The cover of Michael Jackson's "new" album Xscape is revealing. I don't mean that it's literally revealing—quite
the opposite, actually.
In the picture, the lower half of Jackson's
face is shrouded by some sort of intergalactic collar—a futuristic mesh
fraise that rises up from his clavicle and eventually culminates in a
silvery Saturnic ring encircling his entire noggin.
Conveniently
enough, the collar happens to hide all the bad bits. No more pinched
lips. No more cleft chin. No more blocky jawline. No more angular
cheekbones. And certainly no nose—the collar's metallic rim is tilted
just so, blocking that terrible, cartilaginous void from view. In the
end, all we're left with is Jackson's big, sad eyes—the one part of him
that always remained recognizably Michael.
But that's the revealing thing about the Xscape cover: what it obscures. I can't help but see it as a metaphor for the album as a whole.
Xscape is the second Jackson disc assembled by Sony since the artist's death in 2009; the first was 2010's Michael.
But unlike MJ's previous posthumous release—10 songs that Jackson
wrote, recorded, and reworked from 2007 to 2009 but never got around to
releasing—Xscape doesn't have anything fresh to offer. It's not a glimpse of what Jackson was working on post-Invincible (2001), his last studio LP. Nor is it a collection of archival ephemera and outtakes, like the Beatles' Anthology.
Instead, it's something else entirely: a meager batch of pre-1999
scraps and stray demos selected by Epic Records boss L.A Reid to be
"contemporized"—read: inflated, balloon-like, into something that will
sell—by Timbaland, Stargate, Rodney Jerkins, John McClain, J-Roc, and
various other producers.
In other words, Xscape is
a product—and that's exactly what it sounds like. I don't have any
problem with posthumous LPs. When an artist dies, he dies. He's not
around to have intentions anymore, or to suffer when his most
embarrassing effluences are made public, so what he may or may not have
wanted when he was alive—again, which he's not—is no longer particularly
relevant. Unless an artist explicitly prohibits something from ever
seeing the light of day, I say it's fair game. Any material that
enriches or enlivens our understanding of a dear departed genius like,
say, Michael Jackson, is well worth whatever discomfort its exposure is
not causing his corpse.
The key, however, is that it's the artist's legacy that's being enriched—not just his record label. Xscape doesn't
come close to clearing that bar. In fact, it actively works to obscure
the material Jackson left behind. As a result, it winds up obscuring
Jackson himself.
Don't get me wrong. Some of Xscape's
tracks are actually pretty strong. Despite a tepid demo vocal, "Love
Never Felt So Good," a 1983 collaboration between MJ and Paul "My Way"
Anka, coheres after a few spins into exuberant disco-soul earworm. It
wouldn't have fit on Thriller or Bad, but Off the Wall?
Totally. "Loving You," meanwhile, is ingeniously constructed out of one
jazzy, swooping key change after another—a maneuver worthy of the great
Marvin Gaye. "Slave to the Rhythm"—an ode to the working woman—is
Jackson at his socially-conscious best; Timbaland's skittering beat
neatly compliments the singer's staccato syllables about an inner-city
Lady Madonna who "dances in the sheets at night / dances to his needs,"
then "dances at the crack of dawn / and quickly cooks his food."
Other
songs aren't so successful. "A Place With No Name," Jackson's shuffling
rewrite of America's "A Horse with No Name," is aimless and flat. "Do
You Know Where Your Children Are"—an impassioned ballad in part about a
young girl who was sexually abused by her stepfather—seems ill-advised.
The title track is downright unsettling. "I tried to share my life with
someone I could love," Jackson sings, his voice almost disintegrating
with anger and paranoia. "But games and money were all she ever thought
of. How could that be my fault when she gambled and lost?" And most of
the contemporization sounds like what it is—an ostentatious, slightly
ill-fitting suit slipped onto a stiff.
But ultimately the problem with Xscape isn't
the particulars of its production, or even the fact that its mediocre
songs outnumber its better-than-mediocre ones. It's Sony's entire
approach to the project. Half of Jackson's genius was creative: his ear
for a hook, his ability to arrange an entire song in his head, his
expressive, elastic voice. But the other half was editorial. Jackson was
a perfectionist, and as he wrote in his autobiography, Moonwalk,
"a perfectionist has to take his time; he shapes and he moulds and he
sculpts that thing until it's perfect. He can't let it go before he's
satisfied; he can't. If it's not right, you throw it away and do it
over. You work that thing 'til it's right. When it's as perfect as you
can make it, you put it out there."
There's a reason it took Jackson 30 years to release his seven mature solo albums, from Off the Wall to Michael. He was working those things 'til they were right.
There's also a reason those seven LPs sold more than 180 million copies
combined—a per-album average that will never be equaled. The reason, of
course, was Jackson's perfectionism: his penchant, as collaborator
Will.i.am recently recalled, for being "very critical about every single detail"—for standing "in the studio himself, mastering and mixing everything."
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