MICHAEL JACKSON – "I Just Can't Stop Loving You"

Do you know, I haven’t heard this one for 23 years! I like it more now than I did then, when it just seemed like a generic slushy song to me, with the sotto vocce prologue sounding uncomfortably close. There seems to be an odd dynamic about it, as if its either about to break out into a gigantic bombast ballad, or flutter away into Human Nature-style andante honeyness, but doesn’t ever quite decide to do either.

Number 2 Watch: A week of ‘Call Me’ by Spagna. Which is a bit better than ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’

Leave Me Alone wasn’t on the original version of Bad, as far as I can remember, which might have explained its high chart position. I think they tacked it on the end after Moonwalker came out.

Recent film This Is It boasts a superb, epic version of this tune. If I recall correctly, Michael was supposed to be saving his vocal chords, but couldn’t help having a real go at it – then chastising all present for allowing him to go against orders. Like anyone would’ve stopped him!

Funnily enough, in my contemporaneous chart log, Siedah Garrett DOES get a co-credit, which suggests she was given due respect at the time. This is a pretty little song, where MJ goes easy on the vocal tics, and consequently I find it much more listenable than most, even if the “One Day In Your Life”-esque vulnerability veers close to being overdone in the opening verse. Not one of his most hyped pieces of work, and all the better for it. Give me this rather than “Man in the Mirror” any day!

Richard @3 – well I don’t really see how could it not have got to Number 1? as has been said it was the keenly anticipated lead off single of the follow up album to the biggest seller of all time. ‘Bad’AFAIK incidentally sold even more copies than ‘Thriller’ in the UK.

It was a genuine event when this was released – even though due to the song it was a bit of an anti-climax.

Erithian @12: Siedah Garrett was still slightly known for ‘Don’t Look Any Further’ the duet she’d done with Dennis Edwards 2 or 3 years before and which although not a massive pop hit had been on the turntables constantly for months on both the pirates and the dance shows on Radio London (which at that time besides the talk shows only played dance/black music in the mid-80s)etc.

And ‘Don’t Look Any Further’ was pretty inescapable around London around the time it was a hit – as with a lot of black music (which only became minor pop hits nationally) in the London area they were far more generally known and pervasive in shops, coming out of cars, on estates etc than many of the bigger national pop hits were.

So this is MJ’s first post-Pepsi #1 and the beginning of an uncomfortable period. Press intrusion into his lifestyle is mounting and we’re hearing stories of oxygen tanks and shrines to Elizabeth Taylor, which seem in retrospect, the thin end of the wedge. We could allow MJ his eccentricities considering his fortune and his mega-celebrity status. Bad in many ways was his most consistent album, but I tend to agree with everyone else that IJCSLY lacked something compared to the other singles off the album. It’s not gamefaced enough. With the title track and Smooth Criminal, MJ is back in the realm of “event releases” but this just feels like an hors doeuvre before we get to the meal itself.

And a pleasant little hors doeuvre it is. If MJ is coasting here, then he’s streets ahead of Madonna in the same mode. It feels effortless, yet polished and accomplished, artist-at-the-top-of-his-game stuff. Siedah Garrett sounds a little too upstaged to make this a convincing duet, but look who she’s up against. A wilting sapling in the shadow of a mighty oak. Still despite all this, it’s a fine listen. A strong argument for the whole album if this could be considered as filler, but compared to Bad or Smooth Criminal, well you couldn’t consider it as anything else.

Can a single sound good, but not be all that great? That’s what I always thought of this song. It sounds good. Quincy Jones dresses up the whole thing in his Q sound. And you can sing along to the hook, but it just kind of sits there. And as the first single from Bad, it was indeed a letdown. It went #1 in the States. And unlike in England, 4 other songs from this album went #1, including some better singles like “The Way You Make Me Feel”, and “Man In the Mirror”.

Like Anto above I’m not an MJ fan so can someone tell me whether his post-Bad LPs always had a ballad on them ? It seemed to me he was trying to maintain a thread back to his teenage solo career on Motown.
I only really remember the chorus hook of this one but in the Baby Jump stakes I think Bucks Fizz still have the edge.

N.B. I am guessing that for most of us who have commented thus far the Nineties are going to be littered with Baby Jump’s.

I have never knowingly heard this song in my life.

It still tickles the cortex to think of Jackson and Quincy Jones working their way through the New Pop back catalogue in preparation for making Bad. There is more than a hint of the martial, harsh rhythmics of Propaganda’s “P. Machinery” in the unstoppable strut of the title track, and a nice if unintentional nose-snub to Rare Groove snobs via Jimmy Smith’s involvement in same, as well as some Art of Noise staccato speediness in the slalom jerks of “Smooth Criminal,” an if the record does not offer quite as total an assimilation or as drastic a remoulding of the innovations of Horn and Green as Jam and Lewis managed on little sister’s Control, it’s still a very fine record. “Liberian Girl” is as gorgeously opaque a ballad as “Human Nature” and the sunny confidence of “The Way You Make Me Feel” makes it a song which Jackie Wilson should have lived to sing. And there is “Man In The Mirror” of which I will perhaps say more later, in another time and another context. On the other hand, “Dirty Diana” is simply silly, and Jackson’s self-glorifying/self-annihilating tightrope encroaches with slowly rising intensity, particularly on the paranoid “Leave Me Alone.”

Nevertheless, nine of its eleven tracks were released as singles and the album did healthy business. Most of the tracks continue to be revived periodically, with the sole exception of the only one to top the charts in Britain as a single. “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” was released ahead of the album, and Jackson’s hardcore fans, starved of any new material for nearly five years, sent it to number one for a fortnight out of loyalty. It’s as curious a choice for album trailer as “The Girl Is Mine” was for Thriller (although the latter also yielded only one UK chart-topping single), although its portentous introduction was doubtless intended as a sermon on the Neverland mount. In it Jackson speaks a hesitant monologue about wanting “to lay next to you for awhile” and explains that “a lot of people misunderstand me…that’s because they don’t know me at all.” His awkward endearments (“Your eyes are so lovely…your mouth is so sweet”) are spoken as though he is still twelve years old (in fact they sound uncannily like the young Donny Osmond). He does his “She’s Out Of My Life” sob as he pleads “God, I need you” (and probably meant it literally).

All this occurs before the song begins in earnest. Such an introduction would require a song of exceptional transcendence, and “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” is very far from transcendent. Sung with a very subdued Siedah Garrett – so subdued that it is on occasion difficult to distinguish her from Michael – it is an extremely ordinary and unremarkable ballad. Note too how Jackson’s whoops and “Ee hee hee”s are now becoming a mannerism, since they are totally out of place in this sedate environment. The only real point of interest here is the direct lift from Anne Dudley’s string arrangement for “All Of My Heart” in the chorus. New Pop, New Pop – there was just no getting away from it.

MJ was also pretty keen on Adam and the Ants, which makes perfect sense (see “They Don’t Care About Us” for instance), but QJ took the lead on matters Horn/ZTT-related (I think he already had New Order signed up to QWest in the States). The conspiracy, if there was one, was probably more to do with thrill-inducing sonic newness rather than digging particularly deep into what Propaganda etc. were saying or (more sinisterly) implying – which is why MJ should maybe really have done “Snobbery And Decay,” the great 1987 Horn/ZTT number one that never was (and of course Robbie Williams eventually DID do “S&D” last year with “Bodies”).

Propaganda really were the Velvets of our age, weren’t they? Underappreciated and misunderstood at the time, and virtually every decent hit song of 2010 from GaGa on down owes pretty well everything to them, both in sonic and politicophilosophical terms.

Punctum @26, Re: Propaganda. They certainly felt like something more than New Pop at the time. I have unsuccessfully tried to track down their cover/homage to Throbbing Gristle’s “Discipline” in order to compare the two, but sometimes we have to accept what’s not to be, after learning Genesis P. Orridge suppressed it.

The track “Dream Within A Dream” however, is a long standing favourite and the standout piece from “A Secret Wish”. I owned the cassette, and on there was the full 9min version produced by Horn/Lipson which contains the “missing” guitar solo. On CD, the solo is absent(not sure about the vinyl), which in my view takes the shine off the whole thing…well maybe that’s a bit strong, but Horn must have understood that the unmistakeably hard rock,(or prog rock) searing, screaming guitar is the launchpad for the remaining instrumental half of the song. It comes completely out of leftfield as we have been previously lulled into a trancelike state by the two-tone xylophone, the horn motif and Claudia Brucken’s spoken word recital. Then as soon as it has vented its spleen, it subsides with a couple of growls leading into the clattering drum solo, everyone getting a chance to display their chops until finally, that spectral trumpeter (it’s a fairlight, isn’t it? But one can imagine a session man with his horn wandering into Trevor’s studio) gets his turn to pour oil once again on choppy waters, inviting synths to pick up on the horn stylings and run with the ball to the end. DWAD, for me is the very pinnacle of New Pop. If Quincy Jones sat by his mixing desk listening to “A Secret Wish” (DWAD in particular), and phones MJ to tell him “Michael, we gotta raise our game for ‘Bad'”, it would not surprise me in the least.

Re: Propaganda:

I was eleven in the summer of 1984 and thought that Frankie GTH were the best pop thing ever, I loved the conceptualism, the beats, the idea of a remix being like a massive expanded trip into an imagined world, the idea of pop being an important political statement. I think that I was scared of the adult sexuality that I didn’t quite understand, though.

Even with that background, I didn’t really get ‘Dr. Mabuse’ at the time though. It did seem too brutal, too dark, too tuneless. It certainly wasn’t much played on ‘Now That’s What I Call Music 3’! I love it now, but that’s because I understand it.

But move on to early 1985, and Duel was a single that I absolutely loved absolutely immediately. This was strange and grown-up, too – the words about cutting meant that it would be an enthusiasm that I’d hide from my parents – but also seductive and with a tune that stayed with you… for life, I now realise!

I can see why Mabuse only really has an audience of people like us, but I wish that Duel was more widely known. Back in 1985, 12 and miserable, Duel, Welcome To The Pleasuredome and Close To The Edit were a lifeline of sorts… things that changed the way that I both listened and felt.

TPL on Bad, and so many other matters…