Opinion: Michael Jackson post-mortem release reads as ‘corporate money grab’

Jacob Hollar
Mon, 07 Apr 2014 02:19:38 +0000
Campus, michael jackson, new album, xscape

His life might be over, but MJ’s still singing.

Kind of.

Ostensibly, humans are the only species who contemplate their own inevitable march toward mortality, and it has become part of the human condition to rail against the temporal finiteness of our existence.

As such, our fascination with resurrecting dead pop stars isn’t a surprise.

First we brought back Tupac? as a hologram in 2012; now we’re releasing a posthumous record from the King of Pop.

The new album, titled “Xscape,” is set to be released in May — nearly five years after Michael Jackson’s death — and will feature eight songs that weren’t released when he was alive.

Color me skeptical, but the fact that the tracks weren’t released before he died might suggest they weren’t meant to be — because Jackson didn’t like them, because they’re really just not very good, or for any number of other reasons.

Further, the fact that the tracks weren’t released earlier and instead were timed to drop around the fifth anniversary of his death seems to whisper “corporate money grab.”

Still, whether the album is shameless profiteering of a dead star’s legacy or not, it’s obviously generating some buzz and will likely merit a listen once released. The tracks have been “contemporized” by still-living big name producers to give them “a more current sound,” according to USA Today. There’s potential for these to be the big summer anthems of 2014, and they might even be worth a spot in your iTunes library.

Or not. They could be crap. It was certainly a lazy idea to remix the songs – perhaps the execution will be similarly uninspired. We won’t know either way until May.

Personally, I’m hoping “more current sound” is really just music industry jargon for “dubstep remix.”

Dubstep — or perhaps, brostep — wasn’t a thing when Jackson died in 2009, was it? Is it still a thing now or am I clinging to a fad gone by?

Regardless of how the album turns out, it’s almost guaranteed to be a success: Jackson’s name will sell itself — just ask Cirque du Soleil.

Maybe the acrobats are on to something though: Maybe MJ is immortal.

Or if he’s not, at the very least, greed and lazy ideas are doing a great job at pretending.