The Anticipation Of Michael Jackson's 'Bad' Album

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by FaithMonkey, Oct 27, 2019.

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  1. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product

    It's impossible to compare the two albums...
    When Thriller came out, the timing could not have been better. They made some great videos, that captured the public's imagination, and music television video shows, MTV in the US, were starting to take over from radio as the big sell.
    The album had some great songs, and although Off The Wall had been big, there was, for some reason, this idea that Jackson was washed up, and out of the game.... but the first singles and videos for Thriller hit, the award ceremony or Motown show or whatever it was hit, the Moonwalk freaked people out, and the album just caught the whole world it its grip....
    I was 13 or 14 when thriller hit and it seemed like everyone was waiting for the next big video extravaganza, regardless of the song, but the videos got bigger and bigger, and the songs were good enough to back the videos up....
    Thriller was an excellent album that came out, right place, right time, and was promoted perfectly for the time.....
    Fast forward five years or what have you, and the whole musical environment was different again. Also the way media presented things had changed... the whole world culture of news had moved into tabloid type stories ... and now that's about all there is.
    I remember that Bad was coming out (for the record I don't think I ever even bought Thriller, I didn't have to, I heard it everywhere) .... there seemed to be a bit of a build up, and there was talk of a more edgy Michael and such, but ...
    There had been this whole tabloid thing... Michael buys the Bones of the elephant man, Michael sleeps with bubbles his chimp, Michael has surgery to try and become Diana Ross.... I mean it was endless ....
    I think musically the album was very good, but all the positive spin that boosted Thriller was now just weird stories about Michael being a bit of a freak, and I can't help feeling that hurt sales somewhat...
    A good album, highly anticipated by many, but the media surrounding both albums and their releases was so completely different
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2020
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  2. Propinquity

    Propinquity Forum Resident

    Location:
    Gravel Switch, KY
    I’ve grown to appreciate Bad and Dangerous quite a bit over the years. But as noted earlier , I couldn’t have cared less about either when they were released.
     
  3. ronton99

    ronton99 Forum Resident

    There was the huge MTV buildup, of course - you could not escape it.
    But it's like no matter how hard they tried, it wasn't Thriller - those videos are undisputedly iconic.

    The Bad video was controversial because MJ smashed up a car - that's what was controversial in those days, funny now almost.
    I personally thought that MJ sneering through the Bad video was silly and that the song was just clearly not as good as his previous hits.
    I think that's also when he started grabbing his crotch, which people also got upset about.
    I am sorry, Michael Jackson just is not "Bad" as in badass.
    It felt like an inauthentic overreach for me.

    But he had plenty of hits off of that album, so it was quite successful.
    It's just that the hits from Off The Wall and Thriller were SO GOOD.
    Still miss him.....
     
  4. Bink

    Bink Forum Resident

    Are you sure you are not getting it mixed up with the Black or White video?
     
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  5. daveidmarx

    daveidmarx Forem Residunt

    Location:
    Astoria, NY USA
    There was no "hype" that I can recall in the Spring of '87, and I spent most days glued to MTV that year. The commercial you posted is clearly from the 1987 Christmas season (there's a reference to Christmas, plus an excerpt from the video for The Way You Make Me Feel - the third single from the album), so it doesn't support your statement in any way. Do you have any examples of the Spring '87 "hype" for the album?
     
  6. Terrapin Station

    Terrapin Station Master Guns

    Location:
    NYC Man/Joy-Z City
    "Wow, yet another great album!"

    That was the general sentiment. MJ couldn't have been more on top of the world at the time.
     
  7. Strat-Mangler

    Strat-Mangler Personal Survival Daily Record-Breaker

    Location:
    Toronto
    More like "touched and the the lice". :D
     
  8. Strat-Mangler

    Strat-Mangler Personal Survival Daily Record-Breaker

    Location:
    Toronto
    "Bad" had some terrific songs but the ones that weren't were pretty bad.

    - "Liberian Girl" is very boring.
    - "Just Good Friends" is a throwaway and clearly a formulaic duet shoe-in just like Thriller.
    - "I Just Can't Stop Loving You" was boring too. Good chorus but those verses and intro are tough to get through.
    - And I always thought both "The Way You Make Me Feel" and "Another Part Of Me" were repetitious and ran for 1 min too long each.

    "Leave Me Alone" is a great number and it should've been on the record. My new track listing would remove "Liberian Girl" and end the 1st side with "Leave Me Alone". "Just Good Friends" would end Side 2. No intro to IJCSLY, find a female singer with more personality in her voice, and eliminate a verse from the song, too. Remove 1 min-worth of choruses from TWYMMF and APOM. Keep the horns in Bad, too ; maybe even raise them in the mix. Make the organ solo grittier with a B3 instead of the wimpy dinky one that's in there. Add crunchy electric guitar to Speed Demon.
     
  9. Lownotes

    Lownotes Senior Member

    Location:
    Denver, CO
    I was in retail at the time, and the word was Michael wouldn't be happy with anything less than 100,000,000 sold. EVERYONE thought "suuuuuuure"
     
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  10. nicotinecaffeine

    nicotinecaffeine Forum Resident

    Location:
    Walton, KY
    I recall some anticipation among a few pals at the time because there was a lot of media hype, but we were all 12 and were starting to swagger a bit for the women where Michael Jackson was sort of that "thing we used to like". Then the video came out and we more or less damned it before the album was out the gate. Many of us had it, though, albeit quietly. On cassette, of course.

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
     
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  11. Strat-Mangler

    Strat-Mangler Personal Survival Daily Record-Breaker

    Location:
    Toronto
    As for comments about how MJ looked weird, I never thought much of it. What did freak me out quite a bit though was his forearm's veins on the Thriller cover. WTF was going on with those? Freaky!
     
  12. frightwigwam

    frightwigwam Talented Amateur

    Location:
    Oregon
    Bad had five #1 singles in the US, another one in the Top 10, and one more that just missed that mark at #11. The album was #1 for six weeks and eventually was certified Diamond in the US, too. So, apparently a lot of fans were excited for new music from Michael, and it was hard to escape the singles. But, it came out when I was in high school, and at that point I thought his costumes and the badass posturing were ridiculous, and his music sounded too processed and lame. One day, my History teacher, who was also a football coach, gave us a lecture about personal accountability, and quoted "Man in the Mirror" to help get his point across. Of course that made Michael even more uncool.
     
  13. Moggio_4K_Ultra_HD

    Moggio_4K_Ultra_HD Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vancouver, BC
    True. In North America, on the 1984 Victory tour, MJ (and his brothers) headlined football stadiums (mostly 2-3 night stands per market). Whereas, in the US, on the 1987-89 Bad tour, MJ headlined arenas (mostly 2-3 night stands per market). However, because MJ hadn't toured the rest of the world since the late '70s, he was headlining stadiums just about everywhere else, especially since Bad sold almost as much as Thriller did in the UK, which resulted in a record-breaking 7 night stand at London's Wembley Stadium, playing to nearly 500,000 fans (he could've done 20 shows there if demand had been met!)...
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2020
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  14. DesertHermit

    DesertHermit Now an UrbanHermit

    Really?! You don’t mean ‘I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)’...How richly bizarre to have two supposedly (at the time) straight men singing this song together! Then again he was going to try to get Prince to sing “your butt is mine”....;)
     
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  15. Price.pittsburgh

    Price.pittsburgh Forum Resident

    Location:
    Florida
    I was more anticipating Def Leppard's Hysteria in 87 around the same time as Bad's release as a follow up to Pyromania.
     
  16. Graham 12" Remix

    Graham 12" Remix Graham Sylvian, Graham Gedge or Graham from Felt

    I was in the sixth form at school while Thriller ran its course with new singles popping up on the radio every few months. We all liked something on that album - somebody taped it for me - and there was a degree of respect for Michael Jackson and his music. Farewell My Summer Love had reminded us all of his raw talent.

    For Bad, this respect had completely disappeared from my peers. We had shared stories about oxygen tanks or Bubbles and commonly referred to him as Wacko Jacko. There had been a woeful single with Paul McCartney, and it certainly wasn't the cool kids who knew how to moonwalk like him. The first single with Siedah Garret seemed bravely aimed at a mature audience, but after that there was an endless stream of very similar singles with similar videos. It was music for kids; nobody whose voice had broken would have bought Bad.
     
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  17. Strat-Mangler

    Strat-Mangler Personal Survival Daily Record-Breaker

    Location:
    Toronto
    That McCartney single had come out before Thriller was even on the shelves... just so you get the chronology right.
     
  18. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member

    It’s odd that he went for such a weak lead single in I Just Can’t Stop Loving You. I wonder if that dreadful spoken intro was an attempt to tart up the song? In reality, Michael sounds like he’s peering through someone’s window late at night with his trousers around his ankles. Of course, later on he’d see sense and remove it.:)

    When I first heard the song, I had trouble distinguishing Jackson’s vocals from Siedah Garrett’s. She sounds just like MJ with a bag on his head.
     
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  19. Price.pittsburgh

    Price.pittsburgh Forum Resident

    Location:
    Florida
    Bad is a good album and geared with Mtv in mind. Thriller unexpectedly was made far bigger than it ever would have been because of Mtv. Bad, as well benefited largely from MTV as did plenty of albums that would have otherwise not sold as well as they did such as Thriller, Bad, Pyromania, Hysteria, Synchronicity, Sports, Faith, Born In The USA, Purple Rain, Appetite For Destruction, Permanent Vacation, License To ill etc.
     
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  20. telecode101

    telecode101 Forum Resident

    Location:
    null
    I would have been a teenager when that record came out and the "target market" so to speak, The record was very well marketed to my generation back then. CBS built up demand with the video and went from there. Sort of an extension to the spectacle of the long format Thriller video to MTV/music video masses. I do recall we kind of made fun and laughed at MJ in the video. The concept of this odd looking skinny whimpy dweeby guy surrounded by street gangs.. it was kind of funny and contradictory.

    But the record itself was very well received and sold like hot cakes. MJ was a super star and at the height of his pop king status at the time. The sounds on that record were so modern and cool and trendy. I had the LP and listened to it a lot but not as much as Prince's Sign of the Times as MJ was more targeted to straighter pop music fans and Prince was the "alternative" so to speak. .

    A few years ago I listened to the Bad re-mastered extended CD after not listening to it for a long time. The record has not aged well. MJ's Off the Wall and Thriller aged better. The sounds on Bad sound pretty cheesy today (to my ears anyway).
     
  21. Bink

    Bink Forum Resident

    I have noticed that the change in Michael's appearance has been mentioned a few times in this thread and I thought I would get my thoughts down.

    As the years go by I feel increasingly bad for what he must have gone through in those years. As was confirmed by his autopsy, he suffered from 2 autoimmune diseases:

    1. Vitiligo - a disease that affects the pigmentation of the skin and makes you vulnerable to sunlight.

    2. Lupus - a disease whereby the immune system attacks tissue and organs within the body.

    It must have been awful to deal with these while working in the entertainment industry at a time that was at it's most visual to date. In particular it must have been really hard to be the butt of lazy journalism and bad jokes on late night chat shows!

    The extraordinary thing is that when he revealed to the world in 1993 that he had Vitiligo most of the general public decided he must be lying. Even to this day I see comments online by people who believe that he deliberately changed the colour of his skin because he didn't want to be black.

    In terms of his plastic surgery, when asked how much he had he said only had plastic surgery twice. Most people reacted to this with 'are you kidding.......' That reaction is understandable, however I could imagine that he might separate the times when he chose to go under the knife from the times when he was required to due to the effects of Lupus.

    But what often goes through my mind is that these diseases are not exclusive to Michael Jackson. What must have gone through the minds of other people suffering from these diseases when people who are too ignorant to know any different were making jokes about the effects of these diseases?
     
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  22. MrBigFan

    MrBigFan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Scandinavia
    I remember very well when Bad hit the stores monday 31 august 1987 :)
    There was a two page review article in norway`s biggest newspaper that saturday...2 days before release and the review was VERY positive.
    So after work that monday I drove to my local record shop and bought the cd edition and I still have that cd.
    Sony did edit/change the music a little bit with the 2nd pressing of the album as many of you probably know.
    Bad is one of my all time favorite albums and there is only one song on it that I dont like and that is Just Good Friends.
    If it had been replaced with Streetwalker back then it would be a 100% perfect album IMO :)
     
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  23. George Co-Stanza

    George Co-Stanza Forum Resident

    Location:
    America
    I was too young to notice any hype, but MTV sure did play the heck out all of the Bad videos. I don't think most of the hits from the album have aged well, Man in the Mirror being the most obvious exception, so I don't think it comes close to matching the greatness of Thriller. I do think some of the Thriller songs aren't very good in retrospect, but Billie Jean and Beat It have both aged extremely well, IMO, and that helps the legacy of the album, which is pretty much set in stone already anyway.
     
  24. tspit74

    tspit74 Senior Member

    Location:
    Woodridge, IL, USA
    In my neighborhood (western burbs of Chicago) Bad was met with complete indifference. I remember the day of release, the local news did a report at a record store in a big mall to interview people buying the new Michael Jackson album on the day of release. I think 2 people showed up to buy it. I remember the debut of the Bad video during prime time. He looked like a weirdo and the general feeling in the Midwest after the weird Grammy night with Webster and screwing Paul McCartney out of his songs, was that he had become a serious fruitcake. The music seemed completely secondary to the hype. I was into Night Ranger and Yes in '87, so from a safe distance, the whole MJ saga seemed like a desperate, hype driven, freak show, full of hot air. Thriller was fun. Bad was just dumb.

    Absolutely nobody at school in Lisle, IL ever mentioned michael Jackson in 1987. He merely existed.
     
  25. 905

    905 Senior Member

    Location:
    Midwest USA
    I couldn't wait. I got the cassette for Christmas '87, and was content :pleased:
     
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