Tense and agitated, Jackson turns his voice into a machine gun, reducing the verses to a hail of tiny sounds. Every piece of this song is in perfect place, the big brass punctuating each of Jackson’s heartfelt demonstrations of affection. The refrain sounds like confrontation, but in between the title’s repeated jabs come genuine sympathy: “You’re stuck in the middle, and the pain is thunder.” The song is Motown revisited, its roaming synth-bass a stand-in for James Jamerson, its edges rounded out with roving horn charts and gospel-tinged backing vocals.įour and a half minutes of unadulterated bliss, “The Way You Make Me Feel” cruises slowly on a rubberband bass line elevated by Jackson’s ecstatic whoops and yelps. The way his voice tumbles down the notes in the chorus is a master class in vocal delivery, and his pleading repetition of “Why? Why?” is the sound of quiet heartbreak. Simple, stark, quiet and beautiful and boasting a windswept synth-string part that Nas would later sample for “It Ain’t Hard to Tell,” “Human Nature” is one of Jackson’s most subtle and affecting ballads. But Jackson and Quincy Jones surround those lyrics with such spectacular robo-funk - that simple six-note synth riff rolling over and over, unmistakable and unforgettable - that it’s easy to miss the skeletons crouching in its shadows. This is, after all, a song that begins with something evil lurking in the dark, makes a brief stop at demon posession before ending with an army of zombies descending on their prey. “Thriller”‘s 13-minute video is so rife with camp charm it’s easy to overlook the song’s inherent, cheeky darkness. Jackson sounds agonized on the chorus, and Slash’s eerie descending arpeggios envelop the song like spiderwebs - one of Jackson’s more masterfully ominous numbers.Īnd speaking of masterfully ominous. Michael Jackson was often at his best when he was indulging a dark streak, and this strange, sinister number about obsessive love from Dangerous is all ice and shadows. As close to perfect as pop songs can get.Įvery Awful Thing Trump Has Promised to Do in a Second Term Eleven-year-old Michael’s voice on this tune is a wonder: aching and expressive like the best of his years-older soul peers, dicing up syllables on the verses and clinging on to long sustains in the chorus. What better place to start than at the beginning? If anything, this whirling R&B number sounds even better some 40 years on than it did when it was released. It’s those qualities that cement his legend as pop legend bar none. His vocal style was marvelously flexible, often favoring simple attack over cheap pyrotechnics, and he applied it to some of the most indelible melodies ever written. But whether chart-topper or quiet victory, what stands out about the best Michael Jackson songs is how the music mostly cleared the way for his outsized personality. There’s always going to be the one that got away - the shoulda-been classic that got dwarfed simply because his classics were just too towering to allow any runner-ups. Culling a playlist from an artist as estimable and earth-shaking as Michael Jackson is a monumental task.
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