(ThyBlackMan.com) People been arguing about who really pushed Michael for going on forty years now, and most of them are looking in the wrong direction. It was not Prince. It was not Madonna moving units, and it was not whoever the radio decided to prop up that season. If you want to understand the heaviest weight that man ever carried, quit staring at his competition. Go pull up his own catalog.
Let me tell you something folks love to get wrong. When they line up the usual suspects, it is always the rivals and the suits, the label counting numbers in a back room, the programmers deciding what got spun on a Friday night. All of that was real. None of it was the thing that kept him up at three in the morning. The man he could never beat was already standing in the mirror. It was him, a younger version, grinning back from a record he’d already made.
Think about the position that puts a person in. Most artists chase somebody ahead of them. They see a mountain and they climb. Michael had no mountain out in front of him after a certain point. He had a canyon behind him full of his own footprints, and every new album meant he had to leap further out than the last leap or the whole world would say he’d slipped. That is a lonely kind of pressure. You are not fighting a competitor. You are fighting the memory of your own best day.
Start with Off the Wall in 1979. Quincy Jones in the chair, that grown, glossy sound, disco melting into something warmer and stranger. He was barely into his twenties and he made a record so alive it still feels like a first date. Four singles went top ten. Grown folks danced to it, kids danced to it, and it announced that the little boy from Gary had become a serious artist on his own terms. Beautiful thing. Except now that record existed. Now it sat on shelves in millions of homes, and it did not go away just because he wanted to make something new. It became the floor he had to stand above. The kid who cut that album had quietly become his own biggest problem.
So he goes into Thriller. And you can hear him wrestling with what came before, trying to answer it and swallow it whole at the same time. A good follow up was never the goal. What he wanted was to erase the ceiling entirely. What happened next you already know because it warped the whole culture. The record broke every mark anyone had set, sold in numbers that stopped sounding like sales and started sounding like folklore, and put a Black man into heavy rotation on a television network that had rarely given Black artists that kind of exposure. Seven hit singles off one project. Moonwalk on that Motown special and the planet lost its mind. He beat Off the Wall, truly beat it. But look what he did to himself in the process.
Because now Thriller existed. And Thriller was not a floor anymore, baby, it was the sky. How do you follow the biggest thing that ever happened in your field? You cannot. It is a trap dressed up like a triumph. Every soul who cut a check to him, every writer with a deadline, every fan in the checkout line was already asking the impossible question before the sessions even started. What’s next after the most, and the answer to most is nothing, there is no more than most. He had to walk into a studio knowing the version of himself from the last go round had set a bar that maybe no human would clear again, and that included the human trying.
That is the whole tragedy folded into a sentence. He was not being measured against Prince or anybody breathing. The yardstick was a ghost of himself who had already done the miracle.
Bad comes in 1987 and I want people to be honest about that album, because it got graded on a curse that no other artist ever carried. Five number one singles. Five. No album has ever produced more, though Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream would later tie the mark. In any fair universe you throw a parade. But it followed Thriller, so the story became a story about falling short, about not quite reaching the last high. Nobody sells more than the most sold thing ever, and everybody knew it, and he knew it hardest of all. You can hear the strain of it in the toughness, in the harder edges, in that need to prove he still had teeth. He was arguing with a younger man who wasn’t in the room and never would be again.
Then Dangerous in 1991, and now he does something people slept on. He lets go of Quincy, brings in Teddy Riley, and reaches for new jack swing, for a rhythm that belonged to the streets in that moment and not to 1982. That was a grown decision. A man trying to stop racing his old self and start living in the present instead. There is real courage in it. Remember the Time already showed he could sit in that pocket, and now he built a whole world around it. Yet the shadow followed him into the nineties anyway, because the questions never changed. Is it as big. Is it as important. Is it as much of a moment as the one before. The comparison had become a permanent weather system hanging over everything he touched.
And then he did the most telling thing of his whole run. In 1995 he put out HIStory, and the package literally bundled a disc of his old smashes right next to a disc of brand new songs. Sit with that a second. He physically sequenced the young champion beside the grown one and dared you to pick. The fresh half was no joke either. You Are Not Alone walked straight in at the top of the chart, becoming the first song ever to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Scream paired him with Janet and cost a fortune to film. Earth Song showed a heavier, more sorrowful man reaching for something bigger than a hook, and Stranger in Moscow and They Don’t Care About Us carried a bruised honesty he had not let us hear before. It was rich, it was ambitious, and still the same old measuring stick came out, because the other disc in the very same case was the very thing nobody could beat.
Invincible arrived in 2001 as his final studio album released during his lifetime, and I have a soft spot for it that a lot of people are only now catching up to. You Rock My World glided. Butterflies was tender in a way grown love actually feels, and Cry aimed for the heavens the way he always did when the world sat heavy on him. It was a fine, at moments gorgeous body of work. But you know how the tale went by then. Compared to the ghost, it got filed under disappointment, and that word tells you everything about the sentence he was serving. A record most artists would kill to have made got shrugged off, because the man who made it had already made Thriller, and Thriller was still sitting there, undefeated, refusing to lose.
And this is the part that hurts if you sit with it long enough. A gift that large turns into a sentence. Ordinary success you can outgrow. You do a thing, you learn, you do a better thing, you move on lighter. Legend does not work that way. Legend calcifies. It hardens around you like amber and then it starts demanding tribute. Michael was not allowed to simply make music. He was required to top the untoppable, over and over, on a schedule, while cameras rolled and the culture waited to write either a coronation or an obituary. There was no third door.
I think about the loneliness in that a lot. We hand our giants a strange kind of prison. We ask the person who flew highest to fly higher next time, and when they land at merely extraordinary we call it a fall. He gave us Off the Wall, then he had to defeat it. He gave us Thriller, then he had to survive it. Bad and Dangerous were not weak. They were the sound of a genius boxing his own reflection and being told the reflection kept winning.
Prince pushed him, sure. That rivalry was real and it made both of them sharper, and I love it for what it was. But Prince could only chase the current Michael. Prince could not chase the one from three years back who had already broken the game, because that one was untouchable, frozen in triumph, immune to being outdone by anybody including his own creator. The most dangerous opponent Michael ever faced never aged, never got tired, never had a bad night in the booth. He was preserved forever at his absolute peak on a record that already sold to the whole world.
So when you go back and play these albums this weekend, and I hope you do, hear them a little different. Do not stack them against each other like a bracket. Hear a man in conversation with the people he used to be, trying to make peace with them and beat them at the same time, and never quite managing both. The King of Pop had no equal walking the earth. That was exactly the problem. His only true rival lived on vinyl, in the grooves of what he had already done, smiling and undefeated. He spent a whole career chasing a version of himself that had already finished the race. And the wild, aching, beautiful part is how close he came, again and again, to catching him.
This brother loves poetry, music, and the culture that raised him… His words come from somewhere honest, and they speak to everyday Black folks just living their lives… Reach him at JJackson@ThyBlackMan.com.
