by Brett Warner
It has always been a bitter irony that death is the most commercially viable thing an artist can ever do. From Vermeer to Van Gogh, Nick Drake to Notorious B.I.G., nothing attracts dollar signs and revisionist cultural significance quite like a tragic demise. Despite what the gargantuan pharmaceutical industry might suggest, people are secretly enthralled by the romance of death – it’s why The Dark Knight made more than a billion dollars, it’s why Nevermind, not OK Computer, is the most important record of the ‘90s, and it’s why Sony Music’s new release Michael (in stores now) will sell a shit ton of copies despite not being a real Michael Jackson album in just about every possible way.
The controversy stemming from Jackson’s family claiming half of the vocal tracks on Michael aren’t even the late singer’s (more on that in a minute) misses the real point: Michael is not the album Michael Jackson would have released. If it was, he would have done so himself. For one thing, I find it very hard to believe that Mr. Jackson would have foreclosed his Neverland Ranch property and sold off millions of dollars in memorabilia and personal items before simply releasing an album. It had been almost eight full years since his last record, which suggests one of two possibilities: 1.) Jackson recorded a lot of unfinished music, or 2.) Jackson recorded a lot of finished music, but wasn’t happy with it. Neither scenario bodes well for the artistic credibility of this new compilation.
Fans are right to be excited to hear the material, but personally I find the idea of a posthumous Michael Jackson album to be a bit of a hollow venture. Jackson was always a showman, a performer first – with no thirty-minute music videos or elaborately choreographed concerts, ten new MJ songs just feel… a little pointless. And that’s the sad truth about posthumous releases: without the artist’s approval and involvement, it cannot be fairly considered a natural addition to his or her body of work. Whether polishing and over-producing an unfinished set of demos or releasing a cobbled together bunch of incomplete tunes as is, these albums are a lose-lose battle for both artist and audience. (Though certainly a win for the record companies.)
Released a year after his death, From a Basement on the Hill purports to be the record that Elliott Smith was working on before his oddly timed suicide. In reality, it’s one of the most objectionable posthumous releases in recent music history. For one thing, the album was completed not by the man who’d recorded much of the material, David McConnell, but producer Rob Schnapf and Smith’s ex-girlfriend, Joanna Bolme. Whoa, yeah, what? Far be it for me to speak badly of ex-girlfriends on the internet, but they’re not usually the most emotionally unbiased people where their exes are concerned. As for Schnapf, who’d produced Smith’s previous three records, the final product seems to contradict Smith’s creative intentions in just about every way. Smith stated in several interviews that his next record would be a lyrically dark double album. Instead, From A Basement On The Hill was a single disc, fifteen-track album that omitted most of the dark songs recorded during those sessions. One track titled “Ostriches & Chirping” wasn’t even written or recorded by Elliott Smith at all – it was a random studio outtake by McConnell that wound up jumbled in with Smith’s material.
Six years earlier, the family and estate of singer Jeff Buckley decided to release Sketches (For My Sweetheart the Drunk), a compilation of home demos and unfinished studio tracks that, had Buckley not drowned in the Mississippi River in May of 1997, would have been the follow-up to his first and only finished album, 1994’s critically acclaimed Grace. In the album’s liner notes, writer Bill Flanagan recounts that after Buckley’s death, his mother Mary Guibert met with Sony Records and insisted that there be “no posthumous overdubbing… the songs would stay where Jeff left them, even if a part was missing.” All good and fine, but the same set of liner notes also state that Jeff wasn’t entirely happy with the three sets of New York demos he cut with producer Tom Verlaine. The whole reason Buckley was in Memphis in the first place was to cut a new set of tracks with his band, who were flying down to meet him the night he died. While the amended title insists that this isn’t the finished product as Jeff intended, the music itself is just that: unfinished. The songs, while good, lack the polished sheen and passionate delivery that made Grace such a chillingly beautiful listen. Unfinished Jeff Buckley music, if this was any indication, was not really Jeff Buckley music the way we knew it at all.
Michael isn’t a bad album, per se. If anything, it’s a testament to Michael Jackson as an artist that even a mixed bag of variably tweaked studio outtakes and unreleased tunes still manages to sound as good as it ultimately does. But whether these ten songs, in this running order, produced and mixed in this manner is what Jackson would have ultimately wanted is purely speculative and thus a moot point. Much furor has been reported over how Jackson’s family wasn’t included in the album’s completion and that the vocal tracks may or may not even be Jackson’s. (“Hollywood Tonight,” “Best of Joy,” and “Breaking News” sounds especially fishy.) While I think it’s more plausible that his incomplete demo vocal tracks were over-processed by the album’s producers, all of the hullabaloo suggests the general feeling amongst fans and family members that Michael didn’t release this music in his lifetime for a reason and that, to quote one of his new songs, everyone wants a piece of Michael Jackson.
Every artist is different, but posthumously released material never seems to work in their favor. Whether slapping an unused 2Pac vocal track on a brand new song or publishing an incomplete novel by David Foster Wallace, without the involvement of the creator, you have the pop culture equivalent of Roman soldiers auctioning Christ’s bloody robes. In death, Michael Jackson achieved the one thing that seemed to evade him the past two decades: a hit record. I just wish – for the sake of his artistic legacy and the millions of devoted fans that will love Michael wholeheartedly and perhaps naively, regardless of its questionable conception — it was his record.
