is anything like YANA. It's structure and melody are totally different. But you've already made ur verdict about those two songs...if u don't like it then it must not be aesthetically good...or because u don't like the song writing on this particular album, MJ must have lost his confidence in songwriting lol...so in that regard, i can't really argue with that. I admit, I skip most songs on OTW...but i won't say that the album/songs are aesthetically bad just cuz i don't care for them. Obviously OTW is an excellent album.
 
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To better present the ideas I was describing I prepared couple of schemes:
Personalitystructure.png



Classificationofartsandonespercepti.png
 
Writting skills greaten with life experiences..

so I would say he can write better now than ever.....................
 
DenisRS, you can regurgitate as many technicalities as you see fit. you can even divulge it in Shakespearean English if you like. but it would never account for such a level of objectivity you're trying to portray in defining and grading different artistic qualities.

there is set of technical/quantitative parameters that exists independently of whoever's likes/dislikes. For example, for "Morphine" Jackson uses the structure for the first time: two absolutely different, but imprescriptible compositions in the one. Industrial rock, new electric guitar timbres are combined with neo-classic, complex parties for a grand symphonic orchestra ("grand" by academic meaning, not middlebrow's: there is piano among instruments). Compositions also contains advanced poetic images, multi-layer sense.
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i wholeheartedly disagree - this can be (and is) very dependent on personal tastes.
 
What's wrong with co-writing or producing? It's still MJ's vision (most of the time), unless he has a song brought to him, and he happens to like the song, so he uses it.

I'm sure MJ gets plenty of people wanting him to sing/perform their songs, and he may happen to really like a lot of them.
 
denisrs said:
Unless you or anyone else can find whatever artist who used all concrete named extents of controlling voice in a variety of his/her composed songs, there is no way to deny in essense the paragraph you quoted. However, there is disclaimer at the bottom of that research:
Denials like mentioning seemed "favoritism" do not constistute concrete arguments. Here only that quality of argumentation is needed since the research is not a random impressionistic/emanational essay but academic dissection of concrete extents of artists self expression, voice centered in this case. ;)
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I'm not trying to be a jerk and discount everything you say, but art is subjective. It's why you can go to galleries in certain places and find a rotting cow head with flies and maggots displayed as works of art. It is pretty much universally accepted that Michael Jackson is a great artist and a genius, but that does not bleed into every piece of work he has ever made. While I appreciate the talent it takes to come up with a song and many of his songs that I don't consider "great" have good qualities about them, I don't consider every one of his works to be genius, nor would I object if someone placed a different artist above MJ. There have been many great artists overtime and to use any graph, chart or well-articulated study is pointlesss.

I mean, we'll be going in circles here, because with all those graphs and that article you posted.... the very basis of such "criteria" is subjective in and of itself!
 
agreed, Superstition. i actually always enjoy reading Denis's deep analysis alongside WBSS21's, and those graphs look intriguing. maybe we can start a new topic on this since we're heading off of this one!
 
John Lennon used to say that those scholarly talks about music was rubbish, lol.
 
haha nah, everything can be explained scientifically... eventually. it just depends on where the focus goes..
 
Cinnamon234 said:
For the people complaining that this thread is pointless, like I said don't waste your time replying if you don't like it, it's that simple. I don't go into threads I don't like just to say it's pointless.

Groove theory is pretty dead anyway and I don't see too many people trying to start discussions, so how about not complaining and start interesting threads yourselves instead of whining and complaining about this one?



Well that's true and again , I am not questioning all of Michael's talents, there's no doubt he can still sing and dance very well. He's proven that recently enough, but I was just very undrewhelmed with the songs he wrote/co-wrote on "Invincible". It seemed to me that he had lost his confidence in his ability to write because there were so many co-writers on many of the songs on the album. That wasn't the case with his previous albums, he never needed 5 people to help him write one song. If most of the songs, especially the uptempo ones, were actually good though, I wouldn't complain but most of them weren't. In the past however, most of the best songs on MJ's albums have been the one's that he's written himself which is why I was dissapointed with songs like "The Lost Children" and "Speechless" (which was basically "You Are Not Alone" part deux).

Michael seems like he's in a better place these days than he was during "Invincible" era though, so i'm looking forward to seeing what he comes up with on the new album.
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See, I just don't agree that songs like "Speechless" and "TLC" are anything like "YANA". "YANA" IS a song I find underwhelming and bland and typical. While the songs you mentioned have incredible harmony, melody, arrangement and meaning. Some of my favorite songs from Michael are the ones he's written in the last 10 years.

I agree with Denis, by the way, that there is an objective, technical set of standards that are generally applied to any field of the arts which are in turn used to determine the quality of said piece of art. I always use generally applied standards to try and determine what is and is not of high quality rather then makeing such a judgement based on irrational likes and dislikes.
 
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arXter, Cinnamon234: if you will go deeper to the technicalities, then you will get quantitative measurements of every word in the description of "Morphine". You will not find "tastes" in this.

Lets see "Morphine" description line by line:

1) "For example, for "Morphine" Jackson uses the structure for the first time: two absolutely different, but imprescriptible compositions in the one."

There is no "taste" that can deny this statement. Also, there is no "taste" that could attach this feature to "YANA", for example, because there is technically no such thing in that song.

2) Industrial rock, new electric guitar timbres are combined with neo-classic, complex parties for a grand symphonic orchestra ("grand" by academic meaning, not middlebrow's: there is piano among instruments)."

There is no "taste" that could deny that "industrial rock" instrumentation was used. There is no "taste" that could deny that new electronic timbres were produced for "Morphine". There is no "taste" that could deny that there is "neoclassical" part in there. There is no "taste" that could deny that parties were written for GSO. There is no "taste" that could attach any of those features to "YANA", since those are technically absent.

3) "Compositions also contains advanced poetic images, multi-layer sense."

If you will go into the text of "Morphine" line by line (literature/poetry analysis), there is no "taste" that could deny that the poetry has advanced poetic images. There are related sciences that dissolve everything into semantics/semiotics/synonym structures. There is no "taste" that could derive anything comparable to "Morphine's" from "YANA".

------------------------------------------------------

What could be indeed matter of taste is if there would be talks like "oh, this thing sounds fresher, while the other is dull and died out", "great piece with interesting lyrics" et cetera. Because:

1) there is too long way to derive quantitative measure of such concept as "interesting" and it is not possible to do this without object taking into consideration (contrary to example I provided above, where there is nothing considered other than subject, id est song);
2) the same is with "fresher", "dull", "die out" and so on.

You can call it "taste" here; in the example above is just naming of existing features of subject/song that can not all of sudden appear or go away just because there is "mood" of "music critic" (object) for something.
 
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Denis, you're repeating yourself and missing the main point - no matter how many "quantitative" measures you bring up, they will all be prone to subjectivity.

you even acknowledged this yourself here.... in a way:

denisrs said:
Please notice, of course, that there is no way to determine objectively "truly" good and just "good" songs unless there will be some conditional/arbitrary number to differentiate two.
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of which i still disagree with a plausible notion of "good artistic merits" vs. something you don't consider ""artistic"".

subjectivism at its best here.
 
arXter: but the idea of talking about simply "good" or "truly good" songs was not from me; I was the one who questioned that categorization exactly because of the reason you quoted.

That quote means that with quantitative parameters one can compare relative strength of work/artist (and it is said in the researches). For example, you can take a couple (or more) of songs or artists (subjects) and find out independently of object which is "stronger" by numbers.

If there is finite described quantity of degrees of artistic freedom (say, you collected and named all known of those in artistry) in the structures I presented, then it is theoretically possible to have "absolute" meaning in quantitative parameters. Of course, "absolute" in inverted commas because there theoretically could exist additional degrees of artistic self-expression that no one known in human history yet came up with to this day.

However, that disclaimer is not to be confused with "taste" thing because the limit depends only on existing knowledge. If there is certain self-expression degree, then it is included in the set of all of those degrees, with which subject is later analyzed. There is no way then to disregard branch or element, it is there and should be processed deeper according to structural analysis.

Also, since compiling those self-degrees set is not property of any single object (me, you, whoever else), the system is open and self-adjustable. There is no "taste" thing in this the way you referred it. The limitation here is the knowledge accessible to objects (us) thus we could create more detailed scheme for structural analysis of subjects (songs, artists).

So with that kind of limitation one can really get comparison between Britney and Paul, "Morphine" and "YANA". And nothing could be said against those in essence, unless commentator would guess addition in structure that used to analyze the subjects (songs, artists).

Up to date, there was no yet any addition to structures I offered -- no matter if people agree or oppose it. With this, other general denial opinions are scholastic -- like questioning, for example, the assertion that insects is the biggest cumulative biologic mass on our planet. It is formally applicable to question that because no one ever actually weighted all the types of life on the Earth, but in essence, there is nothing to oppose to it.

So we can go on and on with rounds where you say to my concrete arguments the one and same phrase about "tastes" and will be the same scholastic.
 
Not trying to be rude but what kinda question is that? Of COURSE MJ can still write good music. The man has been doing it forever. I don't get why some of you guys ask questions like, "Can MJ still dance or Can MJ still sing"??
 
denisrs said:
Up to date, there was no yet any addition to structures I offered -- no matter if people agree or oppose it. With this, other general denial opinions are scholastic -- like questioning, for example, the assertion that insects is the biggest cumulative biologic mass on our planet. It is formally applicable to question that because no one ever actually weighted all the types of life on the Earth, but in essence, there is nothing to oppose to it.

So we can go on and on with rounds where you say to my concrete arguments the one and same phrase about "tastes" and will be the same scholastic.
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Who comes up with these "structures"? Those scales and structures are subjective in and of themselves, which in essence sort of makes your arguement collapse upon itself.

I can say "Album sales are everything when it comes to the quality of the album" and then list a huge, detailed, and in-depth chart about how 50 Cent, Eminem, Soulja Boy and Usher are the best acts of the 21st Century thus far based on statistical data, but that arguement wouldn't fly because the "Album sales are everything" arguement was a subjective opinion to start with.

Long story short, yes, I think MJ can still write a good tune.
 
Because he has. "TLC", "TWYLM", "BG" and "Speechless" are all great. Great melody, great harmony, great arrangements, etc... Whether you like them or not, imo, those are fantastic songs.
 
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The Moonwalker said:
well we don't know yet do we cos we havent heard anything new from him for a while lol
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Exactly, only when he will release something new we could discuss about it.

But in the recent productions we have heard on the TUC boxset there are some really interesting and sperimental songs like "in the back". I personally think that if he chooses to write his own music he could really surprise us again, just my opinion btw.
 
He has lived many things these last years, good and bad, even very very bad... So if he still has the inspiration and the talent, he can do the best he's ever done. Let's cross the fingers and give him time.
 
damn cinnamon234 whats your freaken problem i mean why are you starting to doubt if your a reall loyal why are you talken all this crap about just keep your mouth shut from now on cause you have nothing nice to aight
 
mjjlover1993 said:
damn cinnamon234 whats your freaken problem i mean why are you starting to doubt if your a reall loyal why are you talken all this crap about just keep your mouth shut from now on cause you have nothing nice to aight
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Are you a fan or a fanatic? I'm not sure you know the difference... ;)

Michael is a man, not God.
Incredible, isn't it?
 
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I think I do, as I'm not a fanatic. The difference is I can think by myself.
Why do you come to this forum if all you have to say is "MJ is the best, I love everything he does and you have to or you're not loyal. Shame on you if you doubt! shame on you if you don't like this or that song!"?

Sorry but that's not very interesting to me...
 
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