Michael Jackson lives

Two things happened this week in my life as a Michael Jackson fan. First, Spike Lee threw an awesome birthday party for MJ in Prospect Park for the second year in a row. I hope he does it every year. Snoop came and did a set, and so did Warren G. I had a lot of fun.

The rest of the photos in this post were taken by my sister at the party.

The other thing that happened is that I discovered the Michael Jackson a capella archive on Hip Hop Is Read. A capellas are versions of a song with just the vocals isolated (though the MJ ones include some instrumentation too.) Getting access to these things set me off on a furious wave of sampling and remixing. Enjoy the results below.

The a capella for “Jam” has this awesome electronic percussion which sounds great over the breakdown section from “PYT.” So that was a no-brainer.

ABC Jam by ethanhein

“Jam” vs “ABC” vs “PYT” vs “Blame It On The Boogie”

mp3 download, ipod format download

My friend Julia observed that a lot of the a capellas are for MJ’s relatively lame last few albums. She thought it would be interesting if I showed those songs some tough love, as she put it. It felt like a good challenge. I’m less familiar with that late period stuff, so it was easier to hear the vocals as musical raw material without being hung up on their original context. I think this is by far the best of the three tracks I did, it has the most of myself in it. For percussion, I used drums from “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” along with an atmospheric beat by Aphex Twin and some hand percussion by Glen Velez.

Like A Comet by ethanhein

“Gone Too Soon” vs “Earth Song” vs “HIStory” vs “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” vs “Weathered Stone” vs “Golden Seal”

My fantasy for the future of music is that every song gets released in stem format with all of the tracks separated out and conveniently sliced at all the rhythmic events. At this point I mostly view legal high-quality downloads and compact disks as a way to get access to decent-sounding samples. MP3s get a little crunchy with all the compression and decompression. What do you say, copyright holders? Want to make life easier for me? Or do I need to keep scrounging stuff off the web?

I really feel like recorded music belongs more to the fans than the recording artist. It’s weird and creepy the way music fans want to possess their idols — I’m as guilty of this as anyone. But there’s no harm whatsoever in wanting to possess recordings. The desire to repurpose the ideas that excite you is where all art comes from.

The greatest curse and blessing of Michael Jackson’s life was the insane degree to which he belonged to the fans. He never had a chance of developing a personality independent of his absurd fame. In the aftermath of his death, the saddest thing I heard anyone say on TV was when his friend Gladys Knight observed (I’m paraphrasing from memory):

We did this to him. We made him so famous. We just kept taking little pieces of him. Look what we did.

The only good thing about MJ’s untimely death is now we can focus our desire to own him where it belongs, on his music. Legally, ownership of the songs still belongs to MJ’s estate and creditors, but emotionally, we the fans are in charge of MJ’s legacy. I hope we’ll treat it well.

6 thoughts on “Michael Jackson lives

  1. The thing is, I really don’t like most of the 90s stuff (who does?) because the execution is crazy flawed, but the raw material is often really awesomely twisted, and could have been genius in the right hands.

    Here’s a new sonic challenge for you to take on at some point in the next, like, ten years: you know, right, that MJ was a fantastic beat boxer (Stranger in Moscow, 2Bad, Money, lots of demos)? So is Tom Waits (_Real Gone_ has a lot of good examples of this, as do some things on _Orphans_). Discuss, in the manner that you see fit.

    • There’s something interesting to me about the work of great artists after they’ve gone off the rails. I agree that MJ’s later stuff is pretty lame but it certainly suggests some interesting roads not taken. Reminds me of 80s Miles Davis, which is also pretty terrible in execution but fascinating in conception.

      Yes! The beatboxing. Love the beatboxing. I read that MJ wrote songs by improvising in the tape recorder, and that he beatboxed all the drum/percussion parts. The beatbox passages on the a capellas are fascinating. Combining that stuff with Tom Waits is an EXCELLENT idea. Hopefully it won’t take me ten years.

  2. Is there really any aspect of the creative process that doesn’t boil down to therapy? And/or trying to impress potential mates? I doubt it.

    I’m delighted to learn that MJ was such a NIN fan. You must be the world’s leading authority on MJ’s 90s output. I’m going to have to check some more of it out.

  3. Ohh. Gosh, I’m sorry The creative process as therapy, take n+1. Well, Janet hasn’t seen _This is It_ either.

    Another thing I just remembered having read: _Downward Spiral_ was apparently MJ’s favorite album of the 90s. Doesn’t “Morphine” sound a lot like “Mr Self Destruct”?

  4. MJ vs NIN sounds like a perfect mashup project. And I have a couple of Aphex Twin samples that sound good under pretty much everything.

    Yeah. This Is It. I have a lot of difficult emotions with all this that go beyond MJ. My dad, who was also named Michael, also died suddenly and unexpectedly, at about the same age. So MJ is all wrapped up in the PTSD from that. Doing all the writing and remixing helps me process. I’m sure I’ll get to This Is It long after everyone has stopped caring.

  5. So I’m just now reading this, and I hadn’t realized that was an Aphex Twin beat. Which makes perfect sense. Someone at some point in the zillions of things that I’ve read commented on how late-period MJ never found a producer that suited him, and I think that person suggested Aphex Twin or Trent Reznor — inspired choices both, since they would’ve instantly had a handle on the pop implications of the dark and aggressive stuff (much of which sounded a little bit silly, maybe since MJ himself couldn’t find the right note with a lot of it).

    Also, don’t tell me that you _still_ haven’t seen _This is It_. I don’t even know what to say to that.

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