Michael Jackson Vs. (?) Prince | Black Music Month

I once told the audience that, one day when things got slow, we’d do a Michael Jackson vs. Prince discussion. Of course, the show ended before we could. So, to start a series here at BomaniJones.com for Black Music Month, I’ll bring the discussion here. With each entry, look at the links closely, as I’ll connect many of the references to YouTube and Spotify so you can check the songs yourselves.
To be clear, this won’t be about who’s better or anything like that. While they’re bound by race and contemporaneity, getting into “better” is futile. They are, however, very different, and that lends to people having impassioned debates about whom they prefer.
The question becomes why those discussions are so heated. Among black artists, this is as close to a Beatles-Stones argument as you’ll get. That fits well. You had the Beatles, with their immaculate and ahead-of-its-time production, plus the ability to make gigantic pop hits without sacrificing any quality or, in many cases, edge. On the other side are the Stones and all the nasty shit they wanted to talk about. ‘Twas sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll for the Stones, and it was all those things in explicit terms. The Beatles danced around the topic of LSD in 1967. The Stones, pretty clearly, talked about an ill-fated attempt to sleep with a menstruating woman the year before. All that’s to say that which band someone picks usually isn’t just about what music they’re into. It’s about what they’re into on a macro level.
Now tell me that doesn’t fit while people discuss Michael Jackson and Prince. And it all hit me Wednesday while listening to one song.
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“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” might be MJ’s best song. If you were to ask me today, I’d say it’s the best song on Thriller. Further, with its place as the album’s first track, it’s a big reason people hold the album in such high esteem. You put it in, press play, and just that fast it’s on. It’s James Brown for the early ‘80s. You can hear it in the phrasing, the hook, the bridge, the groove…just everything. It’s not songwriting genius or anything. It’s just foot-on-the-gas energy that makes it impossible not to move something. Your head, your ass…whatever isn’t tied down, “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” is gonna get to it.
That’s a song Prince just can’t do. He certainly can do James Brown. “Sexy M.F.” may as well be a James Brown song. You can hear those guitar licks all the way through his catalog. But when it came to doing perfect, tight pop/soul songs, the only person in the same league as J.B. was Michael.
The operative word there is “perfect,” for it’s both a blessing and a curse. Of course, perfection is everyone’s goal, but perfection requires so much practice and planning. Every single detail has to be on time. Every word, grunt and run has to be on point. Basically, making a perfect song is capturing a moment that, as a listener, you know damn well only happened once. In that MJ documentary I appeared in, keyboardist Michael Boddicker talked about how Michael would, in his soft voice, tell the band that he needed “10 more takes.” Dammit, they were going to get it right before they left. Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones didn’t make imperfect records. They made highly produced, shiny hits. They could be emotionally resonant and/or sexy, and even somewhat sexual, but they’d be perfect, and they’d sound like everyone involved knew they were perfect.
But is anything perfect about real life?
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The last sentence was the part that hit me, what made me really think about what I think is the biggest difference between MJ and Prince, what makes me so much more of a Prince fan than I am of MJ. And it’s that perfection.
Or, more accurately, Prince’s lack thereof.
No, I’m not saying that Prince never did anything flawless or as high-quality as Thriller or Off The Wall. But with all that perfection, often MJ deviated from anything I could consider to be real. When you listen to Thriller, you can easily get lost in the song. But when the song is over, welcome back to the regular world. In fact, not even welcome back. The truth is that you never left.
So, when I was driving and “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” came on, I was all about it. I was screaming at the top of my lungs and moving in a way I probably wouldn’t if someone could see me in my non-dancing glory. I was in love with the guitar on the bridge, the drum and bass programming, MJ’s voice…all of it.
But there was never a moment where I wasn’t perfectly aware that I was in a car, on my way to work. I didn’t go anywhere. I just had a helluva soundtrack for the ride.
Go farther into Thriller, and it’s still the same for me. It’s hard to separate the B-side of the album — “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” “Human Nature,” “P.Y.T.” and “The Lady In My Life” — from everything surrounding the Thriller phenomenon, but at every step, we’ve got a bunch of amazing songs packaged to make an amazing record. And that record might sound better than any I’ve ever heard. Besides the boring-as-all-get-out “The Girl Is Mine,” the good-but-not-great “Baby Be Mine,” and “Thriller,” you’ve got overwhelming heat on every other song.
You can say the same about lots of Bad. “The Way You Make Me Feel” is irresistible. “Man in the Mirror” does every single thing one could in a studio to make you feel, and it makes the hair stand up on my neck every time I hear it. When he’s on, nobody’s ever been that good. And while it gets slept on — largely because Teddy Riley just wasn’t as pop-centric as Q — Dangerous has moments that do the same.
And as soon as I turn all those songs off, it’s over. They were what they were always intended to be — top-notch pop music. There were records to be broken, videos to be shot…and you can hear it all in the mix. The strides toward grandeur are a part of the sound.
But, while MJ might be more a more talented performer than anyone who ever lived, but the music rarely felt organic after Off The Wall. I’m not so into music for inorganic stuff. I’d also be willing to guess that’s the same for other folks who love Prince as much as I do.
So what are we into it for? To get into it.
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As you may have noticed, Prince is weird. Not like MJ’s weird, which has left us spending decades trying to figure out how the upbringing of a child star created the weirdo we saw over the last 15 or so years of his life.
No, Prince’s weird is the sort that no stories about his parents, good or bad, could explain it. He’s a 5-2 dude wearing high heels and blouses who makes women melt with sheer audacity. I don’t know where the hell they make those. I mean, we can find lots of stories about people who turned out unconventionally because of growing up under the microscope with pushy parents. But the only person I can think of being halfway similar to Prince is Jimmy Goldstein, and I barely know anything about Jimmy Goldstein other than that he wears funny clothes and hangs out with amazingly beautiful women.
And to this day, after all these years of listening to his music, that weird is so fascinating. Not just because Prince is strange, but because he gives the impression that he lives in a world where the stuff he does is perfectly acceptable.
Where on Earth is that? I guess Minneapolis, but I know a few people from Minneapolis. They ain’t like that.
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Maybe it’s not an actual place. Perhaps it’s simply a state of mind, an indifference to public opinion that moves Prince to behave like he’s on a planet with a population of 1. But wherever that place is, I swear I go to it every time I listen to him. And when I’m there, I wonder why we can’t be there all the time.
Where is this world where anyone can do how they please, so long as it’s not hurting everyone else? Where they masturbate in hotel lobbies and stop to carry on conversations with perfect strangers? Where waitresses take baths with heartbroken customers, even if their pants are still on?
The list goes on and on. The Prince catalog is full of these vignettes that, together, are a recreation of an alternate universe. Strangers meet, cut straight to the case, and get to what they want. It might be unapologetically loving as easily as it could be purely physical, superficial or substantially provocative. You wanted to dance? Well, all she wants is a boyfriend. That’s where she wants to go, so no need to waste time on the floor. You’re better built for one helluva night. And we know all this because everyone says so. That’s an audacious place.
And nothing in this world, to me, is more sexy or exciting than audacity, and excitement is what draws me to music. Not that audacity makes Prince sexy to me, or that the audacity even has to be sexual. It just all sounds so exciting, and what better could you call a song than exciting? Think about this part of “Do It All Night.”
Someone over there
says he wants to get to know you, and
I don’t care, cuz I really wanna hold you
and, I’m so scared
cuz he might do something to you that you like
Think that’s not audacious? And it’s all a rush of colliding thoughts, somehow singly focused on her while perfectly aware of the world around him. How can someone so outlandish spell out simple, normal human insecurity so clearly and fearlessly? The same guy who, on the same album, gets a woman to give him head on her wedding day. That’s who.
Where can we all go to be that guy, totally divorced from our hangups? You have sex, express your love and pray to God all for the same reason — because you fucking feel like it. It’s comfortable excitement, and in your life, that sentence may be the first time you’ve ever seen those two words side-by-side.
In Prince’s world, you can smack her on the ass and tell her, word for word, that you want to fuck the taste out of her mouth. And, apparently, the only reason that would be problematic would be if you didn’t mean it.
Sometimes, you wanna fuck the taste out of her mouth. You wanna tell her that from the beginning. That’s what she wants you to do. All you have to do is say it.
So few of us ever do. In our worlds, that just isn’t permissible. But man, how great would it be if it was?
That’s where I go when I listen to Prince. That’s certainly a place I’d love to live.
And that place, for better or worse, isn’t perfect.
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That’s why, to me, comparing these two becomes apples and oranges. Mike and Prince are doing two totally different things. MJ was going to make the biggest, best albums ever made. Prince made music, and he made it constantly. Prince’s four best albums were released between 1980 and 1987. In that same time period, MJ release two albums in total.
The basis of MJ’s music was his talent and the production. The basis of Prince was his own unique ethos and creativity afforded by trying to spell it out. The lil’ fella may have never done anything as good as Thriller. But in the end, would anyone really want that?
Prince indulged his own genius album after album. MJ served the market, and he didn’t think his own greatness was enough to do that (unlike Prince, who almost felt like we were wrong for not buying into his awkward forays into rap).
That’s why I can throw Thriller on at any barbecue and be sure it’ll get the party cracking. It’s also why I can talk about Prince albums for hours with strangers and get different spins from each person in the conversation. I still talk to people about what they think “Thieves In The Temple” is about. I can go on for hours discussing the juxtaposition of sexual and messianic tones — all over a once-in-a-lifetime combination of hard rock, pop, soul and gospel — on Purple Rain.
And I’m almost positive much of that stuff came together by happenstance. I’m not foolish enough to think it was all orchestrated as such. Some was, certainly. But this was just him. This was his world. This was how he saw it. The sound was how he chose to share it. And it was just so damn much to take in that, almost 30 years later, we’re still figuring a lot of it out.
It would be impossible to do that with such an eye toward perfection. The rough edges would be lost, when the edges are what make it all so incredible. That, in stark contrast to Michael Jackson, is Prince’s perfection.
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I’m a good dude that’s into that nasty shit, and I can never get enough of a world where that’s the norm. All depends on what you’re into. It’s about what they made and how they relate to your sensibilities.
To me? Perfection can be pretty boring. Prince’s world is anything but. And that’s why I continue to get lost in it, even if it never makes my neck jerk like “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.”