One person’s view: “Two of the greatest music artists of all time took the biggest dump on the biggest album of all time! Uggh, this song makes me want to rip my ears off and rip all the skin off my face!” – Paul Stroessner @ Return to the 80s
The public’s view: 2.76 / 5.00
Superstar duets have been around since the time of Sodom & Gomorrah, but they took a dark turn in the 1980s. Duets were no longer serendipitous pairings of people who decided to sing together after a chance run-in at an awards ceremony or an AA meeting. Now they were carefully scripted events whose participants were matched to one another by record label accountants based on their appeal to the targeted demographics. Sometimes the duet was tied to the cross-merchandising of a movie, in the same way that Burger King might have served your drink in a collectible Return of the Jedi glass or sprinkled horsefly wings on your sandwich to promote The Fly. The songs chosen for superstar duets were often the weakest available to either performer, in the belief that putting two big names on the same record would be enough to overcome the poor quality and sell a lot of copies. All too frequently, this proved to be a valid assumption.
“The Girl Is Mine” is a notable example of a bad superstar duet, and it is frequently cited as a marketing faux pas. What idiot at Epic Records decided to release Thriller’s worst song as its first single? After looking into this maneuver, however, I think it was actually a stroke of genius and that it contributed to the album’s blockbusting sales. “The Girl Is Mine” may have been wimpy and childish, but it accomplished several goals for Michael Jackson. It reminded pop and adult contemporary radio stations that he wasn’t just an R&B or dance act. It softened up the stodgier media outlets for his forthcoming singles about paternity suits and street gangs. (Remember, radio had just come out of the doldrums and there was still some lingering conservatism.) It also put him on the path to being named the King of Pop. Let me explain this last one.
If you want to become the king of something but you aren’t in the line of succession, your best hope is to depose the current king. In 1982, nobody was more respected than Paul McCartney. He was the de facto King of Pop, even if no one ever addressed him that way and he didn’t walk around wearing a crown. But Michael Jackson sensed that King Paul’s rule over his dominion was imperiled. It was one thing to spend the last decade making silly love songs, but a silly anti-racism song like “Ebony and Ivory” suggested that McCartney was finally way out of his depth. Now Jackson had the opportunity to write a song that the two of them would perform together. This gave rise to the following multi-year scheme:
1. Force Paul to sing Michael’s juvenile lyrics along with him on “The Girl Is Mine”, adding to the narrative that Paul had become a lightweight.
2. Follow up the duet with some kick-ass solo songs, so that people can see how much better MJ is without a goofy has-been like McCartney weighing him down.
3. Use the profits from Thriller to outbid Paul for the publishing rights to the Beatles catalog.
4. Send Paul a bill every time he performs one of his own old songs.
5. License Beatles tunes for use in commercials. Paul stops watching TV, fearing that he will see a Tinactin ad with the jingle “Yesterday / All my jock itch finally went away...”
6. Declare himself the new King of Pop, even as McCartney fumes that he’s still alive and is still making plenty of great pop music in the 1980s. Doesn’t the theme to Spies Like Us count for anything?
7. Marry into the royal family of the other singer who had been called The King. Winner, winner, vegetarian dinner.
Although “The Girl Is Mine” ultimately led to phenomenal success for Jackson, its artistic merit is mixed. It has two world-class singers performing at a high level, plus decent studio work from the guys in Toto, but it also sounds like an argument between a couple of first-graders. “You’re a poohead, Paul.” “Am not.” “Are too.” “Takes one to know one.” “When I get rich I’m going to buy something you want and ruin it.” “I hope your nose falls off someday, Michael.” In the days before Tupac and Biggie, this was the best we could hope for in a musical feud.
My rating: 4 / 10
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