In a YouTube video of a dance to “Smooth Criminal,” a user commented: “ As a dancer, I think this is one of those songs where you don’t need to “learn” the choreography created for it. It’s because the dance moves are already there and you just have to recreate them for the audience .”
This is also what the author of “Smooth Criminal” – King of Pop Michael Jackson once shared: “ I don’t create dances, they actually form themselves. Dance is a way of expressing yourself in physical form. You become a part of the music. Like when I turn into the bass of “Billie Jean”, I can’t help but move my feet because that’s what the bass tells me to do .”
Of course, the above words are for those who have more or less skills and experience in dancing. However, Michael’s music is indeed created as a “stimulant”, making the listener receive it through hearing, awakening the muscles and then transforming it into movements of the head, legs, arms and even the whole body to the rhythm of the magical music!
I recently turned on Michael’s Blood On The Dance Floor / HIStory In The Mix (1997) album to try it out again. This is an album I haven’t listened to much because the remixes of some tracks from the previous HIStory album are in the second half of the disc. However, with the original songs, I like the melody of the song of the same name, “Blood On The Dance Floor”, I really like the sad melody at 2 minutes and 48 seconds between the heavy industrial music of “Morphine”, Michael’s signature falsetto singing in “Ghosts”, the ghostly harmony in the chorus of “Is It Scary”.
On this listening, I just got a genuine copy and experienced it through a set of speakers with quite good quality. And I suddenly realized that the song “Blood On The Dance Floor” has an excellent mix. Although the sound of the instruments is recorded quite thickly, each track has a distinct and extremely sharp timbre. The drums are clear and crisp and the bass is extremely strong without blurring the other electronic sounds. Although this track was co-written and produced by Michael with Teddy Riley back in the Dangerous album, its electronic timbre really does not fit the musical color of Dangerous and is completely reasonable when combined with the remaining songs.
However, there is one common point of the music Michael created at this time, going back to the period when he was free to create with Off The Wall (1979) – the first solo album released by Epic Records, that is, almost all the songs that Michael put on the discs brought a stimulating musical atmosphere to the listener. To do so, in addition to each instrumental track being recorded clearly, with its own unique timbre, in general they were all skillfully interwoven.
As Michael Jackson said about his music and dance that I mentioned at the beginning of the article, the dances are self-expressive like the musical language is compelling.
Here, on the album Off The Wall, the main track of the album, “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” is a disco-funk song that opens with a staccato bass line and a steady shaker. It’s the sound of those two instruments playing “out of phase” in a funky style that makes the singer’s and listener’s hands and feet feel itchy. Then BUMMMMM, the instruments from the strings, the drums with the echoing cowbell, the guitar playing the melody of the chorus, all come together. Then the brass section is added in between other instruments, just like the way Earth, Wind & Fire produces their music. You can imagine your feet can dance to the steady beat of the drums, but your waist, arms and head can all sway to different instruments. Even just following the rhythm of 1 to 2 instruments in the recorded track layers of the song is enough to create a vivid visual image of the auditory impact.
And you know what? Not only the lyrics, but most of the melodies and rhythms of the instruments were composed by Michael Jackson.
In the Off The Wall album, if you read the credits, producer Quincy Jones will list Michael as a co-producer for the songs he composed. The reason is because Michael did not simply create the vocal melodies, but he was the author of many musical lines played by drums, percussion, bass, other instruments, and even the recorded strings.
Michael didn’t know how to read or write music. But his musical sense from a young age and the practice sessions his father gave Michael and his brothers during the Jackson 5 days nurtured his ability to create a song that was about overall harmony rather than just a melody track for vocals.
Michael wrote the song like this: he recorded the melody on a cassette tape, added beatboxing to represent the rhythm of the song, and imitated the other instruments, all in his voice, so that the recording engineers would understand not only the rhythm but also the harmony of the song. In the demo of “Beat It” on the Thriller album (1982) , the listener can hear the notes of the chords, then the harmony and melody, the bass and drums, all created by Michael’s ability to transform his voice. As a perfectionist, Michael wanted the musical ideas that came to his mind to be translated exactly as he envisioned them. That’s why Michael even sang every note of each chord to a guitarist who played it back to the fullest. So it’s no surprise that Michael used his voice to sing the entire string arrangement, complete with pauses and full musical phrases, so that those in the studio could copy it exactly onto their instruments.
Thanks to the way he composed and produced, what we hear in Michael Jackson’s music is largely the idea of this great artist alone. When Michael focused on polishing every note in the melody and rhythm of each instrument, he breathed life and personality into each instrumental track. Because deep down, what Michael ultimately wanted to convey was that every sound we hear is a stimulating element that no one can sit still.
It could be a head bob up and down like Michael did when he sang “ Annie are you okay? ” or a shoulder shake to match the sharp snare on “Smooth Criminal,” or a finger snap to “The Way You Make Me Feel” on Bad (1987) . It could be a sideways head bob with the shoulders down in “Remember The Time,” or a swing of your arms and legs when the tap comes in on “Jam” on Dangerous (1991) . Or you could start to stand up and want to slide your knees forward on the floor like in “Scream,” or a vigorous body shake to the fills on “2 Bad” on HIStory – Past, Present And Future – Book I (1995) .
Making music that inspires dance so effectively is no easy task. In the song “Billie Jean” on the album Thriller that I wrote about before, what I didn’t mention is that the 29-second long opening section of the song consisting of only drums and bass was once suggested by producer Quincy Jones to Michael to shorten it so that it would be easier to attract the listener’s attention when they first heard his voice. However, Michael insisted on his point of view because that intro inspired his feet to want to dance. If the steady drum beat leading the song creates a sense of tempo and basic movements, then when the bass line kicks in, it’s like the shaking of the feet and then the synth sounds intermittently, urging the upper body to bend.
That’s because each instrument doesn’t go together in tempo or pitch. They appear one after another to create surprise and freshness, an element that Michael pays great attention to because it inspires the dancers to create different movements in each different piece of music.
In the song “Bad”, the harsh opening melody line shows the “personality” of a song with a name that is not simple at all. Then the bass plays a rhythm of 3 quarter notes followed by a fast eighth note twice as fast and the rests in between make the rhythm jerky, like the tentative steps of the “bass character”. Then the pre-chorus is rushed to transition to the chorus again in a different rhythm when the vocals sing out of beat with the drums, creating different musical pieces that the choreography can naturally change to. Fill lines with drums or harsh instruments are always Michael’s favorite because it will create high stimulation for the extremely beautiful accents when performing.
Likewise, his songs often have verses – pre-chorus – choruses and then bridges with different tempos and pitches. And most of them are used to build up the tension of the song before reaching the satisfying climax of the chorus.
Up until the album Dangerous, after Michael took the initiative to separate from Quincy Jones, he still brought the same visual music style. The difference from this album, besides the New Jack Swing sound in the song “Jam”, or the car horn sound instead of the snare in “She Drives Me Wild” that Teddy Riley brought in the production, from Michael Jackson’s side, he also followed the direction of creating contrasting strong / soft musical parts in the same song. In “In The Closet”, the opening has a sensual color contrasting with the strong drum part appearing, then turning to the quiet music, continuously like that as if the song makes the body of the performer (and even the listener) stretch out at the quiet parts and shake again to dance at the fast music parts. Furthermore, Michael’s songwriting also creates musical contrast when he interweaves sparse, rhythm-heavy verses with choruses or post-choruses filled with falsetto melody to soften the song, just as he did so perfectly on “Who Is It”.
More creatively, on HIStory, on “They Don’t Care About Us,” Michael elevates the drums to a Jamaican dancehall rhythm with sharp percussion and claps. He minimizes the harmony for most of the track, placing the drums and vocals in two-note phrases to emphasize the beat. Softening synths only appear in the post-chorus sections when the melody is more pronounced. But the sound explodes even more strongly when it comes to the instrumental break, the snare hitting early before the downbeat at the beginning of the measure, then waking up the listener, as if a sudden gunshot had sent the crowd into a frenzy, expressing the spirit of the song’s anti-police violence message.
All the musical changes in these songs are meant to evoke body movements, and by “They Don’t Care About Us,” it seems to be more than just dance, it’s a rebellion of oppressed people.
Michael Jackson’s sophistication did not stop at his music, or his gifted voice. It was the way he used his voice as more than an instrument to express the meaning of each song.
We all know Michael Jackson’s powerful yet smooth vocals from his time with the Jackson 5 onwards. With songs like “Ben”, “Who’s Lovin’ You”, “Got To Be There”, and later “She’s Out Of My Life”, “Lady In My Life”, “Liberian Girl”, “Heal The World”, “Earth Song”, “Little Susie”, “Speechless” and more, Michael could write and sing sweet songs that touched the hearts of listeners. However, he also changed his style and made a big difference since his debut on Off The Wall when he pursued a relatively fast-paced musical style to match his ability to perform while dancing and singing that no other artist has ever matched. Therefore, Michael’s voice in such songs has another layer of personality. It is emphasized according to the rhythm that he wants to express on the vocal track. As a result, the syllables sung are not always sustained, but are mostly paused quickly to give weight to each word/syllable that is stressed. So in some songs written by other composers for Michael, they had to write the lyrics with many notes to give him the opportunity to create a suitable rhythm.
The way he pronounces the lyrics is also changed flexibly, even if the word is pronounced incorrectly, for example, “ come on ” will be sung by Michael as “ cha’mone ” or “ shamone ”, with the purpose of making the timbre more stimulating to the ears. Not to mention the many “ hee hee ”, “ hoo hoo ”, hiccups and beatbox sounds he creates to become an indispensable part of the instrumental part of the song. We can see that these moments of emphasizing the lyrics, these improvised accompaniment sounds not only create surprise but also greatly support in increasing the attractiveness of the performer.
For example, in the Jabbawockeez ‘s performance of “PYT (Pretty Young Thing)” on America’s Best Dance Crew in the first season, in addition to their clever combination of Michael’s signature moves with new dances inspired by the song’s melody, the Jabbawockeez were smart enough to push the bridge in to create emphasis for the performance. With the rapid 1-2-3-4 rhythm of the lyrics ” Pretty young thing ” and ” You make me sing ” (recorded by Michael with a distorted vocoder to sound so robotic that the lyrics were unrecognizable), the clear, unadjusted syllables immediately following it are ” uh! ” like a very strong exclamation on just one beat and ” ha, ha, ha ” sounding like a breath on three beats, both odd beats after the two lines above, giving the song a very nice dissonant transition in rhythm and tone. Taking advantage of that syncopation, the members of the Jabbawockeez lean back to the sound of “ uh! ” and then bounce up and down to the breathy “ ha, ha, ha ” creating a visual performance that matches the music.
In 1994, Michael Jackson was accused by a musician named Crystal Cartier of plagiarizing her music for the song “Dangerous” after Michael heard Crystal’s demo tape. In addition to affirming that he did not know the musician and had never heard the demo tape, Michael said that he had composed several hundred songs since the age of 7, specifically 60-70 songs for the Bad album and 70 songs for the Dangerous album that were not used. When describing the composition process by recording his voice on cassette tape, Michael calmly beatboxed the bass lick of “Streetwalker” (which later served as inspiration for “Dangerous”) in court. Talking about the composition process of “Billie Jean”, he performed each layer of music he recorded, starting with the classic bass lick, followed by synth sounds for the chords he heard in his head, and then the melody of the song; All of which Michael beatboxed/sung in court with perfect pitch and tone. And as the judge asked about the writing process of “Dangerous,” Michael clearly described the rap verses and the B-section that bridges the chorus, all of which he sang acapella with his own percussion in front of the jury.
It was therefore no surprise that the court ruled that Michael, along with his two co-writers, sound engineer Bill Bottrell and producer Teddy Riley, had not had sufficient evidence of plagiarism.
It is also worth mentioning that in court, Michael said that everything he composed, from the melody, lyrics, to the drum beats and instrumental licks, all appeared in his mind as “characters” with their own personalities standing side by side to form a comprehensive sound and image. Therefore, the choreography has been and will forever be an inseparable element of the King of Pop’s music, which has greatly inspired countless generations of artists to come.
RIP Michael Joseph Jackson (29.8.1958 – 25.6.2009)!
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