Word: albums
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...back and he' s Bad ! Five years after the release of Thriller, Michael Jackson unleashes another megahit album...
There is just no getting away from Bad. Even before its official release date on Aug. 31, there were plentiful rumors and heavyweight expectations about Michael Jackson's first solo record in five years. Among other things, the new album had to meet and match his 1982 Thriller, which sold an unprecedented 38.5 million copies around the world and made him into a pop-culture phenomenon, part dancing phantom and part homeboy Kewpie. Bad's first single, a bonbon called I Just Can't Stop Loving You, was a perfect love ballad for parlous times: sexy but hygienic, passionate...
...which contains nine other tunes besides I Just Can't Stop Loving You (or ten, counting a bonus tune on the CD), further compounds the confusion. Like some fine-tuned racing car, it kicks up a lot of its own dust. The album's first video, a stinging 16-minute dramatic vamp on the title tune directed by Martin Scorsese, premiered in prime time on CBS last week and grabbed a 30 share. Set in a New York City subway station, it was in part inspired by the life of Edmund Perry, a gifted black graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy...
...redux, a spectacularly snazzy hang-tough tune that warns against macho excess. What the Thriller cut played for laughs, however, Smooth Criminal takes straight: an evocation of bloody assault, possible rape and likely murder. At any time, it would sound like a creepy song. At the end of the album, it has the effect of casting out all the optimism and willful idealism of Bad and Man in the Mirror and shrouding the record in a spooky, spiritual darkness. The piece is powerful, all right, but not perhaps in the way Jackson intended. It overpowers the joy of the playful...
Britisher Billy Bragg titled his last album Talking With The Taxman About Poetry after a 1926 poen by Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. But a typical Bragg concert, like the sold-out show last week at the Paradise, is more like "Talking With the Rock Star About Foreign Policy...