When Michael Jackson stole Paul McCartney’s sound:
View(s):‘Cautionary tale’ behind ‘The Girl Is Mine’
“Somebody rang me up and this high voice I didn’t recognise said: ‘Hi, Paul’,” McCartney recalled. “I thought, ‘This is a girl fan, and how the hell did she get my number?’ I was quite annoyed.”
Macca’s mood quickly changed from annoyed to overjoyed. “It wasn’t a girl, it was Michael Jackson, and he basically said, ‘Do you want to make some hits?’”
McCartney, it so happened, was very much up for making hits. With his 40th birthday approaching, he was coming around to the idea of writing songs for other artists (his creative compass was also in a spin following the shooting dead on December 8, 1980 of John Lennon). And he knew Jackson could do justice to his material, with the former Jackson 5 wunderkind having covered Wings’s Girlfriend on 1979’s Off The Wall album.
But Jackson didn’t want McCartney to merely furnish him with another tune. Encouraged by his producer Quincy Jones, he had in mind a proper collaboration. He proposed they get together in the studio and let magic happen. Eighteen months later – 40 years ago this month – their first collaboration would be unleashed in the form of the duet The Girl Is Mine.
A syrupy back and forth between Jacko and Macca, The Girl Is Mine is no classic: the spoken outro between the duo could curl toes at 50 yards (“Michael, we’re not going to fight about this, okay” – “Paul, I think I told you, I’m a lover not a fighter”). But, then, Jackson hadn’t intended to set the world on fire with the track.
He and McCartney had convened at Westlake Studios, LA in April 1982. Watching on were Quincy Jones, Beatles producer George Martin and McCartney’s wife Linda. The goal for Jackson was to create a low-key appetite-whetter for his forthcoming solo record, Thriller, which would be released in November 1982. He and Jones were also cognisant that working with McCartney would help them slip into the affections of white America.
In the early Eighties, the idea of a black star such as Jackson becoming a mainstream sensation was – unbelievably – still controversial. MTV, which had launched on August 1 1981, was focused on rock ’n’ roll – shorthand at the time for white artists only.
MTV wasn’t alone in blanking Jackson. Despite the acclaim showered on Off The Wall – a disco-soul instant classic – radio stations across the United States declined to playlist Jackson because he was African-American. Jackson and Quincy Jones’s calculation was that they wouldn’t dare snub a Beatle.
The consensus among Jackson fans is that The Girl Is Mine is the song off Thriller that has aged the worst (McCartney devotees certainly think so). Amid the dark disco of the title track and the stadium funk of Beat It and Billie Jean, it stands out as a big slab of stinky cheese. McCartney – no stranger to sonic cheddar – was never taken with it. He actually admitted as much at the time. One point of concern was Jackson’s turn of phrase – did the King of Pop have to sing “the doggone girl is mine”?
“You could say it’s shallow,” McCartney said. “When I checked it out with Michael, he explained that he wasn’t going for depth, he was going for rhythm, he was going for feel.”
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