If all those allegations are right, he used all his fame and success to predatory ends. He kept his private life intensely private. Michael Jackson was, by just about every account, not a flirt. It made Michael Jackson out to be a flirt. “The Way You Make Me Feel” served a different purpose.
“ Bad” was the statement of intent, the mean-mugging dance anthem. “ I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” was the soft, approachable reintroduction. The album’s two previous singles had served their functions. Every song works as image maintenance and as music, a difficult thing to pull off. Every song on Bad checks some kind of box. Jackson was following up Thriller, the most successful album in existence, so he made a record where all the songs could work as singles. Jackson’s Bad might be the original too-big-to-fail pop album. But Katherine Jackson apparently didn’t quite understand that her son was Michael Jackson and that anything he’d write in the late ’80s would come out sounding like a space-age oddity. That’s why Jackson wrote “The Way You Make Me Feel.” The song is a shuffle, and it has plenty of things that call back to earlier eras of R&B.
The story behind “The Way You Make Me Feel” is that Katherine Jackson, Michael’s mother, wanted him to write a shuffle - an old-school R&B number, like the stuff that Motown was putting out nearly a decade before Berry Gordy signed the Jackson 5. That loping sound was too weird and too precise for an actual bass guitar. There’s no bass guitar on “The Way You Make Me Feel.” I’m pretty sure that bassline comes from session musician Christopher Currell playing the synclavier, the digital synth that Stevie Wonder loved so much. It sounds like a technological marvel, and that’s because it is. The bassline on “The Way You Make Me Feel” sounds funky and awkward and menacing all at once. If Daleks could breakdance, they would breakdance to that bassline.Ī lot of Michael Jackson songs have amazing basslines, but none of those basslines hits quite like the bassline of “The Way You Make Me Feel.” Even on “ Billie Jean,” the bassline isn’t quite so overpowering. That bassline sounds like what might a Terminator might throw on the stereo after it gets off from work. How do you describe that bassline? That bassline sounds like something you’d hear booming out of a lowrider UFO. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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