The Anticipation Of Michael Jackson's 'Bad' Album

I know you are describing the perceptions of the time, but just to pick up on your point about Paul McCartney, the only person that screwed him out of his songs was Paul McCartney. He was given the option to buy them and he declined so they were legitimately put on the market.

 

I was around 12 or 13 when Thriller came out and basically took over pop radio for a couple years. I was around 17 when Bad came out and worked in the mall next to a Record Bar and to say it was insanely hyped is an understatement. People thought it was going to be another Thriller and break all the sales records again. I'm a very casual MJ fan and I like those to albums but my favorite by him is Off The Wall. But I digress, yes, hopes were way too high for Bad because even though it was still a damn good album you can't catch lightning in a bottle twice. It was only seen as a disappointment at the time because of the excessive hype. I think now it takes its rightful place as MJ's 2nd or 3rd best album.

 

Sonic Youth "Sister" was just as big as "Bad"

 

I couldn't wait for the album to come out. I was 13 and a huge MJ fan. I remember buying the first single on 45, not loving the song, but being excited at hearing his voice again on sonething new, though the spoken intro was a bit odd. The weekend before release they played the entire album on our local radio station, interspersing new tracks throughout the day. I stayed glued to the radio, hand on the record button on the cassette deck everytine they played a new track. I ended up not hearing all the tracks, wanting something to look forward to when the album was released. The day it was released I called every record store and bought it that night on cassette. I watched the Bad video premier on CBS that night and taped it on the VCR. All in all, a highly anticipated album, the first of many i bought on release day.

 

True. But he had gone from young and talented to weird and ruthless.

 

Serious question: was it seen as a disappointment at the time?

Heck, here in the States, Thriller had two number 1 hits on the pop charts, while Bad had five (!!), so my thought was always that Bad was considered a worthy follow-up at the time, but an album that over time was considered somewhat of a disappointment once everyone saw how well Thriller aged well and how well Bad didn't age.

 

Not really a disappointment. But people wanted Thriller Part 2 so for those people it was a bit of a let down.

 

But how can one even describe what Thriller pt 2 would have even looked and sounded like? That would have sounded outdated in ‘87.

In the grand scheme of things, Bad has more songs that seem to have had a longer lifespan than Thriller’s.

 

Had he? I can understand the perception of him being weird and I have read that to a certain extent he encouraged some of these stories (elephant man's bones, hyperbaric chamber etc).

But ruthless? I am sure he had to have a bit of a ruthless streak to survive in this business. And he did take charge of his own career at age 21 when he fired his father as manager. But was he any more ruthless than any other pop star? In fact I wish he had been more ruthless. Maybe he could have rid himself of the leeches that fed off his success (and continue to).

 

Thriller was released when I was 9 years old. The second single (or, more accurately, the MTV video for the second single), "Billie Jean," is what prompted me to purchase the album on cassette. It was the very first pop album I ever owned. I didn't even have a boom box with which to play it so I listened to it for a couple of months on a basic General Electric voice recorder until a short while later when I got a KOSS Muiscbox (their version of Sony's Walkman).

As an impressionable suburban kid going on 10 years old, it's hard to overstate Michael Jackson's impact on pop culture at that moment. That school year, I had a Michael Jackson "Popfolio" (a folder for papers and notes) that I brought to school with me every day, my younger brother had a black version of Michael Jackson's "Beat It" video jacket, and I wore that jacket and a white glove that fall when I dressed up as Michael Jackson for Halloween. The full length video for "Thriller" was (and might still be) my favorite MTV video.

By the time Bad was released (nearly five years after the release of Thriller), I was 14 years old and had already begun educating myself in classic rock while also devouring soon-to-be classics like U2's The Joshua Tree and Guns n' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, and a very short while later, Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love and Def Leppard's Hysteria. I still purchased Bad (on CD this time) because of my affinity for Thriller but I never had the passion for it that I had for Thriller. And I didn't purchase Dangerous until probably a decade after its release.

 

As an aside, if anyone is going to call “Bad” dated in compared to “Thriller”, they need to listen to “Human Nature” again. That song is the most 80s song I’ve ever heard.

 

Prince.

I cannot believe it took until page 3 for someone to talk about how Michael Jackson’s core audience was lost to Prince in the five years between albums.

Thriller happened while I was a college kid and it was cool, well written dance music.

Then Prince came along with his guitar and Purple Rain rendered Thriller as soft and silly, I distinctly remember trying to give Thriller a second chance in 1985 and my girlfriend and I just laughed our asses off after thirty seconds.

Bad happened while I was in the third year of my executive career and it was embarrassing. I didn’t bother to buy it.

Michael waited too long to follow up Thriller and as a result he was steamrolled by Prince who had released Purple Rain, Around The World In A Day, Parade, and Sign o’ The Times in that span. Think about that.

 

Would have been nice to have that Prince-MJ duet, apparently cancelled due to a disagreement about who had to sing the "your butt is mine" line

 

If he had been more ruthless perhaps he’d still be alive.

 

This is totally untrue. I am/was a huge Pricne fan back then. Prince's audience was totally different than MJ's audience. MJ's audience was always a lot more "mainstream" compared to Prince audience who, you could claim, were looking for a more "alternative" pop artist.

Remember, MJ was around since Motown days. So he had the fans that were Motown fans and the fans of old 60s and 70s Jackson 5 Motown stuff. It's totally different than the Quincy Jones productions. They were not people that interchanged MJ for the Prince Dirty Mind persona (which IMO was heavily influenced by 70s funk artists -- the music of MJ has very look in common with funk rock. ) or the 1999/Purple Rain persona.

MJ's Bad was a contemporary mainstream pop album by a black artist. What Prince was releasing was not contemporary mainstream pop . SOTT or Lovesexy has nothing to do with MJ, or the other people that reined the mainstream music pop world in that era, U2, George Michael and Janet Jackson.

 

What I'm saying is that back in the day there was a huge swath of Thriller fans, not Michael Jackson fans. And when he decided to take 5 years to release a follow-up, Prince exploded on the scene and our taste in R&B changed from sugary fantasy dance pop to an edgy meaningful guitar pop. Prince meant something. He had a message. He was constantly challenging his audience to grow with him.

By the time Bad came around, it was embarrassing and outdated. By 1987 Beat It and Thriller were silly songs, just sugar pop from a bygone era, and we had 5 years of Prince, hundreds of songs that were so sophisticated by comparison that his new material like The Way You Make Me Feel and Smooth Criminal felt stuck in 1982. I had hoped that Michael's new album would be mature but he blew it, it was Thriller II at the wrong time. Janet's Rhythm Nation a few years later was fantastic, filled that MJ void for those of us who had one, but she was smart enough to work with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis who brought instrumentation and production that sounded futuristic.

 

This makes me wonder, what was the reaction to the Jacksons Victory album? Though Michael wasnt the focal point of the album, he did sing on four of the songs, what did the MJ fans think of those songs? Were they enough to satisfy fans waiting for new material? Also, going back to Bad for a second, I wonder if Dirty Diana was an attempt to make essentially "Beat It part 2" (another song with a hard rock guitarist, in this case, Steve Stevens, on guitar).

 

Sorry, not falling for that one. I still enjoy the majority of Thriller a lot, but Human Nature and The Girl Is Mine are both on my list of songs I will never listen to on purpose again. I think both made that list pretty quickly. LOL

 

The intro alone sounds like the theme song to an 80s family sitcom complete with tacky sweaters.

 

re: Thriller fans and not MJ fans . Yes, i think I understand what you mean. It's possible.Though in retro sppect, I still think Prince was a unique taste. He basically mixed a lot of American popular music together and added 80s imagery to it. If you listen closely to his releases, it really does owe a lot to Rick James as he was mixing funk and rock, except that Prince added more synth pop elements to it. I think people that were buying Prince Parade album and SOTT were buying it because they were Prince fans and stuck to him for his artisty, not his mainstream pop sensibility. SOTT had pop, R&B, rock, jazz and all sorts of music elements to it that mainstream fans didn't really dig. You really need to be a hard core Prince fan to dig The Cross. It's far removed from anything pop circa 1987.

IMO, by 87, Prince was an anomaly on the American R&B charts. He was far removed from mainstream R& B like people like Stephanie Mills and Freddie Jackson.

List of number-one R&B singles of 1987 (U.S.) - Wikipedia


I don't recall Bad being received as outdated or embarrassing. The production was crazy modern and top notch. I still recall the beats on The Way You Make Me Feel totally blowing everyone away.

 

Victory I recall piggy backed on the success of Thriller. I bought the tape and played it endlessly. I had no knowledge or understanding of what the Jacksons were or Jackson 5 .. all I cared about was MJ and how cool they dressed and moved. I had no clue who Mich Jagger was back then. I just played the tape a lot. MJ also sang on Jermaine Jacksons solo record as well around that time. There was lots of intrigue and mystery about who the Jacksons were.

Jermaine Jackson (album) - Wikipedia


Yup. that release did not age very well. Maybe 2 or 3 songs that are good no that at best.

 

I remember BAD as a huge seller and all single releases did very well in the charts,obviously it didnt sell as much as Thriller.
And for me I rather hear the guitar in things like Beat It,Give In To Me and Black Or White over anything Prince did.
I really like Purple Rain and a few others is ok but thats about it for me.

 

The thing is that it's not like Michael just disappeared between Thriller and Bad either. We still had Someone in the Dark, the aforementioned Victory album, Say Say Say, We Are the World, if anything, one could argue that Michael was overexposed between 1983-1987. To be honest though, I prefer Bad to Thriller, Smooth Criminal alone smokes most everything off Thriller.

 

I forgot to compliment you for the reference to an album that's the same age as me.

 

Uh, you need to listen to more, then. She Blinded Me With Science, Tainted Love, Shout, etc.