true, although I always include his appearance at the james brown concert.
I wouldn’t include this as an actual performance since he sang for no more than 10 seconds but I enjoyed his energy here.
They might not own that footage for that.
they were able to release it previously on multiple physical mediums. what’s changed?
I'm glad they actually got the year right. I was waiting for the caption to to show the year 1985I love that the official social media accounts are acknowledging this magical year
‘thriller’ the short film had just debuted. had it been released earlier, not only would it have been nominated, but would have completely swept the board in my opinion.
Not sure where to post this thing. The article is a bit technical for me but it's really interesting. Here's some excerpts from the text:
I don't think I even knew she'd sung this song. Ngl, I'm not keen on her voice. But I'm intrigued by this. I can't imagine her singing WBSS.
it’s the last three sections for me
"This track is an undeniable banger, but it’s also extremely weird": The borrowed hooks and unstable grooves behind Michael Jackson's Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'
By Ethan Hein ( Future Music, Computer Music )
"This track is an undeniable banger, one of Michael’s most reliable dance-floor fillers, but it’s also extremely weird. (All of Michael’s best songs are.) Its most memorable hook is an African-sounding phrase that no one knows the meaning of. We will get to that below, but first let’s examine the rest of the song.
Michael wrote Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' for his sister La Toya to express the conflicts she was having with her sisters-in-law. Both Michael and La Toya performed it, but Michael’s version is the famous one.
It was the fourth consecutive single from Thriller to hit the top ten on the Billboard Hot 100. It’s one of four songs on the album that Michael is credited with writing - the other three are Billie Jean, Beat It, and The Girl Is Mine with Paul McCartney.
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Michael programmed the beat on a Linn LM-1 drum computer, a drum machine that came to be most closely associated with his arch-rival Prince. In addition to Michael’s vocals and drum machine programming, the released version of the song features David Williams on guitar, Louis “Thunder-Thumbs” Johnson on bass, and Paulinho da Costa plays percussion. There are three keyboard players: Greg Phillinganes, Michael Boddicker and Bill Wolfer (who also played the haunting intro chords in “Billie Jean”.).
All of these guys are top-flight session musicians who you have heard on a million other songs. There’s a horn section consisting of trumpet, flugelhorn, trombone, saxophone and flute. The six backing vocalists include Oren Waters, who also sang the Jeffersons theme song, and James Ingram, who sang Somewhere Out There from the American Tail soundtrack. Finally, Michael, Nelson Hayes and Steven Ray are credited with “bathroom stomp board”.
Harmonically, Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ could not be simpler. The whole thing is in E Mixolydian mode, which is like E major but with a flatted seventh (D instead of D-sharp.) The bassline consists entirely of the notes D, E and B. The chords, when they are present, are a simple loop: a bar of D alternating with a bar of E. All the excitement of the song comes from the rhythm, which is wildly unstable for a dance pop song. To understand why, we need to do a little math.
Think of a bar of 4/4 time, the “one, two, three, four” count you can do along with most Anglo-American pop songs, including Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’. Each of those numbers is a beat, and each beat is a quarter note long (that is, each one occupies a quarter of the bar.) You can subdivide each of the beats into halves (eighth notes) or quarters (sixteenth notes).
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Every kind of Black American music of the past hundred years has had snare drums, handclaps or sharp guitar strums accenting the backbeats, and Wanna Be Startin’ Something’ is no exception. The accented backbeat is the rhythmic commonality that unites ragtime, blues, country, jazz, R&B, rock, funk, hip-hop, and every kind of electronic dance music.
Accenting the backbeats is a pretty tame syncopation; we have come to expect it, so it’s hardly surprising at this point. You can make cooler rhythms by dividing the beats in half and accenting the eighth note offbeats. For maximum syncopation, you can subdivide yet again and accent the sixteenth note offbeats in between the eighth notes. This is how you create the sophisticated grooves you hear in the music of James Brown, Prince, and of course, Michael Jackson.
With all of that knowledge in mind, let’s take a look at the drums and bassline of Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’. If you try to count or clap along, you may have a hard time locating the downbeat. This is not because of any deficiency in your rhythmic sense. It’s because the kick drum and bass never play on the downbeat. Instead, they accent the sixteenth note subdivision immediately before and after the downbeat.
This is wildly unconventional! I can’t think of a single other song from the American pop mainstream that does it. There’s a hi-hat on the downbeat, and the vocal melody starts there too, but these elements can’t overcome the instability in the groove’s foundation. Everything else in the track gets its energy from that instability.
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Given how memorable the ending chant is, it’s easy to forget how weird the rest of the lyrics to Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ are. They are mostly in a confrontational second person. The first words you hear are the main hook, and they are threatening a fight. This conflict is a painful one, like thunder, and there is no escape from it, because it’s too high to get over and too low to get under. The whole situation is dire: the baby has a fever and a breakdown, and someone is always trying to start her crying. Your tongue is a razor, and you are treacherous, cunning, and declining.
On the bridge, Michael repeatedly calls you a vegetable, reminds you that they (whoever they are) hate you, and that you’re just a buffet that they eat off of. Billie Jean makes an inexplicable appearance. You are warned not to have a baby that you can’t feed, and in spite of your hustling, stealing, and lying, the baby is slowly dying. That is a lot of anger, regret and paranoia for a fun dance song.
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And then comes the iconic ending, the “Ma ma se ma ma sa ma ma coo sa” chant. It takes up more than a minute of the song, and I have heard DJs extend it far longer than that. But what does it mean? It may surprise you, as it surprised me, to learn that it doesn’t literally mean anything in particular.
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Soul Makossa must have been meaningful to Michael; he didn’t base any of his other songs on quotes or interpolations. But what did it mean to him? Nelson George gives a possible explanation in his book Thriller: The Musical Life Of Michael Jackson. The Jackson 5 traveled Senegal in 1973, and the experience had a profound effect on teenaged Michael.
George quotes him as saying, “I don’t want the blacks to ever forget that this is where we come from and where our music comes from. I want us to remember”. Michael Jackson’s racial identity is much too big a topic for this article, but suffice to say that it was complex. He did love Black music unreservedly, though, and maybe interpolating Soul Makossa was his way of connecting his own music back to its ancestral source. Maybe there would have been a way for Michael to celebrate that connection without appropriating Manu Dibango’s chant, but I am in no position to judge him."
"This track is an undeniable banger, but it’s also extremely weird": The borrowed hooks and unstable grooves behind Michael Jackson's Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'
We put one of MJ's best-loved tunes under the musical microscope and explore the unlikely origins of its iconic hookwww.musicradar.com
this is the kind of analysis that I love & cravethank you for bringing this article to this thread 
it definitely belongs here.
we’ve heard from latoya & jermaine.. there was even an article claiming that it was written for john travolta to sing.
Agreed. There aren't nearly enough articles like this for my liking.it’s the last three sections for me
I'm just glad I found it. It had only been online for a few hours so I was really excited. We don't have enough stuff like this and finding up-to-date stuff is even harder. I loved the fact that the article was so long and it's just one song being analysed.thank you for bringing this article to this thread
I admire your restraint, lol.
Interesting. Not that I can imagine John Travolta singing it ...I was hoping that the audio tapes of his memoirs, would eventually give us his perspective on it.
Ngl, I'm struggling to link it to LaToya. Yes, as the basic inspiration, maybe. But those specific lyrics? I'm not seeing it.
Exactly so.
I think the whole song is confrontational. That's one of things I love about it. But, yes, it doesn't mean that Michael is the aggressor or is advocating violence. I think the lyrics are way more profound than simply, 'oh, you wanna get into it?'.
Helplessness plus rage, I would say. I think this particular lyric is deep and profound. Michael is very upfront in what he wants to say and then is dismissed as a 'song and dance guy'.
An entire Mount Everest of edge and attitude!
Totally. And I'm convinced that gets overlooked a lot of the time.
That's why I love it. Unfiltered.
So many!rather than post reflection. hence the randomness of it all.
there are so many possibilities
this is unlikely as she didn’t write it. nor did she make any mention of ever recording it. not unless you count the prerecorded vocals she would use for when she performed it.
