by Joseph Vogel
Jackson demonstrated his trademark laser focus as the project reached the final weeks. “Sometimes we’d look up and it would easily be three or four in the morning,” Jimmy Jam noted. “There were days when Michael would leave the studio at 3:00 a.m. and be back in action first thing the next day.” Rob Hoffman remembers Jackson approaching the engineering crew in late March 1995, saying, “ ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think any of us are going to sleep this weekend. There’s a lot to get done, and we have to go to Bernie [Grundman for mastering] on Monday morning.’ He stayed at the studio the entire time, singing, and mixing.”
The final pruning was a typically painful process. Bruce Swedien tasked assistant engineer John Van Nest with helping Jackson trim it down. “This was no small undertaking,” recalled Van Nest, “as about seven minutes needed to be trimmed somewhere. I laid this all out in [Pro] Tools and came to know every bar of every song very intimately. I found places where songs could be tightened up and came up with many suggestions. On the night of mastering, I was put in a room at Bernie Grundman’s with my Sound Tools rig, and in this room, I would have to ‘negotiate’ with Michael about what to take out. I’ll never forget this night….Michael came in, and Bruce told MJ that we would have to remove either one whole song or edit the others to fit onto a CD. We chose the latter. I started with song one and played Michael my edits, ‘Oh no, we can’t take that out, it’s my favorite part of the album!’ ‘Okay,’ [I said.] ‘Let’s try another.’ ‘Oh no, we must keep those four bars.’ Okay, let’s go to the vamp, which carries on for two minutes—how about removing these eight bars, ‘Oh no, that’s my favorite part of the vamp!’ Well, you get the picture. Meanwhile, Jimmy Jam was in with us, telling Michael that all these edits were killer, and actually made things better. And over the course of about five hours, we got it down. By this time, it was probably 3:00 a.m., and I was wiped out.”
The album was finally mastered by Bernie Grundman a few hours later. In a portentous sign of things to come, however, the playback session for Sony executives did not go well. Perhaps because of accumulated frustration over how long it had taken to record, or perhaps because of the challenging, eclectic content, they sat stone-faced as the album played and walked out without saying a word when it was finished. “No applause, no comment, no reaction,” recalled Bruce Swedien. “I was absolutely mortified. How can people that are supposed to be in the record business be so dumb?…There were tears in Michael’s eyes. Bea [Swedien’s wife], Michael, and I went out to the parking lot and got in my big Bronco. Michael said to me, ‘I’ll never do this again.’ ”
HYPE, FASCISM, AND CONTROVERSY
HIStory was released on June 16, 1995. By that time the lead single, “Scream,” had already soared to #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It replaced the Beatles’ “Let It Be” as the highest-charting debut in the thirty-seven-year history of the chart. Anticipation was so high that it was leaked to a Los Angeles radio station two weeks early (this was long before the days of illegal downloading in which such leaks became commonplace).
Jackson premiered the Mark Romanek–directed music video for the song—which remains the most expensive music video ever made—during an hour-long primetime interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC. That interview, Jackson’s first since the 1993 allegations, was watched by an estimated sixty-four million people. Accompanied by Lisa Marie, Jackson told Sawyer before the interview that he was willing to answer any and all questions, including about the allegations. Like his interview with Oprah in 1993, the special helped humanize the artist, though it also spent the majority of the time focused on controversies—not on his creative work.
HIStory debuted at #1 on the Billboard album chart that week. “It’s now common for albums to enter at #1 based on first week sales,” noted John Branca. “But back when HIStory was released, you really did have to have a very big album to get to #1.” It hit #1 in nineteen other countries that summer—quite a comeback for an artist who had been declared dead by many industry experts.
In the early stages, Sony seemed to be all-in on the album, unleashing a massive, global, $30 million promotional campaign—including the $7 million for the “Scream” short film and the elaborate military-themed teaser filmed back in 1994. Directed by Rupert Wainwright, the four-minute promotional video featured Jackson marching at the head of a perfectly synchronized army to the stirring music of Basil Poledouris’s “Hymn to Red October.” As Jackson walks, he is gradually identified through his iconic trademarks and waves benevolently to near-hysterical fans. The video culminates in the unveiling of a colossal statue of the artist.
While the video achieved Jackson’s goal of rebuilding his stature and aura (and generating excitement for the album), it was not well received by critics. “The clip doesn’t just stop at representing previously known levels of Michael mania,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Chris Willman, “it goes well beyond the bounds of self-congratulation to become perhaps the most baldly vainglorious self-deification a pop singer has yet deigned to share with his public, at least with a straight face.” Others argued that, with its use of military visuals and iconography and glorification of a charismatic leader, it was modeled after the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. (Jackson responded to this by claiming it was “art” and had “nothing to do with politics, or Communism, or Fascism.”)
As the rest of the promotional campaign unfolded, however—which included the unveiling of a series of real-life thirty-two-foot steel and fiberglass statues of the artist throughout Europe, some of which floated down major waterways like London’s Thames—a major backlash began to build. For Jackson, the campaign was a declaration of defiance and triumph. After being declared down and out, he had emerged even stronger. The cover image presented him standing like an immortalized prizefighter—bold, fists clenched, confident—amid red, apocalyptic clouds.
Yet all the hype and self-promotion played into narratives about Jackson’s lack of self-awareness and megalomania. After a promising first week, the album began to slip quickly, dropping out of the US Top 10 after less than a month. Interest did seem to revive with the release of the second single, “You Are Not Alone,” which shot to #1. The gorgeous R&B ballad became one of the most popular songs on the radio that summer. Yet—in the United States, at least—Sony seemed to give up on the album after that, seeing Jackson’s prospects in America as limited. No further singles were released for six months—and when they were, they received little promotion or airplay.
Overseas, however, was a very different story. Jackson’s popularity abroad had never been bigger. HIStory went platinum or multiplatinum in at least fifteen countries. The album’s singles, meanwhile, met extraordinary success. “Earth Song,” for example, which wasn’t even released as a single in the United States, hit #1 in fifteen countries. It held the top spot in the UK for seven weeks; in Germany, it was #1 for five weeks. “They Don’t Care About Us,” likewise, cracked the Top 10 in over eighteen countries.
After just two months, HIStory had sold nearly eight million copies. More than 75 percent of those sales came from outside the United States. The verdict on Jackson’s comeback was clear: he remained one of the biggest superstars on the planet, but in his home country, the popularity he’d commanded throughout the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s would never return.
REEVALUATING HISTORY
For the most part, critics in the mid-’90s dismissed HIStory. Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it “a monumental achievement of ego,” which seemed more a commentary on the promotional campaign than the music. The New York Times’s Jon Pareles, meanwhile, castigated its subject matter and tone: “His rage keeps ripping through the sweet, uplifting façade he has clung to throughout his career. He’s not pretending to be normal anymore. In his new songs, he is paranoid and cagey, messianic and petty, vindictive and maudlin. Comparing himself to John F. Kennedy and Jesus Christ, he’s a megalomaniac who feels l
ike a victim.”
In a more balanced review, Rolling Stone praised it as an “exhilarating” collection of songs, but ultimately saw it as “misconceived.” “HIStory’s ultimate goal,” speculated the magazine, “is to position Michael Jackson’s music as a planet, a genre, a law, a marketing budget unto itself.”
While the vast majority of reviews were critical of HIStory in 1995, however, it has held up as one of his most important albums. Songs like “Scream,” “They Don’t Care About Us,” “Stranger in Moscow,” “Earth Song,” “You Are Not Alone,” and “Smile” are among the strongest and most durable songs in his entire catalog.
“It’s insipid,” notes cultural critic Armond White in his 2009 book, Keep Moving: The Michael Jackson Chronicles, “for reviewers to complain that HIStory’s anger is personally motivated—of course it is. But it matters that Jackson broadens it, relates it past crackpot fury to the condition of national, universal injury….[He] makes the discomfort of American living, the whole serious question of our nation’s lost humanism, a matter of mainstream consciousness….[He] expresses hard experience and uneasy knowledge. In his aggrieved voice, there’s a place for everyone’s desperate, urgent yearning.”
Connecting the personal, the social, and the universal is part of what continues to make HIStory compelling years later. It is without question Jackson’s most politically pointed album, taking aim at everything from environmental degradation to racism to media malpractice. Yet the album’s power also lies simply within the music itself—the haunting chords of “Stranger in Moscow,” the staccato snares of “They Don’t Care About Us,” the majestic sweep and passion of “Earth Song.”
Those who worked on the album knew those songs didn’t come from the caricature in the press but from an artist deeply committed to his craft. “I don’t know that many people would ever have the patience or work ethic to create the records that [Michael] did,” reflected assistant engineer Rob Hoffman. “We’ll never have the budgets again, that’s for sure….There was this constant pursuit for ‘sounds the ear has never heard.’ ” Music critic Daniel Sweeney praises not only the “vast musical resources” that went into the album, but the “richness and overall spatial perspective of the recording.”
Was it a cohesive listening experience? Certainly not in the same way as Off the Wall or even Dangerous. There’s no single “sound” on HIStory. Some songs—including “Come Together,” recorded during the Bad era—feel out of place. There are also some strange sequencing choices—as, for example, when “Earth Song” gives way to “D.S.”
The argument can also be made that there are too many songs that hit the same note tone-wise. “Scream,” “This Time Around,” “D.S.,” “Money,” “Tabloid Junkie,” and “2 Bad” are all grounded in Jackson’s rage and indignation. The album is a much darker, heavier experience than his work from the 1980s. Yet, like many artists—including John Lennon in his later records—some remarkable material comes out of that struggle, pain, and anger. It may be less accessible than his earlier albums, but it can also be more rewarding.
Decades later, some critics and fans view HIStory as Jackson’s artistic apex, given its combination of raw emotion, tenacity, and vulnerability. For all the headwinds it faced, HIStory has now sold more than twenty million copies (forty million discs), making it the bestselling double-disc album of all time.
THE SONGS
1. “SCREAM”
Written by Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, James Harris III, and Terry Lewis
Produced by Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, James Harris III, and Terry Lewis
After the events of the previous couple of years, Michael Jackson had a lot of pent-up emotions. The HIStory album gave him a number of ways to channel them. For the opening track, he wanted to come out swinging. Perhaps no other track in Jackson’s catalog packs as big a punch. “Scream” is a furious expression of exasperation and indignation. It’s his primal therapy. It’s his declaration of requital.
What it was not was bright, cheerful pop; that’s not the mood Jackson was in.
“Scream” was the first and only duet between Michael and Janet—the most successful brother-sister duo in the history of popular music. It was an expression of family solidarity. Janet enlisted her longtime producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to help out with the track. Within hours of hearing the groove, Michael began developing the lyrics and melody. According to Jimmy Jam, Michael wrote most of the song in one day. He locked into its aggression immediately and quickly figured out the arrangement. Soon after, in the studio, he laid down his first vocal. “The music comes on,” Jam recalled, “and for about ten seconds, Michael just starts dancing around, stomping…snapping his fingers…clapping, which is really unusual. And suddenly, he just started singing. We were blown away. I had never seen or heard anything like it in my entire life. We had to almost hold on to our chairs due to the sheer energy and force of his singing.”
Janet decided to record her lead vocal back in Minneapolis, where she was typically based for her own albums and more comfortable. Revealing his competitive nature, Michael was so impressed with his sister’s lead vocal that he flew out to Minneapolis to rerecord his (ultimately, he stuck with the original). Once the main parts were in place, Janet and Michael sang the harmonies together at the Hit Factory in New York. “The two of them singing together was amazing,” Rob Hoffman asserted. “Super tight, no bad notes, one part after another.” According to Hoffman, the only glitch in the recording session was Michael’s reluctance to swear. “I was in the room when Jimmy Jam asked him to sing the chorus of ‘Scream,’ ” he noted, “and he would not say the F-word. He kind of made it very percussive instead of singing the full word. Janet carried the majority of that background vocal.” This may have been due to some residual holdover from his conservative, Jehovah’s Witness upbringing. But eventually, Michael did it. The “Stop fucking with me” line became the first and only time he used the word in a song, giving it extra impact.
Production on the track, meanwhile, was an elaborate process. Michael wanted a loud, fierce sound, and he got it. The song begins with electric buzzing and glitching effects; then what sounds like an explosion of fire; then screeching and metallic clanking; and, finally, Michael’s voice unleashing a guttural scream as glass shatters around it. It is a brilliant aural effect that captures the entrapment and suffocation he feels. It’s as if he is breaking out of a glass cage by the sheer power of his voice.
The beat kicks in from there, pounding through speakers like a fist (with a subtle sprinkling of residual glass). “Tired of injustice,” Michael sings, “Tired of the schemes.” As Jimmy Jam observed the day the artist recorded it, the vocal arrives with the force and energy of a lightning storm. Janet likewise brings a solid dose of fury. “You’re sellin’ out souls,” she sings, “But I care about mine.”
Throughout the song, the slamming beat and hair-raising bass assault the ear. The background harmonies don’t so much lighten the song as give it momentum, like gusts of wind. Nothing else in the ’90s sounded like this. It was like a cross between Nine Inch Nails and Daft Punk. It was industrial and electronic; R&B and rock.
In the bridge, the noise finally cuts out and there is a brief moment of zen. That peace, however, quickly disappears as Janet registers her dismay at the reports she sees on the television (“…a man has been brutally beaten to death by police after being wrongly identified as a robbery suspect. The man was an eighteen-year-old black male…” the news relays). “I was disgusted by all the injustice,” Janet whispers, then Michael repeats the line, before an electric guitar interjects and blazes through a jagged solo, with sirens and breaking glass in the background.
Many in Jackson’s camp—and at Sony—had wanted the first single to be something lighter and listener-friendly. They didn’t want the artist to come across as angry, defensive, and bitter out of the gate.
But Michael insisted on “Scream.”
The song debuted at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 (and at #1 on the R&B chart). It cracked the Top 10 through most of the rest of the world.
2. “THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT US”
Written by Michael Jackson
Produced by Michael Jackson
“They Don’t Care About Us” is probably the most powerful protest song of Jackson’s career—and certainly among the most enduring pieces of musical agitation to come out of the 1990s. In the mid-2010s, in the United States, the track was resurrected as an anthem for the Black Lives Matter movement. Activists chanted it at rallies, blasted it on stereos, and circulated the Spike Lee–directed short films on social media. Decades after its initial release, it seemed that America (or, at least, some in America) finally understood what Jackson was trying to say.
In 1995, by contrast, the track was plagued by controversy from the outset. Before the HIStory album was even released, critics charged that it was anti-Semitic. Among the opening salvos was an article by Bernard Weinraub for The New York Times on June 15, 1995, which described the album as “profane, obscure, angry, and filled with rage,” and singled out “They Don’t Care About Us” as “pointedly critical of Jews.” Weinraub cited the lines, “Jew me, sue me / Everybody do me / Kick me, kike me / Don’t you black or white me.” Jackson responded immediately in a statement, which read: “The idea that these lyrics could be deemed objectionable is extremely hurtful to me, and misleading. The song in fact is about the pain of prejudice and hate and is a way to draw attention to social and political problems. I am the voice of the accused and the attacked. I am the voice of everyone. I am the skinhead, I am the Jew, I am the black man, I am the white man. I am not the one who was attacking. It is about the injustices to young people and how the system can wrongfully accuse them. I am angry and outraged that I could be so misinterpreted.”