Is anyone else getting sick and tired of Invincible chat and all the ridiculous excuses as to why it didn't perform well?
The album was just not good enough.
There's a poster who is obsessed with the album and keeps bringing up threads or creating new ones about it.
Let it go!!
Invincible isn't a great album, I'll agree. But its performance isn't solely based on its quality, or lackthereof.
1) Promotion. By any reasonable standards Sony purposely underpromoted the album - Butterflies was blowing up on radio play alone and yet they decided not to officially release it. It doesnt really get more obvious than that.
2) Choice of singles. Michael did not get his usual input in singles or their film clips
3) Song choice. If we are to believe there are great songs in the vault, clearly Invincible doesn't contain too many
4) Michael himself. Michael's image was tarnished and he seemed to jump from one scandal to another. He also physically looked drugged most of the time, and image is incredibly important in marketing.
For me, Invincible sold about half of what it could have, but that doesn't make it a great album. it just means it had enough redeemable qualities that could have been marketed to make it a small success rather than the flop that is largely remembered as.
I recall a lot of the big hit R&B albums of the time - Usher's 8701, Justin Timberlake Justified, Sisqo's album, TQ, for instance - and all of those albums had their share of filler, but they knew what their hits were and they pushed them. Invincible didn't seem to be about anything and clearly they didn't know what their best songs were when promoting the album. Maybe because a lot of it is middle-of-the-road and forgettable but I think any Invincible album campaign that doesn't release Whatever Happens is out of its mind.
Shout could have been one of the good songs, that didn't make Invincible, like Jerkins said:
“Michael is like no other. He records hundreds… really, hundreds of songs for an album. So what we did [was] we cut it down to 35 of the best tracks and picked from there. [It’s] not always about picking the hottest tracks. It’s got to have flow. So there’s a good album’s worth of [unreleased] material that could blow your mind. I really hope this stuff comes out because it’s some of his best.”
Below is a chapter from my book Michael Jackson: Songs & Stories From The Vault, revised for this article. The full book is available via Amazon and iBooks. In order to fully appreciate the origins and evolution of “Xscape” – an outtake recorded for Michael Jackson’s Invincible album – it’s...
www.damienshields.com
I think we like to believe that there is another Thriller hidden in the vault but evidence suggests that isn't so. If it were, why were we getting fake tracks on the very first posthumous release, and why are we getting entirely incomplete tracks like Hollywood Tonight?
There's an illusion or myth about the amount Michael recorded and what quality it was at but we're really yet to see anything that suggests that.
