30 Cool Facts You Didn't Know About 'Billie Jean'

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30 Cool Facts You Didn't Know About 'Billie Jean'

By Lucy JonesPosted on 01/02/13 at 02:58:45 pm

Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean' turns 30 today. Not only is it one of the highest selling singles of all time and the catapult that shot Jackson to the zenith of pop, it also changed the entertainment world. First, it was the video that drew attention to MTV and kick started its significance in popular culture. Second, it finally broke the grip of the racists in charge who refused to play videos featuring black performers. Here are 30 other facts you might not know.


1
Memo to this decade's lazy pop moguls: 'Billie Jean' was mixed 91 times by Bruce Swedien. 91 times!

2
Walter Yetnikoff, the president of Jackson's record label CBS, threatened MTV that he'd go public with their stance on race:

I said to MTV, 'I'm pulling everything we have off the air, all our product. I’m not going to give you any more videos. And I'm going to go public and f***ing tell them about the fact you don't want to play music by a black guy.'

3
Michael Jackson said he came up with the idea while driving his Rolls-Royce down a motorway. He was so absorbed by the song that he didn't notice his car had caught fire. A guy passing on a motorcyclist warned him and saved his life.

4
Quincy Jones did not want 'Billie Jean' to appear on 'Thriller'.


5
Jones hated the bassline.

6
He also hated the intro.

7
"But that's the jelly!...That's what makes me want to dance,' said Jackson. And the rest is history.

8
Kind of. Jackson and Jones quarelled over the title of the song. Worried that people would confuse the name with tennis player Billie Jean King, Jones wanted to change the name to 'Not My Lover'. Jackson won that battle.

9
But he didn't get the co-producing credit he asked for. Or the subsequent royalties.

10
Jackson sang the vocals into a six-foot-long cardboard tube.

11
He performed his first moonwalk when he sang 'Billie Jean' on the TV show Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever

12
You might think 'Billie Jean' sounds similar to Hall & Oates' 'I Can't Go for That (No Can Do)'. You'd be right. Here's Daryl Hall on whether his song influenced the King of Pop.

No question about it. Michael Jackson once said directly to me that he hoped I didn't mind that he copped that groove. That's okay; it's something we all do.


13
He nailed the vocals in one take.

14
Jackson's head was set on fire by special effects explosions while filming a Pepsi-Cola commercial soundtracked by 'Billie Jean'.

15
It propelled 'Thriller' to be the best-selling album of all time partly due to winning shitloads of awards and honours.

16
Billie Jean is based on the groupies that used to hang around Jackson and his brothers when they were in The Jackson 5. Here's MJ:

Billie Jean is kind of anonymous. It represents a lot of girls. They used to call them groupies in the '60s...They would hang around backstage doors, and any band that would come to town they would have a relationship with, and I think I wrote this out of experience with my brothers when I was little. There were a lot of Billie Jeans out there. Every girl claimed that their son was related to one of my brothers.

17
However there is a theory that Billie Jean is a real person.

18
Biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli writes that a woman wrote to Jackson claiming he was the father of one of her twins (I didn't even know this was possible).

19
Apparently, after a run of letters, the woman sent a parcel that contained a gun and requested he commit suicide on a certain date after which she'd kill the baby and then herself.

20
The weirdest part? Jackson framed a picture of the stalker she'd sent to him in his home.

21
Ian Brown covered it. It's horrific.

[video=youtube;wUBTy_8jO1s]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wUBTy_8jO1s[/video]


22
The tiger cub at the end of the video belonged to Michael Jackson and was called Thriller, according to the internet.

23
Jackson doesn't actually start dancing till almost halfway through the video. The famous en pointe moment happens at 2:31.

24
The song is in the key of F# minor.

25
The UPC barcode on the album cover contained seven digits that were rumoured to be Jackson's telephone number.

26
Chris Cornell's cover isn't half bad.

[video=youtube;R0uWF-37DAM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=R0uWF-37DAM[/video]


27
Kanye West's remix on the other hand...

28
The audio engineer was told by Quincy Jones to add "sonic personality".

29
He'd already told Swieden to create a drum sound no one had heard before. Demanding, much!

30
The handwritten lyrics to 'Billie Jean' sold for £24,984 at auction in 2012.

http://www.nme.com/blog/index.php?b...itle=30_things_you_didn_t_know_about_billie_j
 
Happy b-day Billie Jean :birthday:




Cool article, but I actually think Ian Brown did a good job with that cover lol :D in a completely different style.
 
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:birthday: Billie Jean! :shout: My favorite MJ single ever! :in_love:

How could QJ hate the bassline and intro, that's sacrilegious!? :shock: Michael showed who really was the genius behind his success and who's The :big_boss:!

405976_395556623865940_443915160_n.jpg
 
No offense, but I do not care for the covers. My mind keep going back to the original song. I never heard West's cover. I saw the hand written lyrics at the Grammy Museum, but maybe that was another version?
 
Great little read, Happy Birthday Billie Jean

Another little fact to add to the 30 of the 91 mixes it was the 2nd mix that ended up on the album
Heres Bruce Swieden telling how it came about ENJOY

 
^^I love the way he gave that information. I wonder if Q did not come into the room how many more mixes those 2 would have done.
 
No offense, but I do not care for the covers. My mind keep going back to the original song. I never heard West's cover. I saw the hand written lyrics at the Grammy Museum, but maybe that was another version?

It's ok, nobody is obliged to like the covers :D

But I see them as a symbol of respect and recognition by other artists. Especially these 2 here :)
 
I can't believe that Quincy didn't like or want the song. Thank god Michael fought for it. I love this song. I can't imagine no Billie Jean.
 
I know it isn't a big deal but for Quincy to not give a producing credit is so wrong. Michael gave credit if you added in a line, a change in the melody ( a few notes), and here he basically imagines the song and puts it out there and no producing credit. That stuff gets me annoyed because once again people didn't give the credit to Michael, whereas he always did, even more than he should have at times. So Quincy gets the money and always has his name emblazoned on the credits when it was Michael's "baby."
 
I know it isn't a big deal but for Quincy to not give a producing credit is so wrong. Michael gave credit if you added in a line, a change in the melody ( a few notes), and here he basically imagines the song and puts it out there and no producing credit. That stuff gets me annoyed because once again people didn't give the credit to Michael, whereas he always did, even more than he should have at times. So Quincy gets the money and always has his name emblazoned on the credits when it was Michael's "baby."

^^Which is why it is so important to have people like Bruce tell what happened in the studio. From them we learn the work and attention Michael gave to the production in the studio.
 
"Few blockbusters are sleeper hits. They usually start strong and then keep lapping the pack — think Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” or U2’s “Joshua Tree.” But “Thriller” didn’t get out of the gate as fast as everyone expected. The first single, a pallid duet with Paul McCartney called “The Girl Is Mine,” was a hit but failed to ignite a frenzy for the album, which had only nine tracks. More than two months after its release, “Thriller” still hadn’t reached No. 1. I was a D.J. at the time at a small rock-oriented bar on Long Island, and I started playing “Beat It,” with its surprising guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen, but at that early point the song was less a phenomenon than a curiosity. It wasn’t until “Billie Jean” was released as a single in early 1983 that “Thriller” really took off. It had that long, sinuous bass-line intro, paranoiac synth warnings, a hiccupping vocal; it was the ultimate crossover dream, a song both timely and out of its time. And it had a first-rate video in which Jackson came off like a musical James Bond, sexy, sly and licensed to dance. The song climbed to No. 1, stormed the ramparts at MTV and, buoyed even further by Jackson’s dazzling performance on the “Motown 25” TV special that May, led the way for the album’s other hits and for other black artists. By the end of 1983, “Thriller” had become a nine-track stimulus package for the entire music business."

From an article in NYTimes by Bob Hoerburger, "'Thriller" and the Lessons of the Mega-Super-Album"
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/m...s-of-the-mega-super-album.html?pagewanted=all

BJ was 7 weeks straight at the top of the Billboard US singles chart
 
I think it's funny when i hear the story about Quincy Jones not wanting Billie Jean on Thriller and the media portray him as ''the genius producer who was making all the smart choices'' and say crap like ''Thriller was really Quincy Jones vision''

Thriller wouldn't be as successful as it is today without Billie Jean
 
So glad Michael didn't hear Quincy. MJ really deserved co-producing credits, that Billie Jean demo was almost finished when he brought to Quincy.

btw, Is this really true? Wow I didn't know that...

Michael Jackson said he came up with the idea while driving his Rolls-Royce down a motorway. He was so absorbed by the song that he didn't notice his car had caught fire. A guy passing on a motorcyclist warned him and saved his life.
 
I never heard West's cover. I saw the hand written lyrics at the Grammy Museum, but maybe that was another version?

Maybe they meant his 2008 "Remix" which sucked.

Anyways, some of the facts aren't really true like there is no tiger cub it's an adult tiger, maybe it is Thriller. He holds a tiger cub in the Thriller album photoshoot.

Well it doesn't really sound like I Can't Go For That (No Can Do) I think it sounds a lot more like the demo/early version of Freddie Mercury's "Foolin' Around" has a very similar bass line and drum; final version not as much (final released in 1985).
 
I knew many of these, of course lol but it was a fun read..this made me laugh:
It propelled 'Thriller' to be the best-selling album of all time partly due to winning shitloads of awards and honours.
:toofunny: yes indeed :D :wub: thank you!

editing though because now that I think about it I wonder if it's really true Michael kept "a framed picture" of his supposed stalker.. that sounds so unlikely of him and so tabloid-worthy lol. I also didn't know Michael didn't get any credits for co-producing it, I mean WHAT THE ACTUAL F**.
 
i don't know whether to believe Daryll Hall or not. First of all, because he waited till only recently to tell it, and secondly, I read where Michael had gone to Freddie Mercury long before both songs were released and recommended that Freddie release 'Another One Bites The Dust', and that song went to number 1 and the Billie Jean beat is precisely the Another One Bites The Dust beat. So Michael discovered that beat before anyone, in a roundabout way. Freddie inadvertently came up with it first, and apparently thought it was worth writing, but didn't know, apparently just how great it was. And proof of how Michael's personality was so much better than so many, he didn't go on all his life about not getting co producer royalties, though he deserved them, if not all producer royalties, but God looked out for him anyway and made the song so big, that it made no difference after all....in sharp contrast to the many who, unwarrantingly, went after Michael Jackson for money that wasn't theirs to begin with, but rightfully was his to begin with. And Jones, to this day, not admitting that Michael deserved those co producer royalties, and not making any effort to make sure Michael's offspring get them, really makes me feel even less respect for Jones.
 
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The most amazing fact is that each time Michael Jackson performed "Billie Jean" live it was his absolute BEST.
Watch the mash-up video below and prepare to be AMAZED!!!!:woohoo:


 
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