Listening to a veteran artist’s greatest-hits collection is always a telling experience. More than any biography or “E! True Hollywood Story” episode, the music tells a unique story when arranged chronologically.
Now with the spread of DualDisc technology, some of these greatest-hits collections are spreading into the world of music videos, which adds a layer of storytelling to these feasts of nostalgia.
There’s no better artist than Michael Jackson to herald the arrival of such technology, which features DVD A-sides and CD B-sides on the same disc. “Visionary: The Video Singles” is more than just a collector’s must-have. It’s a piece of music history from the King of Pop, a man who has influenced generations of songwriters and sold more than 135 million records the world over.
Inside the palm-sized box are 20 individual discs, each featuring cardboard sleeves of the original 7-inch records harboring the singles’ audio and video. It starts with “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and it slinks its way through “Thriller,” “Bad,” “Black or White,” “You Are Not Alone” and closes with “Blood on the Dance Floor.”
It’s obviously heavily front-loaded, with the less-interesting titles and corresponding videos toward the back of the box (“Heal the World,” “They Don’t Care About Us”) weighing things down. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating portrait of an artist, mainly because that artist is Michael Jackson, who has endured one of the most peculiar and fantastic careers in rock history.
This article doesn’t need to rehash Jackson’s weird trail of cosmetic surgery and trials. In fact, he did a fairly decent job of that in the artful video for “Leave Me Alone,” which called the tabloids out for their scandalous (and often libelous) tendencies.
But this article does need to dissect Jackson’s role in the evolution of the music video. He was an important innovator, but it took him a while to get the idea right – and then he completely lost his grip on his own concepts.
The artist’s post-Jackson 5 solo career started out with the vibrant youth and simplicity so evident in his unique R&B-infused pop, a sound that went on to dominate the ’80s. After experimenting with “Ben” and the acoustic guitar, Jackson found his true calling with the Quincy Jones-produced “Off the Wall” in 1979, and the video for it’s lead single, “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” came in the same style of the music.
Disco was dying, but Jackson was just getting started, as evidenced by his lack of groove and confidence. He was a little more comfortable in his skin – and skin-tight human-disco-ball outfit – in the video for “Rock With You,” which was a simpler, less-produced video than his first outing.
But it wasn’t until his next record, “Thriller,” that Jackson got serious about video production, arty concepts and groundbreaking design. With the mini-epic of videos that came out of the “Thriller” album – “Billie Jean,” “Beat It” and the legendary mini-movie for the title track – Jackson forever changed the way videos would be made. He set the tone for the next generation of music videos, and his influence is still felt, with many of today’s top producers inspired by the ingenuity and carry-
through shown by Jackson and his creative team.
But there were five years between “Thriller” and his next full-length release, “Bad,” and a lot had changed between 1982 and ’87. Yes, Jackson still topped the charts with “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “Dirty Diana,” “Smooth Criminal,” “Man in the Mirror,” “Leave Me Alone” and the title track, but the music and the videos were time-stamped with a more constrictive expiration date.
The “Bad” video was a conceptual failure, and together with “Remember the Time,” they signaled the decline of the Jacksonian video epic. He tried making a parking lot and overbuckled pants dangerous in “Bad,” and he attempted to make a Pharaoh (played by Eddie Murphy) jealous of his sweet dance moves in “Remember the Time” (from the 1992 album “Dangerous”), but they both lacked the originality and vision of a “Thriller” or “Billie Jean.”
Jackson changed everything, on the radio and MTV alike. But then he, himself, failed to change. And that, alongside countless other factors, contributed to his decline as a pop culture icon.
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
