Michael Jackson has got a new album out next week. I know, I thought so, too. It turns out that in the ghoulish world of modern celebrity, being dead is no obstacle to shifting product.
There is a whole army of producers, managers, engineers and glory-seeking collaborators queuing to help Jacko overcome the obstacle of having snuffed it two summers ago.
A posthumous film, This Is It, was the prelude to a posthumous recording career, starting with a dismally bland single, Hold My Hand, and now an album, Michael.
Where will this end? Who knows? Maybe they will get Michael to recreate that Thriller video, except this time without make-up. Work him from the back like a puppet; it is not so different to churning out this second-rate sacrilege in his name.
There is plenty more where this came from, though. Michael Durham Prince, a long-time engineer on Jackson records, worked on this latest release and sounded quite shameless about future plans.
Jackson recorded up to 30 songs for each album he made, applying ruthless quality control to release only the very best. Now he is safely out of the way, the vultures can feast on the carcass.
‘The focus is on this new album,’ says Prince, ‘but they’ve got so many wonderful things they can put out.’
No they haven’t. They’ve got the dregs, the detritus of a man’s recording career. They have the works in progress, the songs he rejected, pieces he was not happy with, for whatever reason.
Early reports of the album detail thin, flat vocals, key notes missed, dated melodies and sequencing errors: stuff that Jackson would never have let out of the studio had he been alive.
Epic Records claim that in a handwritten note in the possession of the Jackson Estate, Michael indicated he wanted the woeful Hold My Hand to be the first single for his next project. So really, they are just honouring his wishes.
How sweet. The fact this was an artist taking mind-blowing amounts of chemicals with a fragile grip on reality, and that the song in question was never completed in any way that would have constituted official sanction, is beside the point.
‘Michael was a perfectionist,’ says Frank DiLeo, his manager,
a job that apparently does not croak when the client does.‘But nothing made him happier than knowing people were getting enjoyment out of his music, and that outweighs the perfection.’
As, no doubt, do the 400,000 copies of Michael that are expected to be sold next week; in total, Epic will ship around 900,000 copies for the holiday market.
Death has always been joked about as a good career move in the music business, but this grim industry was taken to new levels by the posthumous marketing of the rapper Tupac Shakur. Tupac was gunned down on September 7, 1996, and died at University Medical Center, Las Vegas, seven days later. He was 25.
More than a decade later Tupac is bigger than ever. The six albums he made during his brief recording career — he was only active as a solo artist for five years and 11 months of that was spent in prison on a sexual assault charge — have been swamped by the eight released since his death, the most recent in 2006.
Tupac launched his own clothing brand in 2003, seven years after his passing, and in 2008, his estate made a profit of 15 million dollars. Considering that little goldmine, imagine how many tricks can be turned by the corpse of Michael Jackson now his career is in the hands of men with no concept of artistic quality control.
One of the songs on the upcoming album had led to claims from within the Jackson family that it is not even Michael’s vocal on the track.
No doubt there will be many more handwritten notes and self-serving explanations for every new release, each one inferior to the last.
Michael would constitute the sound of a barrel being scraped, were there not a good few layers of money-spinning crud to plough through yet.
So don’t buy the album. Leave it for the nutters, the hystericals and the completists, the ones who would consume an album of kazoo music by Bubbles the chimp, if Jackson’s manager could scare up some decade old diary entry in which Michael said he was considering turning it into a B-side.
Everything that Jackson wanted you to hear is already out there. Then he died. Let him be.
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