Behind The Music | ‘Smooth Criminal’ by Michael Jackson
Dressed in head-to-toe white pinstripes, spats and his signature fedora, a coin flip into a jukebox ignites Michael Jackson’s Hollywood gangster fantasy. ‘Smooth Criminal’, an infectiously pulsating track, that’s beat and overall pace speaks of its lyrical urgency.
The accompanying video becoming the centrepiece of Michael Jackson’s most ambitious film project, ‘Moonwalker’, showcasing the artist’s love for classic cinema as well as his formidable talents and ingenuity in dance, performance and visual spectacle. ‘Smooth Criminal’, is often regarded as embodying Jackson at his most electric, both physically and artistically.
Written by Michael Jackson and produced by himself and Quincy Jones, the track was released as the ‘Bad’ album’s seventh single on November 14, 1988. The songs distinct musical as well as visual style became a signature hit for the King of Pop, becoming a mainstay on the artist’s subsequent tours and featured heavily in Jackson playlists, compilation albums and tribute shows.
This is the story behind the inspiration, production and commercial reaction to one of pop history’s most iconic music releases. Michael Jackson’s 1988 hit, ‘Smooth Criminal’.
Encouraged by his previous ground-breaking success with the single and music video for ‘Thriller’, which paid homage to the B-movie horror genre, for his next album Michael Jackson was looking to engineer a track that would also lend itself to another cinematic masterpiece. The artist quickly began drawing inspiration from 1940s mobster movies and classic ‘film noir’, creating the demo track ‘Al Capone’. Jackson grew obsessive and worked tirelessly on the song, although he was frustrated with its overall direction and not 100% convinced it had the commercial hook needed to become, what he hoped, a defining track on his much-anticipated album.
The early demo version evolved, and its lyrics matured, describing a narrator who finds a bloodstained carpet, a body unconscious and a woman being attacked in her apartment by a “Smooth Criminal”, which had now become the track’s title. Many of the songs Jackson wrote were very personal in nature, but this one tells the fictional story of a particularly adept gangster, something far from his personal experience. Much like in his track ‘Beat It’, Jackson is not a participant in violence, but takes on the role of an onlooker. Coming across the victim and asking her over and over — “Annie are you OK?”. A line inspired by Resusci Anne, a dummy used in CPR training, which Michael Jackson took part in during the recording of ‘Bad’. Whereby trainees learn to say “Annie, are you OK?” in order to determine whether the patient is conscious and responsive prior to administering CPR.
During an interview with VH1, Michael Jackson stated that the song’s lyrical content wasn’t recounting a single incident but was just randomly selected phases he read in the LA Times and in other crime reports, which when put together, he just liked the way it sounded.
During the recording of ‘Smooth Criminal’, it was the studio engineer, Bruce Swedien, who acted as the voice of the police chief, and the thumping sound at the beginning of the track was created from recording Michael Jackson’s own heartbeat, which was digitally processed through a Synclavier digital synthesizer. Quincy Jones recounts how involved Michael was in spearheading the track and admitted that even once complete, it was never a favourite of his and only agreed to it making the final album track list because of Jackson’s immense enthusiasm for it.
For a period, ‘Smooth Criminal’ became the working title for Jackson’s album, believing that the name sounded slick and would help Michael Jackson in his pursuit for a more rebellious public image. However, the decision was later challenged as executives considered the title too controversial, as though glorifying organised crime and gang violence, therefore a decision was made, and the record was ultimately named ‘Bad’ as a result.
Colin Chilvers directed Michael Jackson’s self-funded musical epic, ‘Moonwalker’, which included the 42-minute ‘Smooth Criminal’ music video. Having worked on films like ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ and ‘Superman’, Chilvers was inspired by the golden age of Hollywood and wanted Jackson to pay tribute to the MGM musical. However, Michael Jackson already had a concept for the music video that was inspired by cowboys and the western movie genre. But after he and the director watched ‘The Godfather’ as well as other classic movies, Jackson agreed to change it to a 1940s gangster style. “I showed Michael a movie that I felt would fit the theme of the piece, ‘The Third Man’. He loved the look of it, that sort of film-noir look”, recounted Chilvers in a later interview.
Michael Jackson also drew heavily from Fred Astaire’s 1953 musical ‘The Band Wagon’, with his white suit and fedora paying tribute to the iconic performer. During filming, Hermes Pan, Astaire’s long-time choreographer, visited the set and praised Jackson’s tribute to Astaire’s costume and choreography from the film. Saying that Fred Astaire would have been very happy and proud of inspiring such a wonderful person, with Astaire passing away before ever seeing the finished video.
Originally called ‘Chicago Nights’, filming took place between mid-February and April 1987 at Culver City, California and in the backlot at Universal Studios Hollywood. Running way over schedule, director Colin Chilvers recalled Michael’s drive to create the best work he possibly could. Watching production dailies on their lunch breaks, “Michael would say, ‘We can do better than that,’ it was Michael’s movie, and he was going to do exactly what he felt he needed to do to make it perfect.”
Vincent Paterson, who was a lead dancer in the music videos for ‘Beat It’ and ‘Thriller’, co-choreographed the “Smooth Criminal” video with Jackson and Jeffrey Daniel, of soul music group Shalamar. Together they visualized Jackson’s second most famous dance move — a gravity-defying lean. With Michael Jackson and the dancers leaning forward 45 degrees with their backs straight and feet flat on the floor, holding the pose before returning upright. The lean moves the body’s centre of mass further than it can support and appears to defy gravity.
With director, Chilvers, revealing, “the lean that we did, obviously that was a bit of a heritage from my days of Superman. Because we had Michael on wires and fixed his feet to the ground so he could do that famous lean. I fixed their heels to the ground with a slot, so that they were locked into it. If you look in the video, when they come back up from that lean, they kind of shuffle their feet back — they were unlocking themselves from the support they had in the ground.”
The standalone music video for ‘Smooth Criminal’ premiered on MTV on October 13th, 1988, becoming the centrepiece of Jackson’s ‘Moonwalker’ film, which was released on home video towards the end of 1988.
In the charts, ‘Smooth Criminal’ peaked at number seven on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the sixth top ten single from ‘Bad’, a disappointment for Jackson who had already achieved five number ones from the record and was hoping for yet another one. However, ‘Smooth Criminal’ did become certified double platinum in the US and reached number one in Belgium, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Spain.
Lyrically, the track received mixed reviews with more conservative voices outraged and fearing its video’s impact on children of the 80s. “The message is clear. Being a criminal is hip. Michael gives crime status and respectability. You should watch the video, then watch the many kids who will copy his slick clothes and, possibly, copy his gangster behaviour. The subconscious, almost hypnotic, impact of this video makes you ask some questions. What is the message MJ is conveying, to whom he is conveying the message and why?” voiced one concerned listener.
However, despite a minor public backlash, the ‘Smooth Criminal’ short film became one of Michael’s most celebrated visual works. In 1989, it received Best Video accolades at the BRIT Awards, the British Phonographic Industry, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the People’s Choice Awards and the World Music Awards. The film also received three MTV Video Music Award nominations, winning for Best Cinematography in a video.
The style of clothing as well as mannerisms Jackson portrayed in ‘Smooth Criminal’ were reused in the numerous adaptations of the video game, Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker. The song was also a highlight of Jackson’s live shows, the routine growing more elaborate over time. As on the second leg of the ‘Bad’ and ‘Dangerous’ tour, Jackson essentially re-enacted the video with four dancers. However, during the ‘History’ tour the rendition became more theatrical. With the artist dressed like a 1930s Chicago gangster, he would appear on stage with a prop machine gun and blast away six or so rival gangsters, whose bodies were then dragged off stage to great applause.
The King of Pop also performed variations of the 45-degree lean popularized in the video, often leaving crowds wondering how it was done. However onstage, the dancers wore special shoes that could be furtively inserted into pegs on the stage floor, then quickly removed to resume full motion. In October 1993, the technique was filed under United States Patent Law by Jackson and two collaborators, although the patent was let to expire in 2005.
Since Michael Jackson’s death in 2009, retrospective reviews have hailed ‘Smooth Criminal’ as one of the best songs of Jackson’s entire career. In 2014, Rolling Stone ranked ‘Smooth Criminal’ number five on a list of Michael Jackson’s twenty Greatest Videos, as well as sixth on their list of the fifty Best Michael Jackson Songs, writing that it was “his best blend of R&B groove and rock edginess, and a turning point in his shift toward darker, harder-edged material”.
In a retrospective review of the ‘Bad’ album, Newsweek wrote, “Smooth Criminal is a sleek, exhilarating action sequence of a song that’s unlike anything else in Jackson’s catalogue. An urgent and inspired highlight. ‘Bad’ is at its best when it explores the darker, more paranoid side that began to consume Jackson’s life in the late ’80s, and this song captures that impulse.” Entertainment Weekly wrote, “if there was one song on ‘Bad’ that truly captured the sense of artistic freedom that Jackson felt after Thriller, it was this track. This is pop music as suspense drama.”