I know our culture and our media make too much of celebrity deaths. But when a true genius dies, that’s a big deal, whether he/she is famous or not. And MJ was indisputably a musical genius.
I’ve played and studied (and tried to write) music my whole life, and one thing I’ve noticed is that the absolute hardest thing to do in music is to write a catchy melody. There is nothing harder. I don’t say that based on my own experience of trying and failing at it—the evidence is on the radio right at this moment. Every songwriter in the world has spent the last year trying to write 2009′s “summer song”–this year’s “I Kissed a Girl” or “Umbrella.” So far, I haven’t heard a single melody that stands out as being catchy enough to fill that role. (Kelly Clarkson and Lady Gaga have come the closest, I think, though both of those albums have been out for a few months.)
We think of these giant songwriting factories churning out bubble-gum pop music for Britney and Justin and Rihanna, but the truth is, writing earworm pop hits is HARD, even if they’re formulaic. If it wasn’t, everyone would be able to do it and our Top 40 charts wouldn’t be so full of crap melodies.
So, writing a brilliant melody is extremely difficult. Pairing that melody with decent lyrics is even harder. Creating a winning combination of melody and lyric over and over is a feat only a few people on earth can do. And though he hasn’t done it in a while, Michael Jackson was among the best of those people.
His incredible list of songwriting credits is here, if you’d like to see which songs he actually wrote himself. The list includes Bad, Beat It, Billy Jean, Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough, Smooth Criminal, The Way You Make Me Feel, and others. (That link goes to a list of highlights, click the All Songs tab and sort by Artist to see the full list.)
Now then, even if he hadn’t been a performer, even if he’d spent his life in his basement writing songs for other musicians, I would have considered him a genius. But he was a superb vocalist. I wasn’t a fan of the vocal hiccups and stutters he overused in a lot of his songs, but go listen to some Jackson 5 records, or Thriller, or Bad, or that Free Willy song, or his Say Say Say duet in which he sings circles around Paul McCartney.
And yet, that STILL wasn’t the extent of his genius. He was arguably the best pop dancer/performer in history. Usher and Chris Brown are “good dancers” because they can imitate the moves he was doing almost 30 years ago.
Yes, he was a freak. Maybe he was a child-abusing sicko, I’m not sure. But even if you can’t mourn the death of the man, perhaps you can mourn the death of the genius, especially coming the way it did; after a long period of decline into craziness and irrelevance. A brilliant and creative mind like his deserved a better exit.
