Michael Joseph Jackson, was the eight of ten children, born to Katherine Esther Scruse and Joseph Walter “Joe” Jackson. A mixture of dictatorial upbringing and musical submersion from very early childhood saw Michael grow up to be the preordained King of Pop. Whilst Michael is often remembered for his pet monkeys, llama’s, fifty shades of skin colour and Macaulay Culkin, his fifth solo effort was a pivotal album. In hindsight it was also the herald of a stratospheric rise which the musical Icarus paid with his life.
After feeling exposed as a self-conscious child star on CBS show The Jacksons, Michael decided that he was going to break free. Free from his father, free from his family name. Farewell to the Jacksons, Michael was ready to step into the spot light. On November 6, 1979, just as the album was starting to take off, Michael wrote a note to himself on the back of a tour itinerary, a proclamation of self so ambitious it could make Kanye blush. “MJ will be my new name, no more Michael Jackson. I want a whole new character, a whole new look, I should be a totally different person. People should never think of me as the kid who sang ‘ABC’ [and] ‘I Want You Back,’” he jotted down. “I should be a new incredible actor singer dancer that will shock the world. I will do no interviews. I will be magic. I will be a perfectionist, a researcher, a trainer, a masterer… I will study and look back on the whole world of entertainment and perfect it. Take it steps further from where the greats left off.”
Looking back, this note seems eerily like a suicide note from the joyous looking and sounding 21-year old heard on “Off the wall”. From the ashes of this young man would rise a golem, only barely kept alive by his musical breath, but ultimately an empty shell devoid of humanity.
“Off the wall” is a 41-minute foray into Neverland, the land of eternal sunshine and youth MJ longed for the rest of his life. It’s telling that he had his first nose job done the same year as the album was released. Although “Thriller” and “Bad” would prove even bigger commercial successes, they mark a descent into cynicism: more labored and catered for the masses, both those albums hardly exhume the sheer juvenile joy and innocence felt on “Off the wall”.
Michael’s career wouldn’t have soared to such unfathomable heights if it wasn’t for a few musical giants in his corner. One of them was Quincy Jones. Jones had already arranged and produced albums for Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Horn and Dinah Washington. In 1978 he produced the soundtrack for The Wiz, the musical adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, whose feature film version starred Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. During the filming he would spend his downtime with the likes of Woody Allen, Liza Minelli, Steven Tyler, and Jane Fonda at Studio 54. By all accounts, Michael didn’t take part in the club’s notorious orgies of sex and drugs, but he observed it, standing by the DJ booth and noticing which songs drew the biggest reactions.
“Our underlying plan was to take disco out. That was the bottom line,” the record’s Quincy Jones, said. “I admired disco, don’t get me wrong. I just thought it had gone far enough.” So Michael wrote his own disco anthems, but made them dense walls of sounds, interlaced with delicate layers of horns and strings whilst never losing the funk. This is heard on the first song Michael ever wrote by himself: “Don’t stop ‘Til you get Enough” muses on romantic love, something Michael had little experience with at that point. When Jackson’s mother, a devout Jehovah’s Witness, heard the song, she was shocked by the lyrical content, and felt that the title could be misconstrued as pertaining to sexual activity. Jackson reassured her that the song was not a reference to sex, but could mean whatever people wanted it to. It became Jackson’s first solo No. 1 in the US.
Five of the album tracks were released as a single. “Rock with you”, written by Rod Temperton, was first offered to Karen Carpenter, whilst working on her first solo album, but she turned it down. “Off the wall” and “She’s out of my life” also hit the top 10, making Jackson the first artist to have four top 10 hits from one album. According to Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal “She’s out of my life” risks stopping the album cold with its beat-less melodrama but ends up being a classic of the form, with Michael audibly moved to tears at the end of the song, his voice cracking. It’s an imperfect moment from a noted perfectionist, and Jones’ production handles the emotion with understated grace. “A lesser producer would have milked all that drama for all it’s worth,” says ?uestlove in the doc, laughing. “Trust me, if Puffy was producing ‘She’s Out of My Life’ he would have had… Kleenex sponsor the tour.”
Last single “Girlfried” was written for Wings by Paul McCartney. McCartney thought of “Girlfriend” as a song that Michael Jackson might like to record, and mentioned this to Jackson at a party in Hollywood. Jackson had stated in interviews with the music press in the 1970s that he was a fan of the Beatles and the chance to record a McCartney original helped to inspire his next project. Michael always said that he wrote the song for a platonic love “Paul and me… well… we wrote this song for my crush, she is a gorgeous singer, foreign and it is even better, you know?, because she has no idea of my feelings, and you don’t know how I long to do what I say… I will never say her name, that would be a crime”… In 1999 Barry Gibb said in a BBC Interview, he was talking about Agnetha Fältskog from ABBA.
Comparisons were made to Stevie Wonder, that other mercurial child prodigy. Wonder penned co-wrote “I can’t help it” and is heard playing the keys on the eight track of the album.
In 1980, Jackson won three awards at the American Music Awards for his solo efforts: Favorite Soul/R&B Album, Favorite Male Soul/R&B Artist and Favorite Soul/R&B Single. That year, he also won Billboard Music Awards for Top Black Artist and Top Black Album and the Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance. Despite its commercial success, Jackson felt Off the Wall should have made a much bigger impact, and was determined to exceed expectations with his next release. In particular, Jackson was disappointed that he had won only a single Grammy Award at the 1980 Grammy Awards, the Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance. Jackson stated that “It was totally unfair that it didn’t get Record of the Year and it can never happen again”.
The writing was on the wall: Peter Pan had written his farewell letter, Golem was to take dominion in Neverland. The demise had begun.
I love the smell of vinyl in the morning 