A shadow over Jacksons reissues
MICHAEL JACKSON’S HISTORY COMPROMISES A SET OF ALBUM RELEASES. IS IT POSSIBLE TO SEPARATE THE GROUP’S MUSIC FROM THE MAN?
TO L I S T E N to the music of Michael Jackson in 2021 is to enter a moral thicket. The 2019 documentary “Leaving Neverland” tells the stories of two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who claim they were sexually abused as children by Jackson. Robson and Safechuck’s testimonies lend further credence to allegations and criminal charges that dogged Jackson during the last decades of his life. (In a 2005 criminal trial, Jackson was acquitted on 14 charges in the alleged molestation of another boy, Gavin Arvizo, and Jackson’s family and estate maintain that there is no truth to any of the multiple accusations against the singer.)
In the aftermath of “Leaving Neverland,” some have made the case that Jackson’s music should be banned or shunned — that the least we can do for those who say Jackson victimized them is to de-platform their alleged abuser. There are those who may regard a newspaper article about Jackson’s music as tasteless, or worse.
Alongside the moral issues, there is an ontological muddle. Music is a hard thing to cancel. It haunts our daily lives, whether we like it or not; it literally floats through the air, wafting down drugstore aisles and blasting out of passing cars.
It’s difficult to conceive of the logistics by which “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” or “Man in the Mirror” could be suppressed. But if you were to somehow purge the planet of Jackson’s music, Jacksonism would remain.
Jackson, who died in 2009 at age 50 from a fatal mix of medications, was the definitive pop star of the last two decades of the 20th century; he transformed music and the recording industry in countless ways. To the extent that Taylor Swift, Drake, Bad Bunny, et al. are not just beloved recording artists but also global multimedia brands, they inhabit a universe that Michael Jackson made. A preteen pop fan, who was born after Jackson’s death and may never have heard one of his records, knows his music anyway. If you listen to the Weeknd’s strobe-lighted ’80s-style R&B or Dua Lipa’s discofunk, you’re hearing MJ secondhand.
In any case, Jackson isn’t quite canceled. In February, his old record company, Epic, and Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, began releasing expanded digital versions of all six studio albums by the Jacksons, the group Michael and four of his brothers formed in 1975 after the departure of the Jackson 5 from Motown.
The publicity push that has accompanied these reissues reflects the delicacy of doing Michael Jackson business, post-“Leaving Neverland.” Press releases describe the Jacksons as “avatars of an R&B/pop revolution,” while making only passing mention of the group’s lead singer, star attraction and creative driving force.
There is no denying the historical significance of the Jacksons’ output or that it has faded in public memory, eclipsed by both the widely beloved Jackson 5 records and by Michael’s titanic solo career. The music of the Jacksons was the bridge between these two eras. Their six albums document the emergence of a new sound, a different musical world. It’s a transformation that, sure, can be characterized as an R&B-pop revolution. It might be more accurate to call it the artistic flowering of Michael Jackson.
The story begins, like many record business sagas, with warring lawyers. In July 1975, Joe Jackson, the Jackson paterfamilias, held a
news conference in New York to announce that the Jackson 5 were leaving Motown to sign with Epic, a CBS Records subsidiary. Motown had made the group stars, but according to Joe Jackson, it had not made them rich, or not rich enough, given the income they were generating for the label. The move to Epic brought a breach-of-contract suit from Motown, which eventually won the rights to the name Jackson 5.
The plot was further thickened by a familial soap opera. Two years earlier, Jermaine Jackson, the group’s heartthrob and co-lead singer, had married Hazel Gordy, the daughter of Motown founder Berry Gordy. Jermaine opted to stay with Motown to pursue a solo career. A younger brother, Randy, was conscripted as a replacement, and the band was rechristened the Jacksons. In November 1976, a selftitled album arrived in stores.
The LP was touted as a breakthrough. The Jacksons had grown weary of the Motown factory system — the strict control of songwriting, production and other aspects of art and commerce exercised by Gordy and his amanuenses. At a time when many Black stars, including marquee Motown acts like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, were producing ambitious album-length experiments, the Jacksons felt stuck, typecast in a teenybopper role they had outgrown and doomed to a future of churning out albums on an old-fashioned hits-and-filler model.
Yet “The Jacksons” was hardly a radical swerve into new territory. For one thing, the group had not so much discarded its Svengalis as switched them up. The album was a joint venture between Epic and the label Philadelphia International, cofounded by the songwriting and production team of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff.
Gamble and Huff executive produced “The Jacksons” and wrote five of its 10 songs, and it sounds like it — the music is a jauntier, somewhat ungainly version of the duo’s lushly orchestrated Philly soul sound. Beneath the grooves we can detect marketing, a reassuring message aimed at Jackson 5 fans and, perhaps, their parents. The story is told by the song titles: “Enjoy Yourself,” “Think Happy,” “Good Times.”
“The Jacksons” went gold and spawned two hit singles, but it lacked the bite and excitement of the best Jackson 5 music. The most noteworthy song was the most unassuming, “Blues Away,” a loping mid-tempo vamp, nudged forward by Fender Rhodes and brass and strings, and delivered with breezy confidence by Michael, who had turned 18 that August.
“Blues Away” was Jackson’s first solo songwriting credit, and it held hints of things to come. Sonically and harmonically, it’s a near-dead ringer for the lead single from “Thriller” (1982), the Paul McCartney duet “The Girl Is Mine.” But the real revelation is Jackson’s singing. The feathery falsetto, the tremulous vibrato, the percussive gasps and whoops — the vocal style that would captivate the world in a few years’ time was drifting into earshot.
You could say it was the sound of a singer aging in reverse. On the Jackson 5’s smash 1969 debut, “I Want You Back,” Michael was an 11-year-old impersonating a soul man, emoting in the burly style of Wilson Pickett and Levi Stubbs. On “Blues Away,” Michael had slid into his upper register, and a childlike breathiness had seeped into his voice. The blend of sweet and rough — the high, guileless, often plaintive tone of Jackson’s pure singing voice interjected with hiccups, “hee-hees” and other grunts and respirations — is arresting and strange, a sound that didn’t exist before Jackson. Not even James Brown had conceived so original a way to disrupt melody with funk and vice versa.
Jackson’s vocals tilted increasingly in this direction on “Goin’ Places,” again produced by Gamble and Huff. It was a solid effort, but it stalled at No. 63 on the Billboard 200 album chart in November 1977, and none of its three singles cracked the Top 50. Michael’s own commercial slump was now half a decade deep. His four Motown solo LPs, released between 1972 and 1975, had met with progressively diminishing sales. His biggest solo hit, “Ben,” from 1972, was the maudlin theme song from a movie about a pet rat. (The song was given to Michael when Donny Osmond couldn’t fit a recording