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The Official Michael Jackson Thread
Topic Started: Mar 5 2009, 09:31 PM (3,940 Views)
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TickTock
Nov 16 2010, 12:24 AM
The album will be a success, as will all of his posthumous albums released once a year for the next 7. Michael's name sells. That's just a fact.

"Invincible" was so goddamn awful!!! That was the most expensive recorded album in history! He took 4 years to record it too. What a horrible album to go out on. "HIStory", has got to be his artistic best! I would love outtakes from those album sessions.
I love "HIStory" too. It was littered with incredible songs. "Invincible" was an almost total dud.
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HIStory has a few duds, but I also think it also had some of the best material Michael ever put out. He was angry, he had something to say and it was a strong album as a whole. It's a shame America was so unforgiving (even though You Are Not Alone was a #1 here, the album wasn't chock full of hits the way it was in Europe) because the album should've been bigger. I blame the price tag as a lot of people didn't want to pay for songs they already own to get the new tracks, and of his discography after he died, it had probably the least chart impression because of the price tag, even Blood On The Dance Floor did better on the US catalog chart in the aftermath.
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Randy Jackson: New MJ vocals are 'fake'

Randy Jackson has insisted that several tracks on Michael Jackson's new album do not feature his vocals.

The late singer's brother claims that a number of new songs on the album are not sung by Jackson, and admits he was immediately "suspicious" of the project when music bosses banned family members from visiting the studio while the tracks were completed.

In a series of posts on his Twitter page, he said: "Me and my nephew were the first to say that it wasn't his voice on some of the tracks. The family and the executors of the Estate, Branca and McClain, are not on the same page.

"I became suspicious about the album when I heard [that] armed guards were involved. Since my brother's passing, John McClain insisted that no family members were allowed at his studio where the project was being completed."

He continued: "My first thought was, 'What are they trying to hide?' Teddy Riley (producer) was brought in just to mix and insisted on switching studios, at which [point] he called me to come down and hear my brother's music.

"I heard the music and I immediately said it wasn't his voice. Some of the songs are him, and some aren't. I would bet my life on that."

Jackson also insisted that music bosses were being "harsh" and "more concerned about making money off his death".

He added: "They could care less about why and how he died, or maybe they already know."

Michael Jackson's posthumous album Michael is released on December 14.
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A new old song from "Michael" is streaming now. It's a Thriller era track called "Much Too Soon"...

http://www.ladyobama.com/2010/11/listen-michael-jackson-much-to-soon/
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Very nice song actually. I've liked all three songs so far from this album.
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Tragic!
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it's alright.
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NME review of the album. Pretty much spot on!


Album review: Michael Jackson - 'Michael' (Epic)

Not as terrible as you may think. I mean, we're not saying it's good, but...

When Will.I.Am of all people is denouncing your project on the grounds of taste and authenticity, you know you’re on shaky ground. When your lead single is a duet with Akon, you should probably just pack up and go home. Michael Jackson couldn’t do any of these things of course, because Michael Jackson is dead.

When you go in to listen to the posthumous album of unreleased Michael Jackson songs you’re met with a 10-page document that painstakingly details the narrative of how this record is authentic, genuine and tastefully in tune with the album Jackson was already planning. But really. Nobody treated this poor, desperate fucker with any respect in the later years of his life. Why would that vultures act any different now he’s not even around to have a say?

Then you actually hear the thing and you’re met with a bizarre rush of reassurance in human decency. Oh, it isn’t really very good, don’t be under illusions of that. But compared with the unnecessary, inauthentic and insulting mess it could have been, and judged against the level at which, say, Tupac Shakur and Freddie Mercury’s graves have been danced on, ‘Michael’ can actually be considered something of a win.

The songs here are actually complete songs. Not discarded offcuts recklessly soldered together with a few guest raps to cover the joins, but full compositions sung all the way through by Actual Michael Jackson. And evidently, his voice had endured. Sure, the vocals are treated to (excuse the phrasing) within an inch of their lives. But the gleaming falsetto, the rock howl and propulsive beatboxing are all, to different extents, intact.

Thirdly, the robotic R&B that defines ‘Michael’ is probably, more or less like what Michael Jackson would have been wanting to do in 2010. Amazing as it would have been to hear him toe-to-toe with Kanye, Minaj and Rihanna, it was never going to happen because he’s chosen Will.I.Am and Akon. And most of these songs are up to his more latterday standard. Just so, it’s a myth that he ever completely lost it: even ‘Invincible’ had ‘You Rock My World’ and ‘Butterflies’ on it.

And even Akon can’t completely ruin the single ‘Hold My Hand’, a tender mid-paced love song in the vein of ‘Remember The Time’, while ‘Best Of Joy’ and ‘(I Like) The Way You Love Me’ cover similar classy/boring mid-tempo R&B territory... ‘Monster’ revisits ‘Smooth Criminal’ territory only to be ruined by an inappropriate rap from 50 Cent, while the worst thing you can say about ‘Hollywood Tonight’ is that its catchy signature gets annoying after a while.

‘Keep Your Head Up’ is sentimental mush that makes up for its paucity of tune by piling on more and more strings and gospel, and ‘Breaking News’ is appalling, Jackson at his most ‘poor me’ unfortunate over a mess of confused beats.

But then something remarkable happens. You get to track nine, ‘Behind The Mask’ and it’s an absolute revelation, a swirl of psychedelic, orchestra-twinged R&B. Jackson howls a solid-gold melody at his fearsome best, and blippy production and robotic backing vocals dancing behind it. It could sit quite happily on ‘Dangerous’. It is actually brilliant. And then there’s ‘Much Too Soon’, a delicate, pared-down ballad that dates back to the ‘Thriller’ era, but gets you in the emotion-centres in the way that Jackson uniquely could.

On the balancing strength of those two songs, ‘Michael’ manages to dodge the bullet enough to be kind of enjoyable. But it’s worth remembering that both songs date back to the 1980s. It’s also worth remembering that this is the first in a reported 10-album deal over the next seven years. And if this decent-enough album is the best of the bunch, things are going to get ugly from here on in. Michael has his epitaph now. Tear up that contract, The Jackson Estate. Tear it up now.
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Well, it's better than anything on "Invincible", that's for damn sure!
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Only a couple songs impress me.

But in fairness how many "great" posthumous albums are there really? Most of the time they are leftover songs meant to serve the hardcore fans who don't want to let go more than anything.
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More 'new' Michael Jackson songs on the way after posthumous album

Producer Teddy Riley says there's more to come from the archives

There is more previously unheard material to come from Michael Jackson after the release of his posthumous 'Michael' album, one of his producers has confirmed.

Teddy Riley oversaw three songs on the album, which will be released on Monday (December 13). He said he was already signed up to work on the material.

"I look forward to doing the next one and I'm glad I'm on board," he told BBC Newsbeat.

The release of the 'Michael' album has been marred in controversy. will.i.am, one of Jackson’s former collaborators, slammed Sony Records for releasing the album, calling the release "disrespectful".

In addition, several members of Jackson's family have disputed the authenticity of his vocals on the record. Riley has dismissed the accusations, saying, "No-one could ever duplicate Michael."

Riley said he thinks the album would have Jackson's blessing. "It's what he would have expected us to do," he said. "If he was here he would have pushed us even more. It's an incredible record."

The album also features contributions from Dave Grohl, Akon, 50 Cent and Lenny Kravitz. It has already leaked on the internet.

http://www.nme.com/news/michael-jackson/54192
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Michael is going to make 2Pac's posthumous career look like nothing.

Let's not forget that earlier this year some 50 recordings he did for Motown in the early 70's were discovered in a vault, so they will also probably get released in the next few years too.
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Absolutely. I reckon within 5 years, his posthumous output is going to dwarf the volume of stuff he released when alive.
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The Guardian review. So that's why "Behind The Mask" is so much better than the rest of the material...it's a cover. :lol2:



Michael Jackson: Michael - review

Posthumous albums are nothing new these days, but Jacko's is odder than most, says Alexis Petridis

2 out of 5

There is, of course, nothing odd about the posthumous album. Their manner of production has been set in stone ever since the premature rock and pop corpses started piling up in the 60s: cobble together some outtakes, demos and incomplete tracks, tinker with them until they sound finished, present to the public. But "there is, of course, nothing odd about" is a phrase seldom used in conjunction with the late Michael Jackson: 18 months after his death, the World of Wacko can still be relied upon to bring the weird. So it is that the first posthumous Jackson album arrives with a press release not merely providing details of songs, plus a lot of guff that suggests that the Sony Corporation is essentially a philanthropic organisation dedicated to ensuring the personal wellbeing of Michael Jackson's fans, plus gripping insights from producer Ron "Neff-U'" Feemster into the both singer's working processes and his consummate skills as a conversationalist – "He was like, 'How do you feel?' I was like, 'I feel good.' I was like, 'How do you feel?' He was like, 'I feel good.' And he was like, 'Let's see what happens'" – but also a lengthy section informing the listener that it is actually Michael Jackson they're listening to, rather than, say, an Italian Michael Jackson impersonator called Ricky Galliano, performing in a secret studio in Lausanne, Switzerland at the behest of a shadowy figure from Bahrain. Sony has been forced to do this because members of the Jackson family have taken to Twitter to claim that at least some of the tracks on Michael are faked; indeed, members of the Jackson family did something similar when the film This Is It was released, claiming that the documentary footage featured a body double, a claim angrily denied by its makers.

By whatever means, This Is It did a pretty good job of suggesting that the man who was rehearsing for the O2 concerts was an artist at the height of his powers: no mean feat considering the welter of evidence to the contrary, not least the fact that he dropped dead from a heart attack midway through rehearsals, full of propofol and lorazepam. Michael attempts something similar, pulling in a host of contemporary R&B and hip-hop collaborators – Rihanna and Beyoncé producer C "Tricky" Stewart, Akon and 50 Cent among them – in order to suggest that, far from being a remote, peculiar and slightly disturbing figure, he was just one of the guys: another urban artist making contemporary R&B.

In fairness, Jackson had tried something similar when he was alive, by employing the producer Rodney Jerkins and a recording of the late Notorious BIG on 2001's woeful Invincible. Furthermore, he set some of these new collaborations in motion before his death. The Akon track Hold My Hand was nearly finished, and 50 Cent had already been contracted. Lacking any knowledge of what the late King of Pop might have actually wanted him to do on Monster – a lumpy attempt to recreate the atmosphere of Thriller's title track – the rapper opts to boldly break with the tradition of a lifetime by shouting gormlessly about murdering people to a background of gunshots. Alas, all attempts to normalise Jackson are derailed by the arrival of Breaking News, a mind-boggling bit of self-justification with a peculiar muffled vocal. "Am I crazy because I just eloped?" he demands imperiously, rather demanding the answer: no, mate, eloping had nothing to do with it – people started looking at you funny because you dangled your newborn baby over a balcony, had so much plastic surgery that your own mother said your nose "resembled a toothpick", had your hairline tattooed on your face, and all the other frankly strange stuff.

Michael's real problem isn't the late star's indisguisable weirdness, but a paucity of decent material. The best track, by some considerable distance, is a fantastic cover of the Yellow Magic Orchestra's Behind the Mask, which dates to the early 80s. For one thing, it's a better song than anything else on here; for another, the man singing it sounds utterly energised, which is more than you can say for the disembodied voice on Breaking News. Elsewhere, the ballads Best of Joy and Keep Your Head Up are as schlocky as anything on Invincible, and the Lenny Kravitz collaboration (I Can't Make It) Another Day is of exactly the standard you might expect from a track that failed to make the cut for his worst solo album. Only the surprisingly gutsy Hollywood Tonight does anything to assuage the feeling that, quite aside from his personal life, Jackson had been in an artistic tailspin for years before his death. That seems of a piece with the inadvertent message that Michael sends out: try as you might, you can't rewrite history.
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Eric Clapton did "Behind The Mask" and named an album after it as well.

I'm more looking forward to the vault material, which is where the true gems are hidden, the stuff that didn't make Off The Wall, Thriller, Bad, Dangerous and HIStory.

How about officially releasing State Of Shock with Freddie Mercury? I like it better than the Jagger mix.
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I received Moonwalker from Amazon UK (it hasn't been released even on DVD, much less Blu, in the US) and while it was a fun trip down memory lane, it was funny to see how big his ego was even in 1988. It was a fun 90 mins but if you're not a MJ fan it's annoying and self-serving.
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The new album has grown on me in subsequent listens. The second half of the album (barring Breaking News) is better than anything off Invincible IMO
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nothingfails
Dec 13 2010, 10:07 PM
The new album has grown on me in subsequent listens. The second half of the album (barring Breaking News) is better than anything off Invincible IMO
I totally agree. The second half is very, very strong. I even like Breaking News, even though it's not in the same league as Tabloid Junkie.
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Apparently, Michael Jackson’s posthumous album isn’t quite thrilling U.S. audiences. Despite finishing on top around the world in countries like Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, Michael debuted at No. 3 on U.S. charts, according to Reuters. The album has performed better even in Canada and Belgium, where it finished at No. 2. (It sits at No. 3 in Japan, and at No. 4 in Britain, France, and Denmark.)

Though Epic was anticipating a sales number nearing 400,000, Michael only sold 228,000 copies its first week. Music fans gobbled up 259,000 copies of Taylor Swift’s “Speak,” however, sending the young singer to No. 1. (Susan Boyle sits at No. 2 with The Gift, which picked up 254,000 copies.) More posthumous Michael Jackson albums and tracks are expected.
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Apparently, Americans have good taste this time around, no pun.
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