Behind Michael Jackson’s Rap/Hip Hop 90s Sound | ‘Jam’
Symbolising a musical breakthrough with the shattering of glass, the album opener wastes no time announcing the King of Pop’s furious return. In place of the pristine, cinematic sound of ‘Bad’ is something more attuned to the real world, and with a palpable sense of urgency.
Beginning with ‘Jam’, the first disc of the record is dedicated to Riley’s New Jack Swing influence. Lyrically, the song might sound simple enough on the surface. Michael Jackson often stating that he was only at one on stage, finding his own inner peace and using performance as a method to temporarily escape worldly issues. “I have to find my peace cause no one seems to let me be. False prophets cry of doom, what are the possibilities? I told my brother there’ll be problems, times and tears for fears. But we must live each day like it’s the last. Go with it, go with it, Jam!”. Teddy Riley pilots this sense of freedom with an adrenaline-pumping rhythm consisting of electronic drum snares, turntable scratches, and hot horn stabs. In Riley’s words, “Jam was a track that Michael had the idea for. He told me to see what I could do with it, so I took it and created some more instruments and reproduced the record — and he loved it.” He continued, “that’s the way it worked a lot of the time. He’d come in with an idea and I’d flesh it out in the studio”.
Ironically, having rejected Quincy Jones’ idea of a Run DMC collaboration fearing that rap music was on the way out, Jackson and Riley drafted in Heavy D — who had previously worked with Riley’s group Guy and sister Janet the previous year — to perform a rap verse in the song. “It was my idea to get the rapper Heavy D to perform on there as well. He was Michael’s favourite rapper at the time,” recounted Riley.
The video saw the meeting of the MJs, the other being basketball megastar Michael Jordan. In both their prime, the musical and sporting legends, idolised by countless black youth growing up in the projects, came together to flex their respective crafts. The concept was for Jackson to teach Jordan to dance, and in turn Jordan teach Jackson to dunk. The video director, David Kellogg, remembers, “we found this rat-infested, abandoned, bombed-out armoury in a neglected neighbourhood in Chicago. The production went into the neighbourhood under the guise of a mayonnaise commercial. Neither the police nor the landlord really knew what we were planning. Michael Jackson arrived in a motor home. We built a tunnel for him so he couldn’t really be seen entering the building. He was followed shortly by Michael Jordan, who drove himself.”
As for filming the superstars together, there wasn’t a whole lot of direction: “It was easier just to play the music and let them go — either dance or play basketball. It was so loud that they couldn’t really talk, so they had to let the music tell them how to behave.” The disused urban location was befitting of the song’s explosive, chant-like tone. B-boys and B-girls are consistently featured throughout the video, paying homage to the African American and Puerto-Rican youth who have originated so many styles of street dance, which was then perfected and tuned to fit the moves of the King of Pop.
With appearances by Kriss Kross and Naughty by Nature, this was Jackson’s most visible attempt at crossing over into the hip-hop and rap genre, which was now so influential in music of the 1990s. Seeing it as a potential vehicle to capture the hearts and minds of a wider, younger audience. At the same time being cautious not to veer too far from the 70s and 80s melodies his fans loved him for. Therefore, Epic records commission two dozen remixed incarnations of ‘Jam’, created by seven remixers, placed depending on the radio station or club it was to be played at. “We could give one version to everybody,” said Michael Caplan, vice president of artists and repertory at Epic Records. “But we live in such a specialized time, and such a fragmented radio world, that what we’re doing is super-serving our clientele.” This meant club disk jockeys can spin a hip-hop remix, while radio programmers fearful of irritating older listeners can choose a version that excuses Heavy D’s rap section.