The Michael Jackson enterprise – and let's be honest, it had gone from a human career to a product-marketing exercise at least a decade before his heart gave in – knows it is selling a questionable product with the coming movie and album This Is It .
That is before you consider that the well-sourced talk before his death, the high pressure, promoter-demanded medical supervision during rehearsals for his 10 comeback concerts and the drugs coursing through his wasted body at the end suggested there were serious doubts about whether Jackson could physically pull off the promised spectacular.
The incomplete film, which was to climax with the live performances in London, is left with rehearsal footage and promotional guff, which is a bit like offering a training session instead of the grand final. Likewise the accompanying album of "music which inspired the film" is nothing but another repackaged greatest hits bulked out by some demo recordings not good enough to be extras on the most recent reissues of Jacksons major albums and a "new" song which has become the film and album's title track.
Made available for streaming on his website yesterday, that song is clearly a remnant from Jackson's golden years of the early 1980s. Very much in the mould of the gentle ballad Human Nature from the album Thriller , This Is It is a mid-tempo ballad with clicking fingers, an attractive guitar figure winding its way through the song and lush backing vocals and strings.
Tellingly, it speaks more of creamy late-'70s soul than any attempts at modernity which defined Jackson's later recordings, and if the sweetened backing seems disconnected from the lead vocal, like add-ons rather than an integrated sound, they are at least in keeping.
Also in keeping, though in this case, with the distorted view of life he had after Thriller made him a megastar, are the vainglorious touches in the lyrics. When he last toured Australia, Jackson posited himself alongside significant religious and cultural figures through the ages. Later he staged a Christ-like intervention in a "war zone" scenario where an armed soldier was about to fire on raggedly dressed "refugees".
In that context, while it might make you gag, there is little surprise in This Is It beginning with the lines "This is it, here I stand/I'm the light of the world/I feel grand". He no doubt believed it.
© 2007 The Sydney Morning Herald
