Well if I am being honest I tried to do a video for this the other evening, but the signal was so rubbish that it just didn't seem to work. I say that but I bet there are now numerous videos on youtube with me attempting to do reviews.
First off I will point out that I am someone who became a teenager in the eighties, so the music of Michael Jackson is there from hearing The Jackson 5 (who eventually after moving to a different record label had to change their name to The Jacksons), through Off The Wall, Thriller, and so on... I even liked a lot of the Invincible album as well by the way, which many may look upon with disdain.
Anyway, the "Deluxe Edition" of the new Michael Jackson album. One can't help but be skeptical really because, let's face it, all of this posthumous stuff is what didn't make the cut initially isn't it. There are a couple of times where this isn't the case though I suppose.
There is no denying that the song Love Never Felt So Good is a hidden gem of a song. Co-written by Paul Anka, who also wrote My Way, the original recording sounds really nice with Anka's piano and Jackson's vocals, finger snapping, hand clapping, and whatnot going on. Three versions of the same song though is a bit over the top.
The opening song on the set is the Timbaland produced update that is all over the radio airwaves at the moment, and I don't mean the version that features Timberlike, I mean Justin Timberlake. There is a joke there really. The opening track is nice, but to me it suffers from something that is prevalent in soul/dance music (they call it R&B now apparently - I'm over forty, so R&B is Rhythm & Blues) - they should have thrown a real drummer on there, real guitarists, in fact - the crack Jacko team of musicians is still alive damn it. If you're trying to give it that classic 80's Jackson era sound and feel, then why not get those guys in to beef up what's there with real musician feel. That is my opinion on all of the updated material by the way - too much synthetic programmed stuff going down and not enough of raw real true musicians.
Anyway, yeah I think the opener is good. I get irritated by the "featuring Justin Timberlake" thing at the end because that could easily have been a single or release of it's own outside of the release of the album, or perhaps a bonus on a potential single - don't get me started on that kettle of fish about one song singles (why buy the song when I already own the album that it features on?)!
If truth be told I am glad that I have the deluxe edition because then I have the original Jackson recordings from back when they were initially put down. These I like very much. I like the fact that Place With No Name has the guitar from America's song A Horse With No Name in there along with everything else, and I think it's better than the update by the team known as Stargate (do they have to pay royalties to Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin?). As soon as the "update" started I thought "why does this sound so much like the song Leave Me Alone?" In a lot of ways this song is endemic of what irritates me the most about this album, and I will touch on that later as you will see. I will quickly add that if it were me working on the song I would have tried to keep as much of the original vision as possible, but I would maybe have edited the annoying (to me) alliteration where he is singing "take me to a place without no name," as opposed to what my head tells me should be "take me to a place (SLIGHT PAUSE) with no name" - I'd have possibly edited out the "out" bit of that work and restructured that line slightly (as shown) - easy enough to do, even for a hobbyist like me!
The only song that for me personally works perfectly in both versions is the title track itself, but I think that is mainly due to the fact that the update is the same person who worked on the song originally with Michael, so because they wrote it together it has that right there from the off. I must say that I prefer the original vision of the song again, and also feel that it would have been fantastic on either the album Invincible or what should have been a quick follow-up album. For someone so prolific recording and writing wise, Jacko was incredibly non-prolific with releasing material whilst he was alive (except when forced into it by the record label - the opposite to Prince at his height I might add, who wanted to release too much material in Warner Bros eyes). As a solo artist anyway!
Anyway, as this is a quick review I will sort of leave the actual CD itself there for now.
Now for the DVD that comes with the Deluxe Edition...
What a waste of time that was to watch. Although it was sort of interesting in a way, it didn't tell you very much except, and this is me as a writer/musician talking I suppose, to reinforce how much the producers and people behind the release for the most part absolutely threw their own selves into the creation of the pieces and disregarded what the original people who had created the songs had in mind musically, even Michael himself, for it is he uncredited playing the instruments on the original versions of Loving You and Do You Know Where Your Children Are, and perhaps some of them on A Place With No Name.
Instead, on the DVD all of them with the exception of Rodney "Dangerfield" Jerkins says that they just listened to the vocals (singing) without the musical accompaniment most of the time, because they didn't want their musical vision to be swayed by what was on there.
Excuse me, but isn't the job of a producer historically one of realising the artists' vision and not to impose themselves on them? That is incredibly presumptuous and, to be honest, only added to my dislike of the whole process in my mind.
In truth these people aren't producers but are artists, which is the world of soul music nowadays, where a "producer" puts their own stamp on something. You hear a piece "produced" by Timbaland, much as I like a lot of his stuff, you know it's been worked on by him. As an artist I like someone in the studio with me to offer suggestions, but it doesn't mean that they can take my song, come back with it, and then say "I've rewritten it entirely" - imagine someone going up to Black Sabbath and saying "I like the song, but I've got rid of all of the heavy guitars, bass and drums, and replaced them with a standard programmed beat, some twiddly beeping computerised sounds, and it's made it much more modern....
From the artist - "hey, what did you do with my song for crying out loud???"
Up until seeing the DVD I was going to be nicer to the album. If I didn't have the Deluxe Edition with the bonus of the original versions, then this CD would very much be thrown into a box and possibly never see the light of day. As it is though, I will listen to the Timbaland update of Love Never Felt So Good, the update of Xscape, and the original versions. The "featuring Justin Timberlake" version of Love Never Felt So Good is just a redundant unnecessary bit tagged to the end of the CD that, while sort of interesting, doesn't really do much except "ooh they've sampled some of Workin' Day & Night in there," and "well it is Justin Timberlake!" It doesn't matter, because being "Michael Jackson" means that people are going to buy the bloody thing anyway, and Mr Timberlake has, like a few, based his career on the inspiration of Mr Jackson anyway, so a few of his fans will have bought it anyway, possibly claiming how much like Justin that Michael's music sounds - much like some seventies rock sounds like Kings of Leon!
I thought the DVD could have given us more to be honest. Some archive footage of Michael perhaps in the studio working on these songs, some footage of these "producers" working on the songs as opposed to chatting with LA Reid about what they did and why they decided on doing these things. Why not a relatively in-depth say two hours of behind the scenes on the process as opposed to "let's talk about why you did this..." Well, I won't be watching that again!
Points out of five then? Well, I won't be awful because it isn't all bad (no pun intended I assure you). I will give the set a respectable three out of five due to the fact that it isn't actually a terrible thing. The updates are sort of interesting at times, but to my mind they are more like remixes.
Thank you for reading. Please take care.
PS - I was going to take a photograph of me doing the crotch grab thing, but I couldn't be arsed! :-)
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