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http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-new-michael-jackson-single-the-verdict/?hp
By Jon Pareles AND JON CARAMANICA
At midnight, the new Michael Jackson single, “This Is It,” became available on michaeljackson.com. Jon Pareles, the chief pop critic of The New York Times, and Jon Caramanica discuss its merits, and the striking resemblance to a 1991 song recorded by the Puerto Rican singer Safire. (See Ben Sisario’s report on the backstory here.)
JON PARELES: Michael Jackson’s commercial afterlife starts today with “This Is It.” Maybe there should be a question mark at the end of the title–or, perhaps, a slight expansion paraphrasing Peggy Lee: “Is this all there is?”
Promoted as brand-new, it’s not. It has much in common — its melody and many lyrics — with “I Never Heard,” a song written by Jackson and Paul Anka before Jackson’s “Dangerous” album and shelved. “I Never Heard” surfaced in 1991 near the end of an album by the Puerto Rican singer Safire. She sang with what now sounds very much like Jackson’s phrasing, and with a lot more joy.
Safire’s “I Never Heard” exults in an unexpected romance. For “This Is It,” the lyrics got a telling rewrite. Safire sang, “In the light of the world, love is grand,” but Jackson’s version changes it to the considerably more messianic, “I’m the light of the world, I feel grand.” And later, “I’m the light of the world, this is real.”
Jackson still sings about being a lover in “This Is It,” but I don’t hear romance. Now, especially since the song is attached to the memorials of the rehearsal-footage movie, also called “This Is It,” and a blatantly greedy album — the big hits yet again, two versions of “This Is It” and a handful of demos — “This Is It” becomes one of the Jackson songs that conflates his own stardom with universal love and uplift. Love Michael Jackson and heal the world; it was the kind of promise he could make when he was pop’s global superstar. (And the song may well have been set aside because Jackson used the same hymnlike tempo and ascending harmonies in “Heal the World.”)
The vocal starts with the breathy jitters that added another level of tension and syncopation to Jackson’s dance tunes, but soon smooths itself out. Over Jackson’s piano-and-voice demo, the production waxes reverent: rising massed strings, genteel guitar tickles, his brothers in the Jacksons going “ooh.” The free stream on michaeljackson.com is the orchestra version; the “album version” Epic sent the media this morning takes off the strings, an improvement that unveils all the vocal harmonies and the fingers snaps.
No funk here: It’s the posthumous, all-sweetness-and-light Jackson that his family is determined to sell. But at least he sounds human, especially at the end, where he lets the vocal line take a few tentative leaps. The vulnerability — especially at the beginning, as he counts off the song — is the endearing thing about “This Is It.” But what was he thinking as he sang, “I’m the light of the world?”
JON CARAMANICA: Oh dear — it’s an unfortunate coincidence, I’m guessing (hoping?), that the pre-roll ad I’m seeing on michaeljackson.com is for “Gone Too Far,” the MTV reality-intervention series premiering on Monday and starring DJ AM, another 2009 victim of a drug overdose.
Or perhaps that’s reflective of the fumbling hands with which this song has been released. As mentioned here and elsewhere, these lyrics have been heard before. On the stream the recording of the vocals is fuzzy, the mix is far from perfect. And the song itself never fully resolves, working at one melodic and emotional pitch and then fading out.
“This Is It” does have that naïve quality that Jackson managed to hold on to through the early ’90s, only completely losing it in the face of media scrutiny and his own melting under it. (So glad you mentioned “Heal The World,” a far better and possibly smarter song built from largely the same Tiddlywinks.) But as a musical artifact, it’s better as suggestion than song: What I hear here is how Jackson might have sang these words in a proper studio setting, perhaps in a roomier arrangement with more motion in the rhythm.
And it’s an odd choice to signal Jackson’s re-emergence. The song itself is a trifle, a mildly ornery and defensive lyric over a sketch of lush harmonies to come. For “Michael Jackson: The Lost Tapes,” maybe, it would be a welcome curio, but ultimately “This Is It” sticks out as a song chosen more for its title than its meaning. My fear, JP, is that it’s not a question mark missing after those words, but a period.
JON PARELES: I’m with you –”This Is It” won’t be on anyone’s list of best Michael Jackson songs, even if it’s a long list. I’m holding out some small hope about later posthumous releases for exactly the reason you suggest: that the song was chosen for its title, those three little words that were so heavily promoted. “This Is It” was a fine bit of ambiguity from the moment the London shows were announced. This is what? A new beginning? A last stand? We didn’t know it would mean farewell before it started.
But the Jackson vaults have to hold something better. He released albums so slowly and painstakingly that there must be a lot of outtakes–more than the batch of unreleased songs that showed up in 2004 on “Ultimate Collection.”
I’m music geek enough to be entirely curious about the demos of the hits that they are doling out so stingily. Let’s hear them all, not just these three. I remember seeing Jackson in TV interviews, casually beatboxing the rhythms that would be the foundations for those unstoppable Quincy Jones productions, and I can’t be the only one who’d be fascinated by how the songs were built. I’d also like to hear the grooves that never made it into songs. Get a diligent A&R digger into the collection and then book a brilliant D.J. to do a Michael Jackson megamix CD, like the Beatles’ “Love,” from the outtakes.
The question is, who’s going through those vaults and what are they looking for? Right now, it seems as if they’re fixated on ballads, aiming for some soothing adult-contemporary hit. But look at the track list for the “This Is It” album, reflecting the set list planned for London. More than half is upbeat and laced with paranoia, songs like “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” “Smooth Criminal,” “They Don’t Care About Us,” “Beat It” and “Billie Jean.” Those songs weren’t just there for their dance moves; Jackson knew his fans wanted his choppy beats and weird thoughts, his ***** ***** side, as well as his comforting bromides. Sooner or later, the family and Sony ought to let a funk fiend into the vaults, to find something stranger and better than “This Is It.”
JON CARAMANICA: Who’s going through the vaults, indeed? It’s probably a reflection of the disarray bedeviling Jackson’s catalog, legacy and institutional memory that no one in his camp seemingly knew, or cared, that this material had already been released in some form. (Is a cease-and-desist from Paul Anka far off?) Does no one over there read Spin?
Worse, as powerhouse-guest-written Safire tracks go, it’s nowhere near as strong as Marc Anthony’s work from her first album, especially “Boy I’ve Been Told.”
Maybe Jackson knew that, and was happy to let it go. Curiously, the Jackson/Anka writing credit is absent from the Allmusic entry for Safire’s second album.
To wit, did you see the GQ cover story on Jackson a couple of months ago? One of the most moving bits was the brief anecdote about how he asked to sit in and watch Stevie Wonder work on “Songs in the Key of Life.” How he wants to get inside the music’s “anatomy.” We know him as a performer of stratospheric gifts, but he was also a tremendous technician–it’s so reassuring to hear him count out “1, 2, 3, 4 …” at the beginning of “This Is It,” so casually in control.
But so thoroughly encoded into contemporary pop are Jackson’s template and tricks — in everyone from Justin Timberlake to Rihanna to Ne-Yo and far beyond — that the odds of a new song bringing shock were never very good. The future was molded in his shadow.
His attempts to update his sound on his last albums, from asking the Notorious B.I.G. to tag along on 1995’s “HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I” to the stilted neo-soul on 2001’s “Invincible,” were never fully convincing. At the time of his death, it was reported that he’d been working on a dance music album with will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, another Jackson acolyte.
Who knows how that might sound? Maybe it’s better, then, to have the letdown of the merely familiar.
By Jon Pareles AND JON CARAMANICA
At midnight, the new Michael Jackson single, “This Is It,” became available on michaeljackson.com. Jon Pareles, the chief pop critic of The New York Times, and Jon Caramanica discuss its merits, and the striking resemblance to a 1991 song recorded by the Puerto Rican singer Safire. (See Ben Sisario’s report on the backstory here.)
JON PARELES: Michael Jackson’s commercial afterlife starts today with “This Is It.” Maybe there should be a question mark at the end of the title–or, perhaps, a slight expansion paraphrasing Peggy Lee: “Is this all there is?”
Promoted as brand-new, it’s not. It has much in common — its melody and many lyrics — with “I Never Heard,” a song written by Jackson and Paul Anka before Jackson’s “Dangerous” album and shelved. “I Never Heard” surfaced in 1991 near the end of an album by the Puerto Rican singer Safire. She sang with what now sounds very much like Jackson’s phrasing, and with a lot more joy.
Safire’s “I Never Heard” exults in an unexpected romance. For “This Is It,” the lyrics got a telling rewrite. Safire sang, “In the light of the world, love is grand,” but Jackson’s version changes it to the considerably more messianic, “I’m the light of the world, I feel grand.” And later, “I’m the light of the world, this is real.”
Jackson still sings about being a lover in “This Is It,” but I don’t hear romance. Now, especially since the song is attached to the memorials of the rehearsal-footage movie, also called “This Is It,” and a blatantly greedy album — the big hits yet again, two versions of “This Is It” and a handful of demos — “This Is It” becomes one of the Jackson songs that conflates his own stardom with universal love and uplift. Love Michael Jackson and heal the world; it was the kind of promise he could make when he was pop’s global superstar. (And the song may well have been set aside because Jackson used the same hymnlike tempo and ascending harmonies in “Heal the World.”)
The vocal starts with the breathy jitters that added another level of tension and syncopation to Jackson’s dance tunes, but soon smooths itself out. Over Jackson’s piano-and-voice demo, the production waxes reverent: rising massed strings, genteel guitar tickles, his brothers in the Jacksons going “ooh.” The free stream on michaeljackson.com is the orchestra version; the “album version” Epic sent the media this morning takes off the strings, an improvement that unveils all the vocal harmonies and the fingers snaps.
No funk here: It’s the posthumous, all-sweetness-and-light Jackson that his family is determined to sell. But at least he sounds human, especially at the end, where he lets the vocal line take a few tentative leaps. The vulnerability — especially at the beginning, as he counts off the song — is the endearing thing about “This Is It.” But what was he thinking as he sang, “I’m the light of the world?”
JON CARAMANICA: Oh dear — it’s an unfortunate coincidence, I’m guessing (hoping?), that the pre-roll ad I’m seeing on michaeljackson.com is for “Gone Too Far,” the MTV reality-intervention series premiering on Monday and starring DJ AM, another 2009 victim of a drug overdose.
Or perhaps that’s reflective of the fumbling hands with which this song has been released. As mentioned here and elsewhere, these lyrics have been heard before. On the stream the recording of the vocals is fuzzy, the mix is far from perfect. And the song itself never fully resolves, working at one melodic and emotional pitch and then fading out.
“This Is It” does have that naïve quality that Jackson managed to hold on to through the early ’90s, only completely losing it in the face of media scrutiny and his own melting under it. (So glad you mentioned “Heal The World,” a far better and possibly smarter song built from largely the same Tiddlywinks.) But as a musical artifact, it’s better as suggestion than song: What I hear here is how Jackson might have sang these words in a proper studio setting, perhaps in a roomier arrangement with more motion in the rhythm.
And it’s an odd choice to signal Jackson’s re-emergence. The song itself is a trifle, a mildly ornery and defensive lyric over a sketch of lush harmonies to come. For “Michael Jackson: The Lost Tapes,” maybe, it would be a welcome curio, but ultimately “This Is It” sticks out as a song chosen more for its title than its meaning. My fear, JP, is that it’s not a question mark missing after those words, but a period.
JON PARELES: I’m with you –”This Is It” won’t be on anyone’s list of best Michael Jackson songs, even if it’s a long list. I’m holding out some small hope about later posthumous releases for exactly the reason you suggest: that the song was chosen for its title, those three little words that were so heavily promoted. “This Is It” was a fine bit of ambiguity from the moment the London shows were announced. This is what? A new beginning? A last stand? We didn’t know it would mean farewell before it started.
But the Jackson vaults have to hold something better. He released albums so slowly and painstakingly that there must be a lot of outtakes–more than the batch of unreleased songs that showed up in 2004 on “Ultimate Collection.”
I’m music geek enough to be entirely curious about the demos of the hits that they are doling out so stingily. Let’s hear them all, not just these three. I remember seeing Jackson in TV interviews, casually beatboxing the rhythms that would be the foundations for those unstoppable Quincy Jones productions, and I can’t be the only one who’d be fascinated by how the songs were built. I’d also like to hear the grooves that never made it into songs. Get a diligent A&R digger into the collection and then book a brilliant D.J. to do a Michael Jackson megamix CD, like the Beatles’ “Love,” from the outtakes.
The question is, who’s going through those vaults and what are they looking for? Right now, it seems as if they’re fixated on ballads, aiming for some soothing adult-contemporary hit. But look at the track list for the “This Is It” album, reflecting the set list planned for London. More than half is upbeat and laced with paranoia, songs like “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” “Smooth Criminal,” “They Don’t Care About Us,” “Beat It” and “Billie Jean.” Those songs weren’t just there for their dance moves; Jackson knew his fans wanted his choppy beats and weird thoughts, his ***** ***** side, as well as his comforting bromides. Sooner or later, the family and Sony ought to let a funk fiend into the vaults, to find something stranger and better than “This Is It.”
JON CARAMANICA: Who’s going through the vaults, indeed? It’s probably a reflection of the disarray bedeviling Jackson’s catalog, legacy and institutional memory that no one in his camp seemingly knew, or cared, that this material had already been released in some form. (Is a cease-and-desist from Paul Anka far off?) Does no one over there read Spin?
Worse, as powerhouse-guest-written Safire tracks go, it’s nowhere near as strong as Marc Anthony’s work from her first album, especially “Boy I’ve Been Told.”
Maybe Jackson knew that, and was happy to let it go. Curiously, the Jackson/Anka writing credit is absent from the Allmusic entry for Safire’s second album.
To wit, did you see the GQ cover story on Jackson a couple of months ago? One of the most moving bits was the brief anecdote about how he asked to sit in and watch Stevie Wonder work on “Songs in the Key of Life.” How he wants to get inside the music’s “anatomy.” We know him as a performer of stratospheric gifts, but he was also a tremendous technician–it’s so reassuring to hear him count out “1, 2, 3, 4 …” at the beginning of “This Is It,” so casually in control.
But so thoroughly encoded into contemporary pop are Jackson’s template and tricks — in everyone from Justin Timberlake to Rihanna to Ne-Yo and far beyond — that the odds of a new song bringing shock were never very good. The future was molded in his shadow.
His attempts to update his sound on his last albums, from asking the Notorious B.I.G. to tag along on 1995’s “HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I” to the stilted neo-soul on 2001’s “Invincible,” were never fully convincing. At the time of his death, it was reported that he’d been working on a dance music album with will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, another Jackson acolyte.
Who knows how that might sound? Maybe it’s better, then, to have the letdown of the merely familiar.
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