HERE'S A COUPLE OF ARTICLES I THOUGHT MIGHT BE OF INTEREST...

How Billie Jean changes the world
Thursday July 12, 2007
Joe Queenan
Guardian Unlimited

There are four kinds of pop stars: the ones that work hard at remaining cool and stylish and vaguely hip long after their careers have plateaued (David Bowie, James Brown, John Lennon, Cher); the ones that gracefully enter middle age and assume the role of living legend/elder statesman (Neil Young, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan); the ones who never understand that it is time to get off the stage (Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart); and the ones who simply lose their grip and drift off into the void (Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson). Members of the latter group often become so strange, so pathetic, so self-destructive that it is hard for people who come after them to believe that they were once colossi who ruled the world. But Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson were indeed colossi, and they did once rule the world.

For around seven years, Michael Jackson was the most luminous, powerful, influential star in the music business, and no one else was even close. During that period, before his bizarre antics and legal problems turned the public against him, Jackson enjoyed the kind of international fame experienced only by the likes of Muhammad Ali, Greta Garbo and Lord Byron. He was so famous that if you cut his fame in half he would still have been eight times as famous as the next most famous person, whoever that may have been. It may have been Tom Cruise.

All this began with the 1983 hit single Billie Jean. Though it may not sound like it today, Billie Jean is one of the most revolutionary songs in the history of popular music. This is not, however, because its lyrics tell the story of a well-meaning paranoid being stalked by a woman who claims that he has impregnated her, although that in itself was certainly an unusual theme for a pop song at the time. No, Billie Jean was groundbreaking because it introduced the idea that a single must be accompanied by a high-production video - preferably by someone who is a bit of a hoofer - thereby transforming a run-of-the-mill song release into an "event". Billie Jean transformed MTV from a mere diversion for young people into a cultural institution that society at large paid attention to. It introduced the pasty-faced number-crunchers who ran MTV to the concept that white viewers would respond enthusiastically to videos featuring a black performer, something they had not previously believed. Back in those days, a lot of people in the entertainment business were still racists. Thank goodness that's over.

Billie Jean's greatest importance is that it launched the Michael Jackson era, a period in which the entire population of the planet made a group decision to follow the career of one star and one star only. This was an era in which a fabulously gifted performer like Prince was forced into a distant second-fiddle role, because even though Prince could dance, he couldn't dance like Michael Jackson. Jackson's all-encompassing appeal was something that had never happened before in the history of pop music: Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and the Beatles were preposterously famous in their time, but their appeal was still basically limited to white people. Michael Jackson, during his Thriller LP era, had everybody talking about him.

Cute and cuddly as front man/child for the Jackson Five, Jackson had been trying for several years to reintroduce himself to a public that was ill prepared to view him as anything other than a charming has-been. To shatter this perception, Jackson created the flashy, enigmatic, vaguely dangerous persona who appeared in Billie Jean, Beat It and Bad. At a time when most music videos were either primitive or stupid, Jackson made a video that was clever, original, visually opulent and mysterious.

This was the first time that a song had been upstaged by the performance of a song, creating a peculiar situation where no one really had any interest in hearing the song unless they could simultaneously watch the song being performed. Other bands - ZZ Top, the Police, Cyndie Lauper, the Bangles - were putting out amusing, entertaining videos at the time, but no one was watching them because of Sting's dancing. Michael Jackson's footwork was the central conversational theme of Planet Earth throughout the 1980's. Not until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 did mankind move on to another topic.

Billie Jean, which has nothing to do with the tennis legend Billie Jean King, was recorded on a specially designed set to capture the muted sound of the snare drum that Jackson insisted upon. It was produced by the legendary Quincy Jones, who wanted Jackson to change the name of the song and also to shorten the improbably lengthy 29-second introduction, during which Jackson does not actually sing. More thought went into the production of this single than would go into the entire recording careers of Axl Rose, Coldplay, Shania Twain or Gwen Stefani. The song stayed at the top of the charts for more than two months and propelled the album Thriller to its iconic status as the biggest-selling record of all time. Because no one buys albums anymore, and because high-concept music videos are a thing of the past, and because low-key, hybrid songs like Billie Jean sound anachronistic in the coarse hip-hop era, Michael Jackson's achievements now seem as remote and inexplicable as those of the pharaohs. But, if you're in the myth-making line of trade, the pharaohs are good company to be in.

THE STORY OF JOHNNY B. GOODE

Thursday June 21, 2007
Joe Queenan
Guardian Unlimited

Once upon a time, rock'n'roll was an idiom that enabled young people from humble circumstances to escape poverty and make a name for themselves. This was before scions of the landed gentry, masquerading as outcasts, began forming bands like the Wallflowers and the Strokes, producing a brand of music best described as plutocrap: cute, but extraneous.

Whatever its transcendent artistic import, music in its myriad manifestations - Montiverdi, Haydn, Duke Ellington, Howlin' Wolf, the Beatles - has traditionally been an art form that enabled people who weren't born rich to make a living, and not merely to whine about their skanky girlfriends. This is what makes Johnny B Goode such a special cultural artifact. Probably the first song ever written about how much money a musician could make by playing the guitar, no song in the history of rock'n'roll more jubilantly celebrates the downmarket socioeconomic roots of the genre.

The song was written by Chuck Berry while he was on tour in New Orleans in 1958. In the official version of events, supplied to Rolling Stone magazine by Berry himself, the song is autobiographical: A poor boy from a rustic corner of the Deep South with little education and few prospects masters the electric guitar and becomes the leader of a famous band. In fact, Berry was not from the Deep South; he grew up on Goode Street in Saint Louis, an unusually cosmopolitan Midwestern city with a rich musical tradition. Nor was he unschooled; he was the first and perhaps the last songwriter to use the word "omit" in a pop song (Little Queenie). And he was certainly not a hick from the sticks; he had a degree in hairdressing and cosmetology. What's more, the song was originally written for the famous pianist Johnnie Johnson, with whom Berry had worked for years. A half-century later, Johnson would sue Berry, contending that he had co-authored many of his colleague's hits, but the case was thrown out of court, as these cases usually are. Thus, other than not being from the South, or a yokel, or an illiterate, or white, or bearing the name "Johnny," Berry was exactly like the character in his most famous song.

Johnny B Goode was recorded in 1958 with a band that included the legendary bassist Willie Dixon, author of such classics as Spoonful and Back Door Man. It is ironic that Berry should have recorded so many of his hits with a band containing luminaries like Dixon, because throughout his career, Berry was notorious for showing up for his gigs backed by a local band he had hired cheap, sight unseen and with whom he had not rehearsed. These back-up bands included an outfit headed by the young Bruce Springsteen, who later recalled Berry's annoying habit of switching to difficult keys halfway through a song. Berry also once performed in Philadelphia with a band that boasted a harpsichord in its line-up. When Keith Richards organized his homage to the man whose guitar style he had been channeling since his teens - Chuck Berry: Hail, Hail, Rock'n'Roll - in 1987, part of the motivation was to see how the maestro would perform if accompanied by a band that actually knew his songs. The maestro performed quite well.

Johnny B Goode was released halfway through Dwight Eisenhower's dreary second administration, when black people were still routinely being lynched in the Deep South, so for obvious marketing reasons the original lyric "little coloured boy" was changed to "little country boy". One of the great ironies about Berry's very odd career is that the man who has had the single greatest influence on the music that middle-aged white men adore has had almost no influence on the development of black music in America. In this sense, he resembles Aaron Copland, a Brooklyn homosexual famous for writing music about cowboys.

Johnny B Goode was produced by Leonard and Phil Chess, founders of Chicago's celebrated Chess Records. Berry was introduced to the Chess brothers by blues legend Muddy Waters, who, according to one apocryphal tale, was busy painting the walls of the recording studio when a very young Mick Jagger popped by for a visit. The song spent 15 weeks on the American charts, though never rising higher than No 8. Many years later, Berry's original recording was inserted into a capsule and blasted into outer space, ostensibly to give extraterrestrials an idea what sorts of things this civilization was capable of. Actually, to provide a more balanced view of the things American civilization is capable of, the arbiters of interstellar taste should have included Piano Man and Captain Jack. Just to give the aliens an idea of what they were up against.

papaaisaway said:

I always thought it was a Linn or similar drum machine, even though the credits say Ndugu Chancler plays drums.

On the Deluxe reissue, there is a demo version and it's definitely a drum machine.

Total Bullshit.

1981's Hall & Oates song "I Can't Go for That" was the blueprint to Billie Jean. Listen to the first 25+ seconds is a direct rip off, the pacing, the bass line, the starting of the vocals come in at the exact points. Everything! MJ's is only a 1/2 second or so faster.

Prince had 2 music videos out before MJ had one video on MTV! "1999" & "Little Red Corvette".

All these "Reporters" always want to re-write history or worse never do any research.

ElectricBlue said:

Total Bullshit.

These are my favorite lines from that article:



Why not just say MJ is the nearest thing to God?
This writer has lost it.

Cinnie said:

what else is new?

some of you are just plain manic!

ReggaeQueen said:

Lol, I know but i'm not suprised. Billie Jean is a DAMN good song and everyone knows it. MJ wrote all the lyrics and came up with the baseline himself. These people can stay in denial if they wish but MJ didn't rip off anyone with that song. End of story.

Cinnamon234 said:

How did he do the bassline? Vocalize it and give it to the player? Same with the keyboard riffs?

ElectricBlue said:

I remember Rick James saying in an interview that producer Quincy Jones told him at an awards show that the bassline from "Give It to Me, Baby" was the inspiration for "Billie Jean." According to Slick Rick, Q told him "We got you down, Rick" -- which James says inspired him to change his sound with "Cold Blooded."

ElectricBlue said:

Your the one who obviously has a problem with MJ musical legacy.. You see people like you, want to pretend that Michael was a one-hit wonder, the fact of the matter is people were dancing along to Michael, including prince himself, long before anyone had heard of Prince! Many people don't like Michael before of his fuck up personal life and that's understandable, but when I hear people like you trying to make him seem like one-hit wonder it just smacks of resentment.

ElectricBlue said:

Bullshit

Najee said:

Actually,it was the song "Thriller" that borrows the bassline from Rick James' "Give It To Me Baby".James mentions this in the liner notes to the 'Bustin Out' 2-CD compilation.

YEAH, THAT'S A FUNNY LINE

It's tongue in cheek of course... but growing up in those days MJ was worshipped. The world waited with baited breath before he released a new single, video, hell, even before he sneezed.

Gary MF:
The bassline, rhythm, and most of the riffs were recorded by MJ before he took the demo to Quincy Jones.

thedoorkeeper said:

SoulAlive said:

You're right. I looked up the attirbution and apologize for the error.

Nice to read something nice about MJ. It is so rare.

papaaisaway said:

Very True.

papaaisaway said:[quote]YEAH, THAT'S A FUNNY LINE

It's tongue in cheek of course... but growing up in those days MJ was worshipped. The world waited with baited breath before he released a new single, video, hell, even before he sneezed.



Yep. His fame and popularity then have never been paralled. I mean every age, color, ethnicity, culture loved him. It was too much fame, and imo, made him a lil crazy. I love MJ, but I think that kind of popularity would be too much for any human.

You ppl take ElectricBlue seriously, this is his forte.

Hall & Oats lol

c'mon now Blue, now you're just pulling shit out of your ass lol

The reason people hate michael jackson now is because he has survived.. humanity hates to see a man who has endured so much and still stands. He is proud of his achievements and his beliefs and has stood up for himself despite massive criticism.

People just cant understand why he hasnt given in, they want him to break so they can build him up again... like Mariah did, like Elvis did... but Michael is different, he has a determination that people just cant get there heads around.

Its the same with Elizabeth Taylor... noone likes her now, despite the fact she had an amazing career.. if she wasnt so strong willed she'd probably have died years ago..

These people are survivers.

Aaaaah, so it's Quincy's ass that I need to kick.

"Cold Blooded" was a great album but it was definately a different sounding Rick than the "Throwin' Down" album and previous ones before. The "Cold Blooded" album's sound was great but it unfortunately eventually led to weaker albums like "Glow" and "The Flag".

I had always thought it was Prince's ass that I needed to kick for influencing Rick to change his style to a more modern sound.

Here you can see and hear how MJ records a song by himself - how he composes:

http://www.youtube.com/wa...colO9fhI7o

SoulAlive said:

Yeah I can see similarities between the two songs. Actually, the thing that comes up about "I Can't Go For That" being "ripped off" so to say by "Billie Jean" has always been debated. I'm sure he was inspired by the song but I don't think he ripped it off.

FunkyBrotha said:

O...k. And about the Liz comment, please, she's still got people who adore the ground she walks on, man. The reasons MJ gets criticism is because of his "lifestyle" and his choices, but I don't think it's because he survived it all. True he is a survivor. I don't see how no one wouldn't love a survivor. The point is, artists, actors, celebrities, etc., will fall down but they get their tail back up. Build you up, tear you down, root for a comeback, you know the routine.
[Edited 7/20/07 16:43pm]

Timmy84 said:

And Michael STILL has people who adore the ground he walks on. So what's your point? They BOTH get admiration and hate. And as far as MJ's "criticism', an awful lot of it stems from jealousy also. He had a 'wierd' lifestyle in the 80's
(remember Bubbles?) It was jealousy moreso than 'lifestyle'. Thus the set-up, or 'frame'. I agree with with funkybrother about people hating survivors.

mrsnet said:

That's what I'm talking about. You misunderstood me. Why you wanna argue.

Timmy84 said:

Debated by whom - MJ haters?