THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 18, 1995 TAG: 9506160078
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Album review
SOURCE: BY RICKEY WRIGHT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines
ONE PICTURE says so much. This one, in the booklet accompanying Michael Jackson's new album, shows a crowd of fans. In the midst of the throng, arms hold aloft a banner hailing the superstar as ``KING OF POP.'' Nearly half the sign is consumed by a drawing of Jackson's dancing legs and feet - the same graphic that serves as a logo for his MJJ Productions company.
The image, on several levels, is a sham, likely perpetrated by Jackson's supposedly canny PR machine. How many fans' homemade homages link a corporate symbol and a singer? And of course, Jackson himself is responsible for whatever currency his King of Pop tag holds, having deemed its use on MTV as a prerequisite to play his 1991 ``Black or White'' video.
Pictures fill the majority of the pages. Some are taken from the ludicrously overblown TV and film ad preceding the release on Tuesday of ``HIStory: Past, Present and Future Book I'' (Epic). (Are those real Russian soldiers? Their army must really be in need of gas money.) Other pictures are taken from memorable Jackson videos and photo ops with an array of luminaries. Exactly three show his pre-``Thriller'' nose.
More signs, these held up by a small, multiracial array of kids: ``Michael is the Best.'' ``We Love You Michael.'' And a child's written plea for President Clinton to ``Make countres (sic) stop fighting'' and ``Stop the reporters from bothering Michael Jackson.''
Like Richard Nixon before him, Michael Jackson wants us to both forget his past troubles, most specifically the allegations of child molestation that threatened to derail his career two years ago. This, then, is the New Michael Jackson, whose trial by fire and love for wife Lisa Marie Presley-Jackson have made him and his music stronger. Pre-release word on ``HIStory,'' planted by Jackson co-producers and record-company executives, is that the 15 new songs that comprise the double CD's second disc are his most personal ever. You know him, you like him, and, they promise, you'll like him even more now. Welcome him home. List price: $32.98.
All this aside, ``HIStory Continues'' (the disc that contains the new work) is the same old goods. Neither the lean, ``Rhythm Nation''-style funk of ``Scream,'' a duet with sister Janet that's one side of the album's first single, or its self-pitying message are fresh. Except for Michael's use of a popular four-letter word as part of a plea that the meanies let him be.
Leave Me Alone. It's the same demand he bleated almost a decade ago in a song and video that good-humoredly lampooned his treatment at the hands of the gutter press. In 1995, Jackson is mad enough to write a song called ``Tabloid Junkie,'' to implicitly equate his legal troubles with Rodney King's beating on at least two numbers, and to gripe about being sued on the Prince-influenced ``Money.'' He pays lip service to fighting ``all the injustice'' on ``They Don't Care About Us.''
Unfortunately, he's so far gone in Neverland that he can't make these concerns reverberate musically with anything more than a smug showbiz commitment. Despite past tracts like ``Man in the Mirror'' and ``Heal the World'' (both on ``HIStory Begins''), these dribblings make it sound like he woke up to the fact of oppression only after dodging a hit himself. Not that ``HIStory Continues'' - which follows a full CD of remastered touchstones such as ``Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough'' (which kicks practically everything else here, old and new, out the door and into the street), ``Billie Jean,'' ``Beat It'' and ``Heal the World'' - is all that bad. The hard-funk workout of ``Tabloid Junkie'' features some good production ideas that suggest Jackson could mastermind one more chart comeback for James Brown, and his call for a guitar solo from Slash on the utterly paranoid rocker ``D.S.'' is the loosest thing in the 77 minutes of new material.
But Jackson's whining and awards-show awareness campaigns make his new music as hard to listen to as another Sting song cycle. In ``Earth Song,'' he even goes so far as to wonder, ``What about elephants?. . . Have we lost their trust?'' And on ``Childhood,'' the other side of that single (and the theme from the forthcoming ``Free Willy II,'' plug plug), he makes an unconvincingly tearstained case for his ``strange'' lifestyle. It's nice that he loves ``such elementary things.'' So why a 291-foot statue of himself in that ad?
That grandiosity is matched on the title track of ``HIStory,'' wherein Jackson trots out the old soundbites - King, Kennedy, Ali, Neil Armstrong - in an orchestrated conceptual mess that's somewhere between a public-service announcement and a wretched excess stunning even for Jackson. He tops that with the next song, ``Little Susie,'' a tale of child murder that turns on a Durufle excerpt and a bit of ``Sunrise, Sunset.''
Squandering his passion and talent with such overblown junk (and the almost-always pallid work he's cranked out since ``Thriller'') is surely part of what's lost Jackson some of his credibility with his audience as any sexual rumor or pet monkey. Being a willful oddball is one thing; Michael Jackson will never be mistaken for Joe Schmoe. Living the life of near total self-worship he reveals on ``HIStory,'' however, is another. MEMO: To hear excerpts from Michael Jackson's HIStory, dial 640-5555. Press
6453 (MIKE).@ ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Michael Jackson's new CD will be released Tuesday.
by CNB