Michael Jackson

1987's Bad is Jacko's last stand before the bottom fell out of his career in the 1990s. The formula he perfected on Thriller remains intact: ridiculously catchy pop songs pocked with safe aggression and lots of yelping. "The Way You Make Me Feel" is ecstatic dance pop that's permanently engrained into our mind's jukebox. And despite Jackson's silly preening, the title track has a great bass line and new jack drums. Meanwhile, the faux noir "Smooth Criminal" is throbbing fun, and "Dirty Diana" finds our hero being seduced by an adult female.

Michael Jackson is a man. Agreed, he is a young man, emotional age about thirteen, with a
young man's interest in cars, girls, scary movies and gossip. But adolescent stardom,
Jehovah's Witnesses wackiness and unadulterated genius have kept this faux-porcelain
elephant man more childlike than any oxygen-tank sleeping device ever could. Bad is the
work of a gifted singer-songwriter with his own skewed aesthetic agenda and th... More >

Anybody who charges studio hackery is too narrow-minded to be able to hear pros out-doing themselves. Studio mastery is more like it, the strongest and most consistent black pop album in years, defining Jam & Lewis's revamp of Baby Sis as the mainstream and then inundating it in rhythmic and vocal power. But what made Thriller a miracle wasn't consistency--it was genius like "Beat It" and "Billie Jean" and the unknowable allure of the pure star. The closest thing to genius here is the CD-only "Leave Me Alone," which isn't all that close and also suggests what's happened to his allure--the more knowable he gets, the more f*cked up he seems. This is a record that damn near wrecks perfectly good dancin' and singin' with subtext. He's against burglary, speeding, and sex ("Dirty Diana" is as misogynistic as any piece of metal suck-my-cock), in favor of harmonic convergence and changing the world by changing the man in the mirror. His ideal African comes from Liberia. And he claims moonwalking makes him a righteous brother. Like sh*t. (Grade - B+)