Jacko marketing machine won’t stop till they get enough

 Add your view

 

Sneak peak: snatched shot from Jackson's last rehearsal for the O2 This is It show

In pop, at least, death has always been a great career move. While preparations for a funeral for Michael Jackson are still up in the air, the first stage of the grieving process for his fans involves buying his music in huge quantities.

Within days of his death, there were five Jackson albums in the UK top 20 and six singles in our top 40. The American Billboard top 10 now contains nine of his albums.

In the absence of any new music since 2001's limp Invincible album, the singer was already heavily involved in packaging and repackaging his classic tracks — there have been six different greatest hits collections released this decade alone.

Once the dust has settled from last week's shocking news, however, the marketing machine will really go into overdrive. The future emergence of unreleased material could eventually end up in a debt-clearing payday that would dwarf the proceeds from 50 arena concerts.

A live album and DVD culled from recent rehearsals for his O2 “This Is It” show is almost a certainty. The claim by an official from promoters AEG Live that they “have a live album in the can” has been widely quoted. But that's not all. Jackson biographer Ian Halperin reckons there are more than a hundred new — unrecorded or otherwise — songs that Jackson left to his three children in his will. If this is true and even if nowhere close to that number, a healthy posthumous career could be sustained for years.

There's also plenty left over from past recording sessions, according to Jackson's former Sony records boss Tommy Mottola: “There are dozens and dozens of songs that did not end up on his albums. People will be hearing a lot of that unreleased material for the first time ever,” he says.

Some talk of new Jackson songs doesn't sound too promising. His friend, Indian spiritualist Deepak Chopra, appeared on ABC News show Good Morning America last Saturday to play a barely audible snippet of an ode to the environment he claimed they were writing together. Over what sounded like New Age flute music, Chopra said the lyrics were along the lines of: “The trees are our lungs, the air is our breath, the rivers and waters are our circulation.”

Then there's I Have a Dream, a 2006 charity single for victims of Hurricane Katrina in a similar vein to We Are the World, which reportedly was also to feature Snoop Dogg, Babyface and R Kelly. It was written by Jackson during his period of being funded by Bahrainian Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Khalifa; but the pair fell out that same year and it's unclear whether the song was completed, will ever be heard or even exists.

One finished track that can be heard has been on the MySpace page of obscure Brooklyn rapper Tempamental since early 2007(www.myspace.com/tempamental). No Friend of Mine sounds current with staccato piano, hip-hop beats and squalling horns, and also features a rap by Pras Michel of The Fugees that includes numerous Jacko references. If the falsetto voice that takes the chorus and final verse isn't Michael, it sounds uncannily like him.

The most reliable source, however, is rapper and producer will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas. After working with Jackson on a 25th anniversary reissue of Thriller, released last year, he had produced new songs. “They're a hard dance style, like our [the Black Eyed Peas'] new album,” he said recently. “[Michael] said, You know, I just wanna make unprecedented music! I just wanna shock 'em! Wanna go for the jugular! Aim for the throat! Unprecedented rhythms! International number ones!'”.

The five will.i.am remixes on Thriller 25 provide the best clue to a future sound. Billie Jean 2008 adds more strings and weightier hip-hop beats; The Girl Is Mine 2008 is faster with stabbing synths and will.i.am turning the Paul McCartney role into a rap; Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' 2008 features Auto-Tuned vocals from R&B singer Akon and heavy funk bass. It's easy to imagine that will.i.am would have helped Jackson to do what he has always done: take a hot contemporary urban sound, whether it's disco on Off the Wall or New Jack Swing on Dangerous, and make it all his own.

We may yet find out what the pair were plotting in the studio. Even if Jackson managed to record little more than a few trademark whoops before his death, someone will eventually find a way to sell it.

 

What's on today   What's on tomorrow

Receive our newsletter