Cinny said:

TrivialPursuit said:

I was obsessed with "ma ma se ma ma sa ma ma ma coo saa" back then. Man, I could've put that on a loop for a minute or two and been happy. I wish there'd been a longer version with some of that mixed into it, or made into a longer ending with the chant.

The real crime is how that part of the song is always shortened for radio.

Exactly! That's why I'd love to hear it a bit louder, in a much longer jam type session in the last 2 minutes of the song. Fuck - am I gonna have to make this myself?

TrivialPursuit said:

PJMcGee said:

Yeah, that's a natural thing for Prince fans to be into. General messing with genres. Other favorites are "Hot Stuff" by Donna Summer, "If" by Janet, "State of Shock," by Jacksons & Mick Jagger. That one's almost a novelty song. But I thought it was very cool, way better than Michael's duets with McCartney.

YES! Totally forgot about "State of Shock." I loved that shit so much. Still do, honestly.

To compare "Say Say Say" isn't totally fair, though. "Say Say Say" wasn't a rock song.

Man, that Victory album sure was a hodge podge of stuff. Mostly good, some bad. I still dig it. The cover was just beautiful.

TrivialPursuit said:

Jimi

Hendrix

TrivialPursuit said:

PJMcGee said:

I wasn't calling the Jackson-McCartney songs rock. Just comparing songs that Michael made with two British rock legends. (Don't forget the head banger "The Girl Is Mine.") You know, I didn't realize it, but "Scream" is kind of rock. Some serious guitar, and their vocals have a rock edge to them.

I always considered "Scream" a rock song, or at least rock-adjacent, or rock-friendly. The vocals are aggressive, there is a guitar solo in it, it's not necessarily overly hooky or keyboard heavy. And while the club mixes are fun, they do lose a bit of the inherent aggression from the original.

I remember wishing at the time that he had allowed some rock mixes, like Janet did with "Black Cat." There were a few different mixes with different soloists on it.

Pivoting a bit here.

March 10, 1983, MTV makes history and airs "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson for the first time, arguably launching him into the mega star he became. As good as Thriller was, I don't know if it would've gotten quite the same level of attention had it not been for MTV. Would MJ have even made a video like "Thriller?"

We know they were playing Prince before MJ, but MJ was the first "heavy rotation" black artist. It certainly gave Prince and other black artists a much larger audience. While not everyone had cable in their house, they had radio. And the two coupled together put musicians in a whole new, undiscovered sphere of success and spotlight.

Mintchip said:

Everything sold less than Thriller though, right? Everything ever, by everyone. So no surprise there.

Best answer!

The pedo news.

2freaky said:

The pedo news.

There was no "pedo news" during Bad. That came later.

RODSERLING said:

For the record : I showed to my 3 years old son the Moonwalker movie last Christmas. He absolutely loved it, especially the part where MJ morpgs into a robot. My son talked to me the next day about " The robot, he goes up there, in the sky, but where did he go? ". I found that cute, so I offered him a tramsformers-like toy that looked like the MJ robot. . You know the kids, they get bored fast with their toys. So he played with it a week or two, even taking him to school. Then he forgot about it ( Paw Patrol anyone?) and me too. . Yesterday, he played again with the robot. I didn't understand at first what he wanted, but he told me " The robot, is he still up there in the sky? " Oh, yeah sure. " Can I see him again ? " Yes, sure you have it in your hands. He insisted and I didn't get that he referred to Moonwalker, until he told me " I want to see him on the TV". So in fact, he remembered that movie from like 2 months and a half ago! . So I played him the movie. He absolutely loved it again, especially he went crazy about the Speed Demon and Robot segment. He seems very, very sad that the robot vanishes in the sky, without ever coming back. That amaze me, because I remember when MJ died, I thought about that exact scene, and the kids telling like " Will he ever come back? Yeah, I m sure he will eventually". . I think the marketing about that movie was completely fucked-up, because MJ could have had a career as a very popular toy (!). They could have sold millions of that toy, and it would have made great publicity for the movie when it was on theaters, then for the album Bad. A great mistake to not release it in the US in theaters too I think.

Great story! Thanks for sharing. I remember years ago a friend...who is now in his forties telling me how as a child he went nuts for Moonwalker. When I first saw it, I loved certain segments but felt it needed a cohesive narrative. I was a teen, but younger kids absolutely loved it...it was made for them.

I always wished Michael had made a real musical in the 80s..something like "Flashdance". "Footloose" or "Saturday Night Fever". A story with Music and Dance..oh well..it wasn't to be.

Cause by Bad, MJ went from being America's young loveable cute black darling to a bleached, plastic surgery looking weirdo who kept grabbing his crotch.

Superstition said:

RODSERLING said:

Superstition said:

Trying to psychoanalyze why a huge-selling album didn’t sell as much as a massive selling album by the same artist is kinda meh. It’s like asking why we don’t have an eclipse everyday. Just can’t happen. Thriller was groundbreaking in many aspect, and the shock and awe of a video like Thriller had already been done. MJ didn’t need to outdo what he himself had already done, so the question is itself kind of redundant.

Still, Bad had more music videos than Thriller, a worldwide tour, more singles, and a blockbuster movie as a vehicle. So it's nevertheless interesting to wonder where it didn't work as fine as planned.

how many artists were able to follow-up a massively successful album with an album that sold more copies? did Fleetwood Mac ever have an album that sold more than Rumours? In terms of sales,did Prince ever top Purple Rain? It's an unrealistic goal.

SoulAlive said:

Bad wasn't bad but it wasn't a thrill.

RODSERLING said:

SoulAlive said:

how many artists were able to follow-up a massively successful album with an album that sold more copies? did Fleetwood Mac ever have an album that sold more than Rumours? In terms of sales,did Prince ever top Purple Rain? It's an unrealistic goal.

In fact, the real relevant question is why it sold so much less in the US than Thriller? In some countries ( UK, Italy, Switzerland, China, etc), Bad outsold Thriller. So, it proves it's not that far-fetched. On most countries, Bad did " Only" Twice as less than Thriller. But in the US, it did three times less. So, why did it sold more in the UK and that few in the US is the key relevant question. As I already pointed out, to me the cause is that the US didn't release the last two singles and the movie in theaters. That explains such a discrepancy. And for that matters, Prince outsold Purple Rain in many countries with D&P and Batman. [Edited 3/25/22 5:16am] [Edited 3/25/22 5:17am] [Edited 3/25/22 5:20am]

Because americans suck and the fairweather fans left him.

RODSERLING said:

So, why did it sold more in the UK and that few in the US is the key relevant question.

1987 is when New Jack Swing started to blow up in the USA, and eventually it became oversaturated. By the time Mike released Dangerous New Jack Swing had been on the radio 5 or 6 years already. It's like Off The Wall came out at the end of disco's popularity. At the time Bobby Brown's album Don't Be Cruel sold more than Bad in the US. The difference is that Bad continued to sell in the decades after its release. Don't Be Cruel mainly just sold at the time it came out, it didn't have a big life as a catalog album. Hip hop was also still rising with the mainstream audience when Bad came out. Today hip hop is the #1 genre in the US, and maybe country 2nd.

The US was not one big audience then. There was Top 40 radio, Album Oriented Rock, R&B, country, Latin pop, Tejano, club/dance music, adult contemporary, smooth jazz, etc. That's why Billboard had all of those different charts. The people who were buying Bon Jovi records probably wasn't buying Kenny G. The people who were buying Randy Travis or The Judds weren't as likely to buy LL Cool J or Tone Loc. Debbie Gibson & Depeche Mode probably didn't share a lot of the same oudience either. All of them were selling a lot of records during the late 1980s.

MickyDolenz said:

RODSERLING said:

These albums weren't "New Jackson", and they all sold more in the US than Bad despite being released in 1987, with less or equal number of singles : Slippery when wet Bon Jovi (12 M) 4 singles Whitney (10M) 7 singles Faith - George Michael (11 M) 7 singles Dirty Dancing - (12M) 4 singles Joshua Tree - U2 (10 M) 4 singles Appetite for Destruction (18M) Hysteria - Def Leppard (12 M) Clearly, by his number of hits, Bad sales seems low compared to the other. Bad had 5 #1s, and the 7th single, Smooth Criminal/Moonwalker, should have had a bit of the Thriller video impact, which was also a 7th single. [Edited 3/25/22 18:13pm] [Edited 3/25/22 18:18pm] [Edited 3/25/22 18:18pm]

None of those albums had much in common with Bad musically. Glam metal (aka hair bands) was huge in general at the time, but its audience was primarily young white people. Adult contemporary like Whitney Houston has always been popular in the US, no matter what the music trend was at any time. Like right now there's Adele in the middle of the rest of the trap beat acts on Top 40 radio. As far as singles, people didn't generally buy the 45s and the albums. One has nothing to do with the other. Pink Floyd sold a lot of albums, but had few Top 40 radio hits. There's other artists who were more known for singles than their albums like Irene Cara. Dirty Dancing is the soundtrack to a blockbuster movie or popular TV show, just like other popular soundtracks of the 1980s were (Footloose, Beverly Hills Cop, Miami Vice, Flashdance, etc.).

Again, all of these albums you listed did not necessarily sell to the same people and you also have to look at the musical trends in general. The USA has a lot more people than the average European country. That's how Garth Brooks is the biggest selling artist of the 1990s and he probably has not that much presence outside of the USA. Garth has 9 diamond albums, he's the only act in history who has that. Why do you think all of those British Invasion acts tried to make it in the USA?

Just becaue somebody had a big selling album did not mean anything. Look at Alanis Morissette & Norah Jones. George Michael's album after Faith did not have as much success. The Bee Gees couldn't get any airplay in the US after 1979 after the "disco demolition". The USA has always had lot of segregated radio formats for different audiences. People who did not like the type of music on MTV had Video Soul on BET, Video Jukebox, VH-1, etc. BET was formed in the first place because early MTV shown few music videos by Black performers, supposedly because they didn't make rock n roll. Yet they would show Hall & Oates & ABC, basically "blue-eyed soul".

RODSERLING said:

SoulAlive said:

how many artists were able to follow-up a massively successful album with an album that sold more copies? did Fleetwood Mac ever have an album that sold more than Rumours? In terms of sales,did Prince ever top Purple Rain? It's an unrealistic goal.

In fact, the real relevant question is why it sold so much less in the US than Thriller? In some countries ( UK, Italy, Switzerland, China, etc), Bad outsold Thriller. So, it proves it's not that far-fetched. On most countries, Bad did " Only" Twice as less than Thriller. But in the US, it did three times less. So, why did it sold more in the UK and that few in the US is the key relevant question. As I already pointed out, to me the cause is that the US didn't release the last two singles and the movie in theaters. That explains such a discrepancy. And for that matters, Prince outsold Purple Rain in many countries with D&P and Batman.

Some things cannot be repeated.The Thriller phenomenom of 1983/84 was never going to happen again,no matter what singles MJ released or didn't released.

MickyDolenz said:

RODSERLING said:

it was a huge mistake to not release Liberian Girl, it would have made the top ten in the US, and a great publicity for Bad. Give In To Me would have been huge for sure.

how can you possibly know this?