‘Off the Wall’ at 35: Classic Track-by-Track Album Review

[Bubs]

Michael Jackson’s ‘Off the Wall’ at 35: Classic Track-by-Track Album Review
By Kenneth Partridge | August 08, 2014 12:40 PM EDT

There comes a time in every young man’s life when he must put on a snug tuxedo and gleaming white socks and go his own way. For Michael Jackson, that time was 35 years ago, on August 10, 1979. It was then, weeks shy of his 21st birthday, that Jackson released Off the Wall, the album that established him as a grown-up solo superstar and set the stage for his coronation as King of Pop.

Off the Wall didn’t sell as well as MJ’s follow-up, 1982’s world-devouring chart beast Thriller, but song for song, it’s arguably the stronger album. Produced by Quincy Jones, who Jackson had befriended on the set of the 1978 Wizard of Oz reboot The Wiz, Off the Wall introduces the Michael many fans would prefer to remember most.

Those aggressive grunts and hiccups hadn’t yet come to dominate his singing. He’s not playing a monster or a gangster or dressing like a Klingon general. Lyrically, he doesn’t take hyper-defensive stances against gossipy critics or those who would abuse the trust of elephants.


Despite all the sadness he’d already experienced, Jackson puts on a brave face. During what he later described as “one of the most difficult periods” of his life, he manages to look and sound like a fresh-faced kid with boundless talent and energy. And that comes across from the opening seconds.

“You know, I was … I was wondering, you know, if you could keep on,” he half-stammers at the start of the leadoff track, “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” It’s like he’s addressing not just some girl, but a whole planet of girls -- and guys and housewives and truck drivers and grandmas -- he’s about to seduce with music and charisma he barely understands. “Because the force,” he says, “it’s got a lot of power.”


Indeed, the force was strong in MJ. On these 10 disco-funk burners and cottony pop tunes, he’s boyish yet confident, sexy yet naïve -- the Luke Skywalker of pop. The first two singles, “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and “Rock With You,” were nightlife anthems, and both topped the Billboard Hot 100. While the album peaked at No. 3, it would be the last time this notorious perfectionist would settle for anything less than No. 1. From here on out, Jackson owned the pop charts.

In the years that followed, the music got weirder and tougher, and Michael grew stranger and more reclusive. By 1987’s Bad, he’d waved a gloved hand goodbye to the last traces of normalcy. But on Off the Wall, this otherworldly being is just here to make us swoon and dance. Resistance is futile. Read on to get our track-by-track take of this pop masterwork.


“Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”: Here’s where little Mikey becomes a man. “Touch me,” he urges, singing self-penned lyrics over music he’s written himself. “And I feel on fire.” Interestingly, Jackson delivers this come-on in a falsetto that’s far from masculine. It’s not exactly feminine, either. As rival Prince would say of himself years later, MJ is neither your woman nor your man; he’s “something that you’ll never understand.” One thing everyone can understand: This song’s irresistible disco-ball shimmer and rhythmic snap. You’ve heard it a million times, and you never get enough.

“Rock With You”: As with the previous track, the meaning is ambiguous. It’s possible he’s singing about sex, but this is Michael Jackson. If he’s sweating until dawn, he’s probably dancing. As far as grooving goes, this one’s slower and funkier than “Don’t Stop.” Jackson lets his voice go gravelly when he digs into the line, “Just take it slow / ‘cause we got so far to go.” He’s settling into this party he’s throwing, pacing himself to go the distance.

“Working Day and Night”: The second of three tunes written solely by Jackson, “Working Day and Night” would have been a smash single on any other album. On Off the Wall, it gets relegated to album-cut/ B-side status. Outfitted with bass pops and rattling percussion, which come in toward the end, this one’s a rhythmic monster -- certainly not a typical disco-funk track. When Talking Heads cut “Remain In Light” the following year, they may well have had this record in mind. Justin Timberlake has certainly spun it a few times.

“Get on the Floor”: It’s no surprise that bassist Louis Jordan co-wrote this one. LJ doesn’t quite upstage MJ and his fluttery lover-man vocals, but his poppin’ bassline makes Jackson’s “dance with me” plea rather redundant. This song would make crippled robots dance, and Jackson knows it. He throws in some James Brown-lite grunts just for the funk of it: “Get up, won’t you g’on down!”

“Off the Wall”: Rod Temperton, the man behind “Rock With You,” penned this, the album’s third of four Top 10 pop hits. It shimmies ahead a bit like “Thriller,” which Temperton would write a few years later, and Jackson gives one of the disc’s most assured vocals. Amid his gasps, he even offers up a proto-“He-hee,” previewing one of his signature vocal ticks of the ‘80s and beyond. Still, this is safe, good-natured, friendly Michael. His message: Life is short; go nuts. You can’t say he didn’t take it to heart.

“Girlfriend”: Even though Paul McCartney included this tune on the 1978 Wings album London Town, he penned it with Michael in mind. It’s Macca at his doofiest and most tuneful, and the innocence of the lyrics -- all about a guy who’s actually going to tell another fellow he’s having a fling with his lady -- is perfect for Jackson. It’s supermarket rock with sax and synth sounds that have aged about as well as 1979 milk, but those “do-doot-do” vocals still bring a smile.

“She’s Out of My Life”: As the story goes, Michael cried at the end of each take, and he certainly sounds like a man on the verge of tears. As on all of his finest ballads, MJ lets his voice quiver at some bizarre frequency he turned into during those years of touring, recording, and trying to cope with the loneliness of being a child star. As he wrote in his 1988 memoir Moonwalk, he wept at the realization he was “so rich in some experiences while being poor in moments of true joy,” and that’s how he turns a relatively unremarkable love song into a showstopper. Everyone knows there’s no “she,” and that’s what makes it so devastating.


“I Can’t Help It”: Yet another sign Off the Wall is a masterpiece: The tune Stevie Wonder co-wrote is among the ones people talk about the least. True, it’s a pastel-colored twinkle-fest of the sort that would earn Stevie a bad name in the ‘80s, but MJ’s sincerity and effortless vocals shine through. Perhaps because his love songs were never going to be super believable -- at least not when taken at face value -- he turns pap to pop.

“It’s the Falling In Love”: Here’s the perfect love song for Michael. It’s all about how the idea of romance, the mystery of thinking about what might be, is better than the real thing. Again, it’s lightly funky and infused with those horns give this record so much of its flavor, and the sing-songy chorus is the sort of thing for which Michael’s voice was made.

“Burn This Disco Out”: Temperton once again works his magic, and “Off the Wall” ends just as it began, with Michael vowing to keep the party going all night. In a few playful moments, he affects a low bellow and sings, “Keep the boogie alright.” To be continued…

http://www.billboard.com/articles/r...ons-off-the-wall-at-35-classic-track-by-track

 

[Annita]

http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/08/_off_the_wall_the_classic_album_turns_35.html


Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall Was the Perfect Pop Record

Die-hard Michael Jackson fans know that before Thriller, Off the Wall—released 35 years ago this week—was his signature achievement.
By: Mark Anthony Neal
Posted: Aug. 6 2014 2:07 AM

off_the_wall
Off the Wall

EPIC RECORDS

What is Michael Jackson’s greatest album? The answer helps establish whether you were introduced to Jackson via Thriller, the crown jewel of his commercial legacy, or whether you were riding with him long before he donned the sequined glove—since Off the Wall, the classic album released 35 years ago this week, that represents Jackson at his most brilliant musically, and that may be the most perfect pop recording of the late 20th century.

Off the Wall is remembered as the first in a series of collaborations between Jackson and producer-arranger Quincy Jones that would redefine pop. Yet when Jackson and Jones first began to work together, on the set of The Wiz, Jones was actually focused on another young black male vocalist, Luther Vandross, who had contributed “Brand New Day” to The Wiz soundtrack and who was featured on Jones’ 1978 recording Sounds ... and Stuff Like That.

That Jackson’s youthful professionalism impressed Jones—himself a veteran of the same chitlin circuit that produced Jackson and his brothers, in the form of the Jackson 5—is no surprise, but Jones also detected a certain something that Jackson possessed—charisma, genius, brashness—that would allow them to push music forward. And “You Can’t Win,” from The Wiz, was the first fruit of their partnership.

Off the Wall, Jackson’s first solo album since his days at Motown, was also the first project he worked on without Berry Gordy, his brothers, superproducers like Gamble and Huff, and, to some extent, his overbearing father. It was a true career reboot—an attempt to grow him up in the face of a public that remembered him as a cherub-faced little boy who had aged out of his cuteness. Though the Jacksons had released their most successful post-Motown album, Destiny—which featured hits like “Blame It on the Boogie” and “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)”—the year before, Michael Jackson was adamant that he didn’t want his new solo album to sound like Destiny 2.0.

Jackson’s label, Epic Records, balked at the choice of Jones, best known for working with jazz and blues artists like Count Basie, Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra, but Jones was crafting a unique sound that borrowed from the full range of American popular music, most evident in his multi-Grammy winning album The Dude (1981). As Joseph Vogel writes in Man in the Music: The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson, “Off the Wall did for R&B what the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds did for rock,” in reference to an earlier sonic revolution.

Indeed, Jackson’s decision to work with Jones was a product of his own growing independence. Off the Wall was released only weeks before Jackson’s 21st birthday. At the time, he was living in New York City under the watchful eye of Diana Ross and was hanging out in all the late-night dance spots, including Studio 54. Jackson got the chance to see the disco movement up front, but Jones helped give his sound a sophisticated sheen.

With Jones came a slew of collaborators, who would work intimately with Jackson for more than a decade, including keyboardist Greg Phillinganes, who also served as Jackson’s musical director on tour; and songwriter Rod Temperton, known for his work with the band Heatwave, especially their blue-light-in-the-basement classic “Always and Forever.”

From the opening track and lead single, the Jackson-penned “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” (with that precoital purr in the beginning), Off the Wall was a timeless endeavor in pure pop pleasure. Drawing references to Star Wars (“the force”) with a pulsating rhythm that can still move an ass—or a thousand—35 years later, “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” was the ideal reintroduction for Jackson, finding a spot on both the pop charts and the dance floor. The song earned Jackson his first Grammy Award as a solo artist for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance.

“Rock With You” also topped the pop charts—notable at a time when the slick type of R&B production of Off the Wall was having difficulty finding an audience on pop radio amid thinly veiled racist and homophobic notions that “Disco sucks.” There’s an argument to be made that “Rock With You” and the title track (also a top-10 pop hit), both written by Temperton, are the templates for the black crossover sound of the early 1980s. Indeed, that Temperton magic gave George Benson a top-five pop hit the next year with “Give Me the Night.”

Even without those hit singles, Off the Wall is a seamless listen. “Workin’ Day and Night”—a metaphor for Jackson’s work ethnic—was as “smelly jelly” as anything Jackson ever recorded. Stevie Wonder contributed the mature stepper “I Can’t Help It” to the project. The song was likely initially drawn from an earlier aborted session that Wonder did with the Jackson 5 that also produced “Buttercup.”

That Wonder, who was at the peak of his creative powers, contributed a song to Jackson’s album speaks volumes about the gravitas Jackson held, as was also the case when Paul McCartney provided the sweet little ballad “Girlfriend.” The song was a precursor to “The Girl Is Mine,” the lead single from Thriller that featured McCartney on vocals. And “Girlfriend” wasn’t even the best ballad on the album; “She’s Out of My Life” remains one of Jackson’s most mature and affecting vocal performances.

Mark Anthony Neal is a professor of African and African-American studies at Duke University and a fellow at the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is the author of several books, including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities. Follow him on Twitter.

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[souldreamer7]

:smilerolleyes:Michael Jackson's OFF THE WALL Album deserves such respect, It should get more attention... I adore this album and I'm happy that it's being celebrated.

OFF THE WALL Deserves Respect.

Michael Jackson’s ‘Off the Wall’ Turns 35 Years Old On 08.10.14 Happy B-Day Off The Wall

There comes a time in every young man’s life when he must put on a snug tuxedo and gleaming white socks and go his own way. For Michael Jackson, that time was 35 years ago, on August 10, 1979. It was then, weeks shy of his 21st birthday, that Jackson released Off the Wall, the album that established him as a grown-up solo superstar and set the stage for his coronation as King of Pop.....

LINK:
http://www.billboard.com/articles/r...ons-off-the-wall-at-35-classic-track-by-track

 

[SheilaMJFan4Ever]

Off The Wall is my favorite Mike album, hands down!