How many michael jackson songs are there

He said he was at Sony when Jackson's last contract was negotiated, though he acknowledged it could have recently been updated. Gordon said Jackson owns some of his master recordings, while others are owned in partnership with Sony. Regardless, he said, Sony retains exclusive distribution rights for anything Jackson produced during the term of their contract.

Gordon said he expects Sony's Legacy Recordings division to do something similar to what it did with Elvis and create a division purely for Jackson's catalog. Jackson's last original album was 's "Invincible. He died just weeks before he was to perform 50 concerts at London's O2 arena in what was supposed to be his comeback. He had also begun working on new material.

Two weeks before he died, he wrapped up work on an elaborate production dubbed the "Dome Project," which could be the final finished video piece overseen by Jackson.

Two people with knowledge of the project confirmed its existence Monday to The Associated Press on condition they not be identified because they signed confidentiality agreements.

Four sets were constructed for Jackson's production, including a cemetery recalling his famous "Thriller" video. Shooting for the project lasted from June 1 to June 9. Now in post-production, the project is expected to be completed next month. Last year, Jackson released "Thriller 25," an album marking the 25th anniversary of the album.

Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, has more No. With 13 No. His catalog has both legendary breadth and depth, considering Jackson was the first artist to score No. Where to start with "We Are the World," the biggest charity single of all time, which recruited 46 singers to contribute a few words each to raise funds to combat poverty in Africa.

The first single from Jackson's "Bad" album is also its weakest one. Thanks in large part to Michael's precocious talent, the Jackson Five quickly progressed from performing in local talent shows to landing a record deal with Motown. Michael began to exercise an unprecedented level of control of his musical and business affairs following the Jacksons' departure from Motown in In , Jackson temporarily re-teamed with his brothers for the successful Victory album and tour.

The worst track on his three classic albums. But it does! If you have nothing better to do some day, spend some time just checking out the bass line! Were there killer songs in the archive? Hard to listen to this objectively.

Some synth noises and some Jacksonian ululations. Kelly song, which meanders around without getting anywhere. Right around the time he was working on this song with Jackson, Kelly was allegedly filming himself urinating on a year-old girl.

We all had difficult teen years; Jackson was living out every misstep in public. Slash is brought in to dutifully lay in some grinding guitars.

Sneddon was the Santa Barbara County DA who had the unappetizing job of serving a search warrant on Jackson … to inspect his genitalia, after a kid had said he had blotches on his groin. The case began in L. Jackson dispensed glamour and gifts, and played the mother off against the birth father, who naturally grew more and more suspicious, as one would when one hears that a something man was sharing a bedroom with his young son.

This being L. In any case, after a great deal of behind-the-scenes machinations, the son eventually told a therapist he had in fact been molested. That set a criminal investigation in motion.

Like other predators, Jackson focused on kids from broken homes or who were vulnerable in other ways. He played secret games, showed them pornography, distracted their parents with expensive presents.

And, like Harvey Weinstein, he hired scorched-earth private investigators to harass his accusers and muddy the waters. And like Donald Trump, instead of meeting with the media to explain his position, he released an insane-looking video proclaiming his innocence.

The kid was hounded for years by Jackson fans, who repeatedly published his address and pictures online. Alone and wracked by a rare and highly painful disease, he put a bullet in his head a few months after Jackson died; he was so isolated that the hospital eventually just had his body cremated.

The brothers kept insisting on being able to produce their own album. He appeared in the film The Wiz , where he got to know Quincy Jones. Jones befriended the young Jackson, and eventually agreed to produce his first adult solo album.

You have to remember that no one expected good songs filling out these albums. Actually, Jones is one of the coolest people who ever lived.

He knew Ray Charles as a teen. Jackson has nowhere near the adult perspective to handle a subject like this with any subtlety or insight. Another six-minute-plus ordeal. Over it all Jackson warbles. On the cover of the album, Jackson poses, unconvincingly, with an acoustic guitar. This sounds like an Olivia Newton-John song.

The song bounced around Jacksonland for years and ended up getting retooled by Timbaland for the second posthumous Jackson album, Xscape. This would be the last track Jackson would record for Motown.

This one, an epic six-and-a-half minutes, rambles between a crooning upbeat chorus and verses where Jackson gets to sound all tough … and then lurches back into weepy protestations, complete with lots of very historical sounding news and speech clips.

Was Jackson himself a student of history? The melody is aimless. And the chorus is leaden. Then it goes into yet another Michael Jackson song about how mean the press is to him. It was certainly a tragedy, but even so many years later it still makes your blood boil a bit to think how celebrities like Jackson and Elton John went into overdrive to about a kid like White when gay men were dying, literally unsung, by the thousands, sometimes on the streets.

Whenever I think of this song, I think about a magazine called Wigwag , which was begun by some refugees of The New Yorker. The mag featured an opening essay each issue, and one month it was about White. But then you realize the lingering outro is really just a setup for Jackson to deliver a lugubrious spoken-word recitation, which on inspection has little to do with the rest of the song.

Did I mention this was the theme to Free Willy? You might or might not like Ross as Billie Holiday. Just the melody appeared in the film; it was put together for Jackson with lyrics by Smokey Robinson. Jones, apparently experimenting with different things Jackson could try, turned to schlockmeister Carole Bayer Sager for this nothing song. The results in Off the Wall and Thriller are of course obvious and arguably inarguable.

But it should be recognized that the practice is compromising. Are you an artist? Or are you a craftsperson, keenly looking at what the customers want? And at what point do you lose yourself in this process? Etiam aliquando bonus dormitat homerus. Why was Michael Jackson singing formal love plaints like this? Turns out Michael Jackson is the director! Jackson and race is one of the weirdest subjects I can think of.

He suffered from a condition called vitiligo, which gave him patches of lighter skin; that was his excuse for bleaching the rest of his skin. All of this was then complicated by his bland admonishments about race as he grew older. This is supposed to be a duet with Stevie Wonder; I have to say after listening to Bad for decades I still get sorta surprised when I read that Wonder is on the track. The leadoff single from Bad , designed to soften up the populace for the next assault. Around this point on the album, the novelty of the edge of the beats was wearing off a bit.

There are occasional reports that Dangerous or Invincible are the most expensive records ever made. How does that happen?

Jackson would then flit about, in between trips out of the country, to troll for decent beats for his album. And the trouble was that, in the end, Dangerous sounded like what it was — the product of a very expensive, but in the end, not-quite-human process. Not a bad track, but to enjoy it, you have to get past the title. And this was before any of his scandals presented itself to the public. Was he writing from his subconscious? Practicing his lines?

Carlos Santana plays through the track and whistles too. Tacky ending with Jackson and Santana thanking each other. You get one of those here, and then another aggregation of the best beats and melodies money could buy at the time.

You have to give him credit. This is all courtesy of Teddy Riley. I think Jackson takes him to a harder place here than normal. My sense is that Quincy Jones, on the hilariously titled Bad , knew it was all posturing and produced accordingly; here, in Dangerous , it feel more like Jackson was browbeating his producers to make him seem more, you know, dangerous.

But en masse it all seems poised and melodramatic. As is typical on the album, he veers here between an overdone defiance and a tearful choke in his voice.

Slash wanders in again and plays an awful lot of notes to underscore how desperate the singer is. In the U. This created a distracting legal battle when MCA put out this album, and even tried to release an accompanying single, right when Thriller was coming out.

This was the single, which is annoying even before E. By this time, Kravitz was long past whatever low creative peak he had ever hit; the chances that he would suddenly be writing hot material for Michael Jackson was doubtful, a suspicion a quick listen to the song confirms.

It took more than half a dozen people to write this overlong and over-verbal mess. Jackson wrote this with Dr. It has an undeniably efficient backing track, and the chorus certainly has a hook.