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The new Michael Jackson single threatens to diminish the posthumous goodwill afforded the pop star.
With the investigation into his June 2009 death pending, the focus has been on the entertainer’s hits catalogue and musical excellence, rather than his peculiarities and criminal allegations.
And last fall’s documentary film This Is It cemented his image as a perfectionist and hands-on creative force.
But “Breaking News,” the first salvo from Michael, a collection of unreleased recordings due Dec. 14, is a self-referential rehash that spotlights all that was wrong with Mike.
The song opens with staticky snippets of controversy-generated media reports – “the plot thickens to destroy Michael Jackson,” “unauthorized biographies,” “the paparazzi would not leave him alone,” “a series of lies,” “here we go again, another lawsuit,” “more allegations against the performer” – before devolving into a thundering, CNN-style announcement of “breaking news.”
According to Sony Music, the song was recorded in New Jersey in 2007 and “recently brought into completion.”
No details are provided about Jackson’s collaborators, or the producers who massaged the final version, but musically, the track recalls 1991’s Teddy Riley-produced Dangerous and specific percussive elements and horn lines of “Remember the Time” and “Jam.”
Lyrically (“he wanna write my obituary”) the song is in “Tabloid Junkie” and “D.S.” territory with a paranoid Jackson blaming haters for his travails. Those tunes were on 1995’s HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I, released after the child-molestation rumours first surfaced in 1993.
And at the height of a narcissism that never defined his best work, the singer keeps saying his own name – “Everybody wanting a piece of Michael Jackson/The artists stalking the moves of Michael Jackson.”
A couple of Jackson’s nephews Tweeted that the vocals on “Breaking News” aren’t their uncle’s. They would know best, but it sounds enough like the icon outside his peak. These were, after all, the unreleased songs of an unrepentant perfectionist whom Quincy Jones remembers responding to the initial mixes of 1982's mega-smash Thriller with tears and threats to shelve the album.
There’s certainly lots of cutting and pasting here: Jackson’s floating trademark “hee hees” are out of sync with the lower, burnished choruses.
If Michael is similarly disappointing, Jackson’s label and executors will find a limit to these “Breaking News” lyrics – “No matter what, you just want to read it again/No matter what, you just want to feel it again.”
