I didnt mean to blow the dance monkey thing out of proportion and personally hate it when things are made to be racist when they're not. But I felt like you were making a point that a white audience were basically trying to make him do what they wanted, which isn't quite the case.
Anyway, the difference between Thriller and Invincible is all in the ear. Play one after the other and the difference in quality is stark. While Invincible is a well produced album with a lot of interesting sonic sounds, Thriller just cuts through and commands the listener to dance. Thriller is an incredible album with some of the most timeless hits in human history. Invincible is not.
HIStory is Michael's most personal album and even that seems more general than a lot of artists "personal" albums. I am not sure what tracks in Invincible could even be considered personal or as though they're a special piece of his life that he's offering to his fans.
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Unbreakable - a semi generic take on the fact he is resilient, of course no doubt he is. It's a little personal. It's acknowledging a personal reality. But it hardly brings the listener deep into Michaels world, any deeper than we know.
Invincible - a song about a girl. Just another song about a girl. Nothing here to suggest it's Lisa Marie Presely or any woman who was actually in his life.
Heartbreaker - see above.
Break of Dawn - see above.
Heaven can wait - see above
You Rock My World - see above
Butterflies - see above
Speechless - a syrupy and generalized song about an unconditional love, allegedly written about the play of children. This is well tread ground for Michael in the vain of Heal the World. Certainly not any more personal than that song. Really just full of vague and interchangeable sentiments about "love being magical!" Michael was prone to these kinds of expressions that seemed to belie a bit of an unrealistic and out of touch view of expressions of love, as though he rarely experienced it in ways we did. It's all very Disneyfied and fantasy and there's not anything here I'd consider personal nor particularly relatable. But he loved the song, it meant something to him, so there's that.
2000 watts - What is this song even about? Certainly it's not a page from his autobiography.
You are my life - I don't hate this song as much as other people seem to. I think it could certainly be seen to be about his own children. Is it super personal? No. Once again, it's another vague song, where a meaning has to be discerned through the likely false story of a woman. Not particularly personal.
Privacy - Think "Leave me alone" but not as good. It's become tradition for Michael to feature a song like this on every album, it just happens that Privacy is by far the worst. Personal? Kind of. But there's nothing going on here that goes even a single step deeper than "the media harasses me". We know that, Mike.
Don't Walk Away - Another vague song about an imaginary woman. You could twist and turn the song to mean something but it doesn't, really.
Cry - Heal the world part 2. Still not personal.
The Lost Children - Probably the most personal song on the record just because it's the kind of song only Michael would make.
Whatever Happens - Wonderful song, great story, not personal though.
Threatened - See Unbreakable - not particularly personal, but does leverage some fact about his life to create the song.
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So there we have it, WHAT IS SO PERSONAL ABOUT INVINCIBLE?
I think a big mistake Michael made on the album is he tried to come across like an every man. Like he wasn't a 45 year old living in a theme park. This album largely sounds like a Babyface album. It's not any more personal than any of his prior albums it's just not as good.
