Bad at 35: Michael Jackson's Impossible Follow-Up Triumph

On August 7th, 1987, Michael Jackson released Bad, the long awaited follow up to Thriller, the best selling album of all time. Talk about pressure. How do you follow up something that basically rewired the entire music industry and turned one man into the most famous performer on the planet. Jackson and producer Quincy Jones, teaming up for the third and final time, decided the answer was to go bigger, sharper, and a little tougher around the edges. The album kicked off a run of singles that felt like a nonstop victory lap. Songs like the title track Bad, along with The Way You Make Me Feel, Man in the Mirror, Dirty Diana, and Smooth Criminal, all became massive hits, and Bad actually holds a rather remarkable record, becoming the first album in history to produce five number one Billboard Hot 100 singles from a single record. Thriller, for all its dominance, only managed two. Jackson also poured serious cinematic ambition into the era. The short film for the title track, directed by Martin Scorsese of all people, ran nearly twenty minutes long and turned a simple pop song into a full blown street drama, complete with leather buckles, zippers, and choreography sharp enough to cut glass. It became one of the defining images of Jackson at the peak of his creative and commercial powers, all slicked hair, chains, and swagger, a deliberate pivot away from the softer, gentler persona of Thriller. Commercially, Bad went on to sell somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty five million copies worldwide, an astonishing number for basically any other artist in history, yet inevitably discussed as something of a step down simply because it had the impossible task of following the single biggest album ever made. It is the classic tale of the sequel that could never quite escape the shadow of the original, even though on its own merits it stands as one of the most successful and influential pop albums ever released. Bad also marked a turning point in how music videos were treated, since Jackson and his collaborators leaned hard into big budget storytelling, elaborate dance sequences, and cinematic direction, helping push the music video format from simple promotional tool into legitimate short form art. Smooth Criminal alone, with its gravity defying forward lean, has been imitated, studied, and marveled at for decades, spawning countless theories about wires, weighted shoes, and physics defying showmanship. So on this date back in 1987, pop music got a jolt of leather jacketed energy that would echo for years, proving that even in the shadow of an untouchable masterpiece, there was still room for another era defining triumph. Some great Deals https://amzn.to/49SJ3Qs For more check out http://www.quietplease.ai