On the Zhejiang Satellite TV music reality show "The Voice of Heavenly Gifts", Wang Heye and Liu Xijun cooperated in a retro disco song "The Wind Blows" after turning the scene, the song also quickly became popular on various video platforms on the night of broadcast, and swept the network.
Xiaobian noticed that the song was composed by Liu Tao, Lyrics by Liu Tao, Yuanyuan, Li Jiantao, and Li Haorui, and the musician Wang Heye sang At the same time as the song exploded, it was suddenly discovered.
The stage version of "The Wind Blows", the overall arrangement style and Michael Jackson's "billie jean", followed by the chorus sung by Liu Xijun, are also very similar to the Cantonese song "Season of the Wind" sung by Xu Xiaofeng, and the same Cantonese singing section is the same. The wind blows the song's melody familiar, the arrangement is familiar, and the lyrics are familiar, which immediately triggers questions about whether the public has copied previous songs.
One of Jackson's "Thriller" albums that year, "Billie-Jean," was named the greatest single in history.
It is said that the world's famous music channel ——— VH1 has picked the champion among all the top songs that have reached the major music charts in Europe and the United States. The judging results showed that fans were obsessed with Michael Jackson, with a total of 25,000 votes for Michael's "Billie-Jean".
Summer of 1982. Jackson is on Highway 101 in Los Angeles. After working with producer Quincy Jones for days in the studio for the sequel to Off The Wall, he drove home. According to Jackson's recollection in his 1988 autobiography, he was "deeply immersed in a melody that haunted his mind," so he didn't realize that the chassis of his luxury car was starting to smoke.
"We were driving down the highway when a young man on a motorcycle came up to us and said, 'You're on fire.'" We suddenly noticed the smoke and quickly stopped the car. The entire bottom of the Rolls-Royce burned. That kid really saved our lives. "But even a passing brush with death doesn't shake Jackson's obsession with the work he's working on." Even as we sought help and found new ways to get to our destination, I was quietly composing more material. ”
The song is perhaps the most self-written work Jackson has ever written, and the inspiration for the horror-inflamed parent-child claim drama stemmed from what happened to the singer and the female fans who suffered from paranoia. Jackson worked on the song for several months and was convinced he had something extraordinary on his hands.
"Musicians know what will be best-selling material. Everything has to feel in place. To make you feel fulfilled and feel good. Jackson recalled, "That's how I felt about 'Billie Jean.'" I knew when I wrote it that it was going to be a hit. "But the song's place in history is far from just a few numbers." Billie Jean "broke the racial boundaries of MTV and destroyed the generations of racial segregation in commercial radio." At the dawn of the modern era of music video, this single ushered in the trendy post-spiritual pop music that is still influential to this day. First, "Billie Jean" marked the arrival of his adulthood, a former child star who transformed into a new generation of Elvis and the Beatles, becoming a super pop icon of the second half of the 20th century.
Billie Jean, a song that is still the most bizarre to this day, was able to break into the top 40 of the singles chart, which is absolutely remarkable. Jackson's previous solo works have been lavish disco, but "Billie Jean" is creepy, with a pulsating bass, a whip-like remake, and a grotesque polyphonic track, jumping through gaps in keyboard sounds and strings. Over the years, listeners had gotten used to Jackson's particular singing style —false screams, "hehe-hee," and James Brown-esque yelling and phrasing— but in 1982, no one had ever heard a song like this, which only escalated its uneasy effects, feeling that "Billie Jean" was actually a five-minute crash, in rhythmic terms.
This eccentricity is no accident. Bruce Sveton, Quincy Jones, a studio engineer for years, recalled: "When we recorded 'Billie Jean',...... Quincy told me, 'Well, this piece of music has to have the most unique sound qualities, if we've never recorded it.' Jones asked Jackson to put the recordings on the tape through a six-foot-long cardboard pipe; he also brought in jazz saxophonist Tom Scott to play a rare instrument— the Lyricon, a wind-chirping synthesizer that cleverly weaves the entire piece with a sour, horn-like sound. Bassist Louis Johnson experimented with a variety of guitars he owned, until Jackson decided to use the Yamaha guitar as a soundtrack to produce the ideal thick, buzzing music. ”
At the same time, Sveten also finds the perfect beat through craft projects. He hired carpenters to build a special drum platform and ordered a specially crafted bass drum to design isolated drum beats to capture the correct imagery on the strings and drum racks. "See if you can think of any other musical composition that makes you know what song it is as soon as the first three drums are played?" Sveton said, "That's what I call a sound trait. ”
Michael Jackson, but the main component of this trait was almost spared in the final editing. "Billie Jean" rarely begins with long basses and drum beats,—— Jackson doesn't sing until the 29th second——, so Jones tries to trim it out, but Jackson fiercely demands it.
"I said, 'Michael, we have to cut out the beginning,'" Jones recalled, "and he said, 'But that's Jelly!'" Jelly is Jackson's private jargon, and he uses "smelly jelly" to mean crazy beats—"That makes me want to dance." "Oh, if Michael Jackson tells you, 'That makes me want to dance,' the rest of us have to shut up." ”
It was Jackson's dance, along with his singing, that advanced the "Billie Jean" phenomenon. On May 16, 1983, more than 50 million people watched Jackson perform his mesmerizing and famous spacewalk for the first time at the Motown 25th Anniversary Gala; in addition, Jackson traversed and spun through the illusionary cityscape in the song's music video, with the sidewalk constantly shining wherever he went, as if he were stepping on a disco dance floor. MTV almost never aired videos of black performers, and when they refused to play "Billie Jean," Columbia Records president Walter Yennikov went berserk. "I said to MTV, 'I'm going to take all our work out of the tv station.' I'm not going to give you any new videos to play. I would also go to TMD in public and tell them the truth, saying that you don't play black music. "Billie Jean" was quickly looped, and neither Jackson nor MTV talked about the past.
These images are forever recorded in cultural memory. But it was Jackson's autograph that made "Billie Jean" such a fascinating psychological drama — it was a truly thrilling work on his landmark album. Few songs convey so much Freud's psychological material: paranoia, delusion, sexual fear, seduction, and shame that mingle in the lyrics, hovering between blunt negation ("The kid is not my son") and apparent confession ("This happened much too soon/She called me to her room" happened so quickly that she told me to go to her room). Today, "Billie Jean" looks more like an allegory of the twisted relationship between celebrities and admirers, and the main theme was adapted into a video in which Jackson is tracked down by a detective in a military shirt. It's the greatest artistic manifesto about star chases by the world's most famous man — who has had viewers tearing his clothes since he was 10 years old.
Whether it has a greater autobiographical or historical significance, "Billie Jean" is ultimately a dance piece. Countless radio or MTV broadcasts have not diminished the intensity of the song's intimidation of the speakers.
"Billie Jean' is hot on every level," says Greg Feringens, a legendary Studio musician in the Los Angeles area who played keyboardist on the song. It has a super rhythm, it has a super cool sound, it has a super cool melody, it has super cool lyrics, it has a super cool interpretation. It affects you physically, emotionally, and even mentally. After 23 years, Michael Jackson can be sure that no one can make a stronger "smelly jelly."