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The line “BillieJean is not my lover!” is Michael’s defiant declaration that he, and he alone, will not be lured into a world of sin. He’s spitting on the temptation of sexuality itself. On the surface, Michael tells a woman who has accused him of fathering her child that he did no such thing: “The kid is not my son.” But what the fury of his performance tells you is that he’s not just rejecting the scandal, the false accusation - he’s rejecting the possibility of such an accusation. Yet what is it about “Billie Jean” that makes it Michael’s anthem of anthems? It’s the angry power of the song’s hidden message. His legendary performance of it on the 1983 Motown 25th Anniversary special was the moment he moonwalked from superstar into cosmic Elvis/Beatles strato-stardom.
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The Real Meaning of “Billie Jean.” From that opening up/down drum beat and snaky bass walk, it is, and always will be, Michael’s greatest song - his signature statement in the form of a demonic dance-floor epiphany.
Mj human nature meaning joseph jackson movie#
Twenty years later, Michael did another movie theme song - “Will You Be There,” his mash note to the killer whale of Free Willy - and though the gorgeous, gospel-inflected number is heavenly to listen to, the underlying Michael message remains the same: animals are glorious, far more so than people.
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Whoever came up with the masterstroke concept of getting the teenage Michael, with his yearning, crystalline soprano, to croon the theme song of the sequel to Willard was on to something profound: The song testified to Michael’s angelic quality (who but an angel could love a rat?), but it also hinted, years ahead of time, at his dark side - his attraction to monsters, and the loneliness that would make the biggest superstar in the world feel too isolated and lost to be loved by anyone human. Michael first declared his independence from his brothers with his early solo albums, the second of which was Ben (1972), the title song of which was a melancholy love ballad…sung to a rat. In that sense, Jackson’s “childlike” nature emerged out of the paradox that he didn’t have to grow up because he was always, in his imagination, a super-adult. The question Smokey Robinson raised, and didn’t quite answer, is: How did the young Michael do it? Did he feel those feelings? I would say that he did and he didn’t - that what his boy-virtuoso vocal-emotional mimicry expressed was a personality so empathic that it was as if he could consume, through art, other people’s experiences, and therefore felt no need to live those experiences himself. For me, the line that has always made the prepubescent Michael sound most bizarrely mature comes in “I Want You Back,” when he sings: “Oh, darlin’, I was blind to let you go!” He delivers those last four words like a wise old soul-sister diva tempering her ardor with worldly grace. At the memorial service last Tuesday, Smokey Robinson, recalling his reaction to the first time he heard the 10-year-old Michael sing a version of “Who’s Lovin’ You” that outdid Smokey’s, acknowledged the dizzyingly precocious, almost nature-defying quality of Michael’s ability to sing lyrics rooted in the experience of adulthood and to interpret those lyrics exactly as an adult would sing them.