The Definitive 1000 Songs Of All Time 1955 to 2005: Number 621

Number 621

Michael Jackson

"You Are Not Alone"

(1995)

Genre:Pop

Hoo boy, where do i start with this one without offending oh, lets just say the entire planet? Ok, lets try an honest opinion instead of buttering sh*t. (There's a Jackson pun in there isn't there?). There was a time not so long ago that i thought this mans voice was touched by the hand of God, gave him a gift that made us mortal people wish we could sing like just even half like that. "You Are Not Alone" was one of those songs that sent goosies down me spine and you have to remember i like Alt Rock not Pop, definitely not Pop. But whatever the genre, to this day i cannot understand why with the gift Jackson had WHY does he have to surround himself with controversy? Prince never did that crap, you never hear of dirt thrown at Prince, he could control whatever "weirdness" controls him, so wtf couldn't Jackson be happy with what he had achieved? I guess he is disappointed with himself, yea sure, but he should have been more worried what he did to his fans, they are the ones who he let down the most. And that's just tragic, if not insulting.

Michael Jackson was unquestionably the biggest pop star of the '80s, and certainly one of the most popular recording artists of all time. In his prime, Jackson was an unstoppable juggernaut, possessed of all the tools to dominate the charts seemingly at will: an instantly identifiable voice, eye-popping dance moves, stunning musical versatility, and loads of sheer star power. His 1982 blockbuster Thriller became the biggest-selling album of all time (probably his best-known accomplishment), and he was the first black artist to find stardom on MTV, breaking down innumerable boundaries both for his race and for music video as an art form. Yet as Jackson's career began, very gradually, to descend from the dizzying heights of his peak years, most of the media's attention focused on his increasingly bizarre eccentricities; he was often depicted as an arrested man-child, completely sheltered from adult reality by a life spent in show business. The snickering turned to scandal in 1993, when Jackson was accused of molesting a 13-year-old boy; although he categorically denied the charges, his out-of-court settlement failed to restore his tarnished image. He never quite escaped the stigma of those allegations, and while he continued to sell records at superstar-like levels, he didn't release them with enough frequency (or, many critics thought, inspiration) to once again become better known for his music than his private life. Whether as a pop icon or a tabloid caricature, Jackson always remained bigger than life. ~ Steve Huey

What does Rolling Stone think about the KING of Pop?

A decade after "thriller" and MTV transformed pop, Michael Jackson releases a collection that combines a classic greatest-hits anthology with a jarring and uneven new album. Throughout HIStory we're reminded of the Michael Jackson who helped groove music go mainstream with Off the Wall, fused high-tech New Wave and Caribbean rhythms with the aid of producer Quincy Jones on Thriller and Bad, and communed with trancelike '90s soul and New Jack Swing inventor Teddy Riley on 1991's underpraised Dangerous. A decade after Thriller, Jackson's still the same: the apolitical universalist who never shared the hip-hop generation's politics, the pop figurehead who bends the latest mass flavors to his creative will, the Spielbergian artist tycoon who's drawn to Old Hollywood glamour and New Hollywood balance sheets. He still wants to be the King of Pop and to be left alone.

Some of the new songs – the excellent current single "Scream" or the first-rate R&B ballad "You Are Not Alone" – manage to link the incidents of Jackson's infamous recent past to universal concepts like injustice or isolation. When he bases his music in the bluntness of hip-hop, Jackson sketches funky scenarios denouncing greed, blanket unreliability and false accusation. HIStory unfolds in Jackson's outraged response to everything he has encountered in the last year or so. It makes for an odd, charmless second chapter to a first that includes miraculous recordings like "Billie Jean," "The Way You Make Me Feel," "Black or White" and "Beat It."

But the bulk of HIStory doesn't feel as contemporary as the "Scream" video, in which Michael and his sister Janet jump around like '90s fashion kids trapped in a spaceship stolen from a Barbarella film set. With its silly heraldic cover painting and theme-park title piece, HIStory feels like the work of someone with a bad case of Thriller nostalgia. Occasionally this backward focus works to Jackson's advantage: On "Stranger in Moscow" he remembers the synth-pop '80s while constructing wracked claims of danger and loneliness that rival any Seattle rocker's p??in.

More often, this strategy backfires. Jackson seems desperate for the days when he ruled, when doing a Beatles cover like this album's "Come Together" would have equaled a nod to preceding royalty. Now it reveals the downside of Jackson's HIStory defense, which is plain old superstar ego. The slow blues-operatic "Earth Song" for all its noble sentiments, sounds primarily like a showpiece – something with which to knock 'em dead in Monte Carlo. And uncut Hollywood fluff like "Childhood," "Little Susie" and the climactic version of Charlie Chaplin's "Smile" has zero point of view on itself; its blend of rampaging ego and static orchestral pop is a Streisand-size mistake. What it's doing on an album with Dallas Austin and Jam and Lewis is anyone's guess. But then that's the story of this exhilarating, misconceived, often heartbreaking package. HIStory's ultimate goal is to position Michael Jackson's music as a planet, a genre, a law, a marketing budget unto itself. As time passes and singles break, maybe those superhuman plans will touch back down on earth. (RS 714) JAMES HUNTER

For The Beatles see Number 947 & Number 894

For Barbra Streisand see Number 836

Note: "Earth Song" is where he was at his greatest, this is just a personal feeling but Michael Jackson could have made an even better statement than that, even to the point of all humans existing as one on the same pice of dirt we ALL live on ... he sang about all of us, yet he chose "himself" over real greatness and that was the potential he had and lost.

Rolling Stone Top 500 Songs ranked this song at (Im sure he is somewhere in our charts) and the Album ranked at Number (Before he became yanno... Whacko Jacko)

This song has a crowbarred rating of 71.5 out of 108 pts

Michael Jackson - You Are Not Alone
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