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HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I

With the best-selling album of all time under his belt by 1984, there was perhaps nowhere for Michael Jackson to go but down. Yet even from within Thriller’s colossal shadow, 1987’s Bad achieved unprecedented success, charting five No. 1 Billboard singles and dominating MTV airtime with extended, Broadway-esque videos for “Bad,” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” and “Smooth Criminal.” But what about postBad—i.e. “bad”—Michael Jackson? While Thriller’s unthinkable success guaranteed mega-sales for any future Jackson release, the production of memorable singles waned sharply with 1991’s Dangerous, and stopped altogether with Jackson’s final studio effort, 2001’s Invincible. This back-end of Jackson’s recording career, a comparative failure even at the time, is increasingly dwarfed by his earlier, legendary achievements. Potentially lost within the mix is 1995’s HIStory—a two-disc release grouping hit singles from previous albums on one disc while presenting new material on the other. The supplementation of Jackson’s new work with a greatest hits collection suggests that his team was well aware of a marketing issue: past Michael and present Michael were now cleanly severed in the minds of fans, and the most effective way to push new material, the album suggests, was to concede the old. To some extent, Jackson’s career was simply following the arc of the music video age; Thriller had been released just one year after MTV was launched, and the channel continued to provide a perfect outlet for his extremely visual and stage-oriented performances at a time when many listeners received their music from the television. Declining interest in music videos, however, and the corresponding changes in MTV’s programming relegated Jackson (despite a high-production affair for 1991’s “Black or White” and a nearly-nude appearance by new bride Lisa Marie Presley on the 1995 ballad “You Are Not Alone”) to a more conventional role as recording artist. The bigger story, though, is that HIStory was the first Michael Jackson album released after the artist was accused of child sexual molestation in 1993, and shows a concerted effort to regain control over his public image. As its elongated title suggests, HIStory is presented in part as a historical and laudatory document. It is also, the italicized first three letters tell us, a rebuttal to Jackson’s media-constructed identity— a chance to vocalize his own story. The cover image presents a statue representation of the artist in aristocratic military garb and with stoic, classical features. While softening the surgical changes to Jackson’s real face, this image introduces a “pop star as royalty” metaphor—a persuasive iconography—that continues within the accompanying