Imho Dangerous is MJ's most underrated album of all time. I notice a lot of casual fans and the media seem to ignore Dangerous all the time and hold Quincy Jones' produced albums for MJ to be the best and only albums worthwhile listening to.

For example, take Bad which was outsold by Dangerous in every single country except for the US and UK. Even then it went 7x platinum to Bad's 8x platinum in America. However an important thing to note is that the Dangerous world tour never reached America nor was it able to finish the 2nd leg. A potential 8-10 million albums could have been sold if this tour was allowed to complete and the 1993 allegations had never come about.

Also Nirvana's Nevermind took a lot of steam out of Dangerous, the focus of the media and people were on Nevermind.

Dangerous had the best chance of coming near Thriller's sales, as of right now it's at 32 million albums worldwide, it could have easily passed 40 million if the above scenario had been avoided.

As for the music, look at the diversity of the tracks: Who is it, In the Closet, Will You Be There, Give in to Me, Black or White, Remember the Time are all classics and each track is different.

MJ has gospel, dance, ballads, r&b, hard rock,etc. This diversity makes it far more appealing than the pop flavored Bad Album...

Your thoughts...

i agree Dangerous as a whole is as good, if not better, than bad. In the Closet and Give in to Me are in particular strong tracks.

Yes, because it didn't play it as safely. The songs have a nice, dark edge to them even though the production sounds quite dated (but I don't believe "dated" equates with "out of date").

VoicesCarry said:

yeah, you're right about the production sounding dated now.

Dangerous was the beginning of the end.

SENSHY said:

Remember how his Dangerous tour was kicking ass, and MJ being on awards shows in 1993? It's not like the material on Dangerous was so bad that it caused his popularity to wane.
I don't think people were talking about MJ falling off until the first molestation accusations came out. That fucked everyone up, and even affected MJ's work following that time (HIStory).

CinisterCee said:

Nah man..it was th ebeggingin of th eend because he was using other producers and began his mish mash of songs etc..some enjoyed that and its their right...but it was like the beginning of the "lets use the producer flavor of the month" on this record.

SylvesterStalloneMJ said:

Thriller was a once in a lifetime album. If those type of sales ever happen again it won't be a Michael Jackson album.

In my opinion Dangerous is a great album. But I think Bad is better. I think Dangerous is a little too long and would have been better if it was about 25-30 minutes shorter. Off The Wall, Thriller and Bad are much more consistent than Dangerous. I do agree that it is an overlooked album. But I wouldn't put it up there with his first three Epic solo albums.

rialb said:

Yup! And that's my reason for not listening to the whole album in its entirety for a long time.
Alot of the beats just vamp on and on and on (ie. "Jam", "Dangerous"). Or have intros that I don't think would have been missed had they never been released. (ie. "Think about the generations and say we wanna make it a better place for our children, and children's children, so that they know.." BLAH BLAH BLAH Get to the record!)

SENSHY said:

Oh THATS what u meant. Yeah, I agree.

Dangerous is my second favourite album after Bad. Michael's post Thriller work is very underrated.
[This message was edited Fri Apr 9 18:41:51 2004 by WildStyle]

i just recently bought Dangerous
its very good but i favor bad because its more artistic
he did most of the writing and production
as another person said
dangerous he was tesing out producers etc...
I personally thought HIStory was better then Dangerous
because the songs were written better
but if you put some songs from dangerous and some songs from history together
you get a monster album
MJ hasn't Done a Masterpeice Like Prince (sign O The times)
PErsonally i think thriller is overated
What Mj has to do is stay true to his creative self and not always try to sky rocket in the pop charts
It doesn't matter how many a record sold , least not to me
the quality of the album matters

Luv4oneanotha said:

I disagree. Bad is a masterpeice (coincidently both albums came out in 1987). I guess it's all just a matter of personal opinion.

Luv4oneanotha said:

You know I stopped for a second when I read that.
I think Thriller is like Purple Rain in that it was hugely popular, but MJ doesn't have a later-defining masterpiece that really shows you everything that encompasses the artist the way Sign O The Times does. Although you can see parts of pure art ("Childhood" "Stranger In Moscow") on HIStory...

WildStyle said:

Hmmmmm you might be able to convince me of that.

I've always preferred Dangerous to Bad. It's more experimental, the songs are (generally) edgier and it was just cool to hear Michael straying away from the "keep-it-safe" styled pop of his previous three albums. I like Bad but it's a bit too ordinary for me.

Dangerous was much more rnb than the poppy Bad! Jackson masterfully picked Teddy Riley to help co-write and produce tracks with him! Riley and Jackson work great together on this album and the material they did represents the best "NewJack" material the genre had to offer! Those cuts are deep hard swing cuts that represent jackson as being edgy and not just poppy, which is what the majority of "Bad" was! The outtakes from "Dangerous" are great and i heard he also worked with another hot producer at the time-La reid and Babyface, those cuts must be awsome as they were as hot as Teddy at the time (check out their work with Bobby Brown and Mike's brother Jermaine Jackson on his "You said" album! Remember his controversal track "Word to the badd", the bootleg about MJ, I wonder if MJ cried, proberly did!).....anyway



I prefer "Dangerous" over "Bad" but both albums represent pop at it's best (compared to madonna for example), "History" was a brave record, witch has aged alot better than "Dangerous" and "Bad" thanx to a more natural approach to the dink donky drum patterns, but "History" suffers thanx to a over abundance of 'agressive' songs but in fairness, that was Jacko's right as an artist, but like Prince, his best work are just songs about relationships, not the personal stuff! Also "History" starts very angry and ends very quietly and sombre which I don't like at all!

Anyway, "Dangerous" is brilliant all the way through and like alot of the records around at the time, most of the songs are too long (this was proberly due to the fact that CD's required more music to fill up and artists just extended songs to compensate writing more tunes for a album-though mike (like Prince) has many outtakes he could of used to fill space,instead of extending the song by a couple of minutes!

"Dangerous" is better,darker,edgier,funkier,but considerabally longer than "Bad"!

Funny, I don't think Dangerous sounds that dated. I mean sure some of it does, but have you heard most of the stuff from the early 90s?

What's so dated about, say, "Who Is It?" or the title track? Except the snare drum and the one-dimensional reverberation of course, but all in all "urban" pop music hasn't really changed that much since "Dangerous".

... which is Michael's most uncompromising record to date, btw.

Dangerous seems to be forgotten, every talks about the biggest selling album of all time, the second biggest selling album of all time and the debut but no one mentions Dangerous. I think Dangerous was great, but Im not too sure if it was the music or the videos that made me favour it so much, ok so everyone knew mj did the best videos but the videos were just amazing and it was the first time I got to feel that anticipation waiting for the next video or the next performance/appearance, and i do think a good video can help you get into a song which was otherwise mediocre, for example scream, i didn't like scream untill that little 30 second segment where mj and janet dropped it. I liked Bad but with Dangerous I thought was a bit edgier, personally i dont think it sounds that out dated, most of the tracks have that clasic urban pop feel that you hear now only back then it just felt so much fresher. Bad has its moments to though i loved mjs vocals on most of the tracks especially on speed demon but the lyrics were rather weak, the liberian girl beat is timeless and leave me alone i thought was quite ahead of its time.

On first listen, I thought that Dangerous sounded too much like Michael was desperately trying to sound contemporary. It was the first non QJ produced album and it was difficult to get to grips with.

However 13 years on, Dangerous is quite possibly MJ's most interesting, daring and subtlely addictive album to date. It's incredibly diverse sounding, it contains a few songs that would never be hits (and for the first time introduced non-commercial sounding MJ songs - there ought to be more) and, ultimately I feel that it's the definitive Michael Jackson album.

It's so much better than the obvious attempt at commercialism that was the Bad album and it's waaay ahead of the blandness of the Thriller album (is that a controversial thing to say? I don't care, it's how I feel). I love Off The Wall (probably comes second in my list of MJ albums), but Dangerous, to me, represents Michael Jackson at his best.

With Dangerous, MJ moved away from his Quincy Jones sound as moved toward a more "current" (then-current) sound.

Most of the tracks are either produced or engineered by Teddy Riley of Blackstreet. His hand is ALL over Dangerous . . .

>However 13 years on, Dangerous is quite possibly MJ's most interesting, daring and subtlely addictive album to date. It's incredibly diverse sounding, it contains a few songs that would never be hits (and for the first time introduced non-commercial sounding MJ songs - there ought to be more) and, ultimately I feel that it's the definitive Michael Jackson album.

It's so much better than the obvious attempt at commercialism that was the Bad album and it's waaay ahead of the blandness of the Thriller album (is that a controversial thing to say? I don't care, it's how I feel). I love Off The Wall (probably comes second in my list of MJ albums), but Dangerous, to me, represents Michael Jackson at his best.<

co-sign.

None of them come close to Off The Wall for me. That will always be my fave MJ album.

Thriller was good but it was so overplayed at the time that I can't listen to it to this day.

Bad was ok, but that title track really sucked a big fat stinky ass.

Dangerous had some kick ass moments but is too long.

I haven't bought any MJ albums since...however I really liked Ghosts after seeing it on VH1 last Halloween.

Haystack is right on the money!

To say that MJ tried to hop on current trends by picking Teddy Riley as a producer might be true but he was criticised by critics when Bad came out. They thought he was playing it safe and giving us a Thriller part 2 instead of something fresh and innovative. So he ditched Q and tried something different.

I don't know why people think QJ is some kind of messiah for MJ, if you've listened to the thriller demos, the best songs from MJ's albums are always his own tracks, Billie Jean, Beat It, Don't Stop,etc are all MJ produced tracks.

QJ didn't even want Smooth Criminal on Bad and they fought over that track which caused a big rift between them....

Dangerous recieved 4.5 stars from Rolling Stone and was called MJ's most daring work since Thriller.

But a disservice to the album is that tracks like Gone to Soon were put intead of beautiful deleted tracks like For all Time which is as good if not better than Human Nature...

Had he cut out Gone too soon, She Drives Me Wild, Heal the World, Can't Let her get away(great track btw), and added in a ballad like For All Time, Dangerous would have been a flawless record.

It was recieved better critically at the time than Bad, but 13 years later the media totally ignores this album even though it outsold Bad!

Is it due to the loyalty to Quincy that Dangerous has been ignored?
[This message was edited Sun Apr 11 11:30:27 2004 by SylvesterStalloneMJ]

Dangerous + HIStory Disk II + BOTDF (first 5 tracks) = amazing 90ies-MJ
If you consider Off The Wall's disco sound late 70ies, than i think MJ's 90ies output overshadows his 80ies-output.
In the 90ies MJ had to prove himself against all kindsa critics, gossip, accusations, whatnot. It's actually amazing how the quality of his music remained as high, even as he appeared to loose grip with reality.

History was a giant drop in quality, I thought it was his weakest album, even weaker than Invincible.

Too much filler, very uneven and really over-produced...History was THE END of Mj in my opinion.

You have a couple standout tracks like Stranger in Moscow, YANA, Scream, but it's overwhelmed by the crap...

The 1993 allegations imho really affected MJ's work....

I remember highly anticipating the followup to Dangerous and thinking "WTF is this shit?" after listening to history.

Blood on the Dancefloor has some good tracks, most of which were recorded for Dangerous btw, BOTDF,Is it Scary, Ghosts were all Dangerous rejects....

SylvesterStalloneMJ said:

I thought that too, when I became I fan around 2000, that History wasn't that great of an album, but when the shit started to happen again, history was the only album I listened to! It's my favorite album, with dangerous as a very close second, I understand michaels pain then and now. you can listen to history and think that it's beeing recorded today. it's amazing IMO!
Dangerous is a masterpiece, I tell ya! with songs like who is it, remember the time, bland or white, heal the world, will you be there, give into me,and many more, its an album I can hear non stop! beautiful!

i think if you took some tracks from history dangerous and blood on the dancefloor you have a masterpeice

Scream
Black or White
They Don't Care About Us
Morphine
Stranger in Moscow
Superfly Sister
Earth Song
You Are Not Alone
Childhood Theme [From Free Willy 2]
Give in to Me
Tabloid Junkie
Ghosts
2 Bad
Is It Scary
Remember the Time
In the Closet
Who Is It
Smile
Will You Be There



and yah i think Bad was prolly the closest to MJ's Masterpeice

When Bad came out i played it again and again for about a whole damn year. It's a fine album. The only weakness is Speed Demon and even that's pretty good. Dangerous again - i was a fully fledged prince geek by this time, but it's something i can spin again and again. It feels a bit long, maybe, but it's got some of MJ's best material on there. I'd prefer Bad over Dangerous because it feels like a coherent album, in the same way Off the Wall and Thriller do.

History again has some of MJ's best material - like Strangers in Moscow, but as a single album i don't think it comes close to his previous 4 offerings. Blood on the dancefloor had 4 killer tracks, for me. And Invincible has some fantastic stuff, but it's ruined by some saccharin rubbish like Cry, The Lost Children etc. Break of Dawn, Heaven Can Wait, Butterflies, You rock my world, 200 watts - i think all those tracks are fuckin wonderful.

Anyway, back to the question - probably Bad.