At midnight on Sunday, the new Michael Jackson single, “This Is It,” became available for streaming on michaeljackson.com. Jon Pareles, the chief pop critic of The New York Times, and Jon Caramanica, a regular contributor to The Times’s pop coverage, discuss its merits, and the striking resemblance to a 1991 song recorded by the Puerto Rican singer Safi
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Michael Jackson rehearsing onstage at the Staples Center in Los Angeles in June of this year.
JON PARELES Michael Jackson’s commercial afterlife starts today with “This Is It.” Maybe there should be a question mark at the end of the title — or, perhaps, a slight expansion paraphrasing Peggy Lee: “Is this all there is?”
Touted as brand-new, it’s not. It has much in common — its melody and many lyrics — with “I Never Heard,” a song written by Mr. Jackson and Paul Anka before Mr. Jackson’s “Dangerous” album and shelved. “I Never Heard” surfaced in 1991 near the end of an album by the Puerto Rican singer Safire. She sang with what now sounds very much like Jackson’s phrasing, and a lot more joy.
Safire’s “I Never Heard” exults in an unexpected romance. For “This Is It,” the lyrics got a telling rewrite. Safire sang, “In the light of the world, love is grand,” but Jackson’s version changes it to the considerably more messianic, “I’m the light of the world, I feel grand.” And later, “I’m the light of the world, this is real.”
Jackson still sings about being a lover in “This Is It,” but I don’t hear romance. Now, especially since the song is attached to memorials like the rehearsal-footage movie, also called “This Is It,” and a blatantly greedy album — the big hits yet again, two versions of “This Is It” and a handful of demos — “This Is It” becomes one of the Jackson songs that conflates his own stardom with universal love and uplift. Love Michael Jackson and heal the world; it was the kind of promise he could make when he was pop’s global superstar. (And the song may well have been set aside because Jackson used the same hymnlike tempo and ascending harmonies in “Heal the World.”)
The vocal starts with the breathy jitters that added another level of tension and syncopation to Jackson’s dance tunes, but soon smoothes itself out. Over Jackson’s piano-and-voice demo, the production waxes reverent: rising massed strings, genteel guitar tickles, his brothers in the Jacksons going “Ooh.” The free stream on michaeljackson.com is the orchestra version; the “album version” Epic sent the media takes off the strings, an improvement that unveils all the vocal harmonies and the finger snaps.
No funk here: it’s the posthumous, all-sweetness-and-light Jackson that his family is determined to sell. But at least he sounds human, especially at the end, where he lets the vocal line take a few tentative leaps. The vulnerability — especially at the beginning, as he counts off the song — is the endearing thing about “This Is It.” But what was he thinking as he sang, “I’m the light of the world?”
JON CARAMANICA Oh, dear — it’s an unfortunate coincidence, I’m guessing (hoping?), that the ad I’m seeing on michaeljackson.com is for “Gone Too Far,” the MTV reality-intervention series premiering today and starring D.J. AM, another 2009 victim of a drug overdose.
Or perhaps that’s reflective of the fumbling hands with which this song has been released. As mentioned here and elsewhere, these lyrics have been heard before. On the stream, the recording of the vocals is fuzzy, and the mix is far from perfect. And the song itself never fully resolves, working at one melodic and emotional pitch and then fading out.
“This Is It” does have that naïve quality that Jackson managed to hold on to through the early ’90s, only completely losing it in the face of media scrutiny and his own melting under it. (So glad you mentioned “Heal the World,” a far better and possibly smarter song built from largely the same building blocks.) But as a musical artifact, it’s better as suggestion than song: what I hear here is how Mr. Jackson might have sung these words in a proper studio setting, perhaps in a roomier arrangement with more motion in the rhythm.
And it’s an odd choice to signal Mr. Jackson’s re-emergence. The song itself is a trifle, a mildly ornery and defensive lyric over a sketch of lush harmonies to come. For “Michael Jackson: The Lost Tapes,” maybe, it would be a welcome curio, but ultimately “This Is It” sticks out as a song chosen more for its title than for its meaning. My fear, J P, is that it’s not a question mark missing after those words, but a period.
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