Michael Jackson “HIStory”
I imagine if you were listening through Michael Jackson’s discography without the knowledge of what was going on in the tabloids at the time, you’d be very confused when you got to “HIStory”. It’s the album where he hits the tipping point, where his work becomes a very defensive offense against his attackers and where he loses the thing that got us dancing in the first place. It is so much a response to “Michael Jackson, the child molester” headline that, if you remove the context, some of these songs are just skeletal thumps and ‘hee-hee’s” echoing in the dark. “HIStory” is either awash in the goopiest of ballads, pleading for empathy, or screaming at Michael’s oppressors through dizzyingly syncopated beat-driven Pop. He’s really turned into your angry Uncle who cries when he’s drunk.
The bi-polar quality of Jackson’s writing is not entirely new. The model is there in “Beat it” and “The Lady in My Life”, the hot and cool sides of his peak performance in “Thriller.” But this level of anger is really something different. Michael was always insisting that he was Bad and Dangerous, but it was Halloween dangerous -- you never believed it. 1995 Michael is really angry, you do believe it, and it’s spoiling the party. Jackson is trafficking in Black Flag-level rage, but stuck in an idiom that requires some lightness to get the feet moving. “HIStory” is Pop music for mosh-pits. But what club do you go to to dance to it? And if you haven’t been reading 1995 tabloids, how do you know what you’re dancing to? It’s all quite literally a tragedy. But it’s also tragic artistically, because there was a lot of talent on display in “HIStory’s” new material. It is MJ, after all. Out of his blinding pain and melodic instincts, Michael Jackson developed something new, but it’s not anything anyone wanted. It’s diseased pop.
“Scream” opens the album and sets the claustrophobic “I’m wearing yellow-tinted sunglasses, why is everything yellow, dammit” tone of the album. Janet’s strong, feminine voice is a welcome contrast, because this song is full of a clanging metal, broken glass, and futuristic squawks that insist that it’s the latest thing. A killer beat drives “They Don’t Care About Us,” which manages to be both angry and pleading, pioneering a new mode for Michael: the scream-beg. “D.S.” is one of the real mysteries. The song refers to Dom Sheldon, but is actually a song about Tom Sneddon, the DA who pursued Michael for child sex abuse accusations. Even Michael realized Dom Sheldon was a terrible name for a song, so he abbreviated it to the enigmatic “D.S.” It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Dichael Sackson is pissed. This is truly an inside baseball song. The beat is tough. There’s a guitar solo by Slash from Guns n’ Roses. But there is just no way you could get into this song without being or having been constantly in the presence of Dichael Sackson. And there lies this album’s problem. This pop star is hurting, but in a very specific way that is very difficult to universalize. “Don’t you know what it’s like when the cops bust into your on-site theme park and make you show them your wiener to see if it fits the description?!“
Did I mention that these beats are out of control? This is evidently what gazillion dollar songs sound like and you’d have to be dead not to be impressed. “Tabloid Junkie” came on and I was halfway up to the dance floor before I realized what it was about. All this singing about his persecution really shuts the jam down. Michael’s full, deep embrace of himself as victim is what undid his gift. “Little Susie” is a ballad based on the real 1972 murder of a neglected girl named Susie Condroy, who was tossed around until she went to live with her sexually abusive Grandfather. A burglar breaks into their house and kills her. I’m surprised he didn’t add that the burglar’s name was Dom Sheldon. Michael clearly sees himself in this murdered child, and pines for the girl who sang a tune so that someone might “feel her despair”. All the slow songs on the album are like this: they really need you in a way that makes you want to run for the hills.
Michael’s need to push the sales numbers and keep his Pop throne were likely the reasons why his most personal, revealing album was paired with a Greatest Hits package and given the confusing title “HIStory: Past, Present, Future”. The plan backfired, and a lot of people missed that there was an entirely new, original album on the second disc. It’s a shame, because this music is nothing if not singular. “HIStory” contains a classical requiem, a creepy La-La song to a music box, a Biggie Smalls rap, sweeping environmental activism, a “We are the World” pep-talk for humanity, and those sick, sick beats. All orchestrated by one of the greatest talents popular music has ever known. Yeah, it’s complicated. Probably much worse than that. But like the thirty foot statues of himself he had erected to promote the album, there will never be anything like this again.