It's amazing how much time I've put into thinking about this album this past week and I still don't really know what to say about it. As I've already written I feel that Jackson's best work was his 1979 release Off The Wall. Three years later he would release Thriller and it would be five years before Bad. Thriller of course changed everything. It was such a smash hit, that it put Jackson into a different realm. It's amazing to me that it was five years until his next release.
It's a daunting task to follow up such a big hit record and one thing the five year delay gave Bad was its own space. By 1987 Thriller really was a piece of the past. Bad continues to build on the sound developed on Off the Wall, but Bad takes the sound away from the dance floor and is much more pop focused.
In many ways Bad succeeds at what it is intending to do. It is probably Jackson's best collection of straight pop tunes. But there are two big problems. First, when you move more into the singer songwriter area you are more exposed as a writer. Jackson is exposed here as not the best lyricist. A song like "Liberian Girl" sounds great and has a good hook, but the lyric is so odd it throws the listener off a bit. Secondly for the first time Jackson's voice sounds a bit mechanical. There is such a softness and gentleness to his singing on Off the Wall that listening to him is a pleasure. When you listen to a song like "Bad" that smooth voice has been replaced by this harsh mechanical approach and it just doesn't have the same affect and to me doesn't work as well for Jackson.
All in all it's a much better album than what I remembered from 1987, but of course by that point I was into The Cure, so you know. It's a solid pop album and if you want to hear Jackson at his pop best then throw this one on while you clean the house.
Following the Rhapsody rating method I give it 2 out of 5 stars for Not Bad.
Such a sad story.
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