Album of the Week: Michael Jackson — Off the Wall

Rolling into 1979, Michael Jackson was already a household name. Throughout the seventies, his albums with the Jackson 5 along with several solo records put him to the top of the list during Motown’s second era. The classic soul sound that dominated the earlier decade had to increasingly split time with disco on the radio and in clubs. And not unlike rock music after punk, there was a sense of a giant question mark over what was going to come next as the 1980s were coming on. Indeed, many of the most famous artists from both camps seemed to be either floundering, or alternately on their own island, removed from whatever past scene they may have been a part of.

Enter Michael Jackson, former child star now coming of age in a new era of MTV, corporate radio and ever-consolidating music conglomerates. Now 20 years old and wanting to break free of his family, particularly his abusive father Joe Jackson, and to define a new career path for himself going forward, Jackson moved on from Motown Records. After meeting Quincy Jones on the set of the musical film, The Wiz in 1978, the pair forged a partnership that would take their respective careers in new directions, breaking with their respective pasts.

You can’t talk about Off The Wall, and Jackson’s subsequent albums without talking about the great Quincy Jones. He was the George Martin to Jackson’s Beatles, and through his production work, he played a major role in defining the pop sounds of the next two decades and beyond. Jones came from a jazz background and had worked as a bandleader, arranger and performer before starting into a career working on film soundtracks, with middling forays into disco and soul music. What Jones did on Off The Wall that broke new ground was to bring that broad, cinematic arrangement practice further into the pop-production sphere. If you listen to the album once it sounds as though it could have been performed by a simple five piece funk band, but subsequent plays and a glance through the credits show a meticulously crafted album with a huge number of players, all of whom serve to shape a deceptively simple sounding album that might be as produced as a Hollywood film soundtrack — a practice that would come to dominate much of pop album making in the future. With writing turns by all-stars Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney, Off The Wall plays like a Hollywood blockbuster film as much as it does an album.

While it would be Jackson’s second Jones-helmed solo album, Thriller, that would send him truly into the stratosphere, Of the Wall is particularly interesting in how it manages to be an axis point between several different musical moments, bridging the gap between the past and what would come not only from Michael Jackson, but pop music in general. The album’s sound, beyond the meticulous crafting by Jones, is a blend of soft-going funk, soul impressions from the previous decade and disco. The Grammy winning lead single ‘Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough’ demonstrates this well — everything you hear in the song you’ve heard before, but have you ever heard them together? This use of styles from the past decade combined with the production style that Quincy Jones developed while working on Hollywood films felt new. The result is pumped-up cinematic pop, a sound further fleshed out on the Paul McCartney penned ‘Girlfriend,’ a light soul rocker that was first recorded by McCartney’s band Wings, but was always intended for Jackson.

This style first explored on Off the Wall would be expanded upon on Jackson’s subsequent albums all the way to 1991’s Dangerous. The blockbuster combination of sounds and production styles inspired Jackson and his creative team to develop a vision that included newly minted MTV as a medium for short films and visual tangents that all revolved around the music from his albums. It can’t be stated strongly enough how much of an impact this would have on the next several decades of pop music. Despite MTV’s death as a music channel some fifteen years ago, artists today are still trying to approximate what Jackson was doing throughout the 1980s. But the visual and multi-media components, wouldn’t have worked without a quality grounding musical context, and it was on Off the Wall that Jackson and Jones synthesized the previous decade of music with a forward thinking approach that not only took them into the future, but invented it.