Album of the day: Michael Jackson, “Off the Wall”
Michael Jackson
Off the Wall (Cd Epic EPC5044212-2)
It is known that nostalgia always plays bad tricks by making us imagine things more beautiful than they actually are; let’s put the
just in case you’re on vacation today and you feel like taking a trip down memory lane by listening to one of the albums that marked your adolescence, and let’s say one of these albums is Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall”.
Start the record and “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” immediately grabs your throat with its powerful groove that you’ve let loose to, sweating like crazy at who knows how many parties. So far, so good. “Rock with You” arrives, and you’re already singing at the top of your lungs, thinking back to your girlfriend at the time. Here too, everything is fine. “Working Day and Night” gives you the final blow, forcing you to dance on the table, an irresistible rhythm that gives no respite and leaves you stunned, also thanks to the deadly riffs of the horn section. Then the trouble begins…
“Get on the Floor” is terrible, a flaccid pop/disco so bad that you’ve erased it from your mind and feel like you’re hearing it for the first time. A triptych of rare ugliness follows, with the modest title track taking the prize for best song only because McCartney’s nauseating Bee Gees-esque version of “Girlfriend” (which wasn’t a masterpiece in its own right) has a glucose level that will give you a diabetic attack, and “She’s Out of My Life” is so sentimentally banal that it sounds like Zeffirelli’s “The Champion,” a veritable festival of clichés (complete with a tear at the end).
You’ve just started to wonder what you were smoking back then to like this record so much when the beginning of “I Can’t Help It” lifts your spirits for a moment; a magnificent song by Stevie Wonder, impeccable arrangement by Quincy Jones, you start to breathe again, but it’s only for a moment then everything goes down the drain with the proto-disco music of “It’s The Falling in Love” (among the most horrendous songs of all time) sinking into the abyss with “Burn This Disco Out”, which leaves you with the taste of gastritis in your throat and short of breath.
What a disappointment! You are probably wondering how you didn’t notice it then; thank goodness that today with the Internet there is no need to buy the whole CD and you can choose only the good songs, which on this album are really fantastic…
Carlo Boccadoro, composer and conductor, was born in Macerata in 1963. He lives and works in Milan. He collaborates with soloists and orchestras in different parts of the world. He is the author of numerous books on musical subjects.
This text is taken from “Lunario della musica: Un disco per ogni giorno dell’anno” published by Einaudi, courtesy of the author and the publisher.
