Bad

Extremely uneven - 3 all time greats, pure fun bangers (Bad, Smooth Criminal, The Way You Make me Feel) and then a heaping pile of schmaltzy saccharine bullshit. Noone cares about the ballads, MJ, we're here for the dance hits so cut out the crooning, it's truly awful. The 80s guitar shredding is kind of good and really funny.

Not as good as Thriller, but that's like saying Rubber Soul or The White Album wasn't as good as Sgt. Pepper... You've already released the quintessential 1980s all time best selling monster record, how do you follow that up? Just casually make the 12th biggest selling album of all time I guess, make it have 11 songs and release 7 as singles and have 5 go to number 1 in the charts, make the "Bad" video be an 18 minute long short directed by Martin Scorsese? Sounds like a plan, be sure to throw in a world tour that seemingly never ended, play to 500k paying people over 7 nights at Wembley Stadium? Oh go on then...

I remember when MJ was a little boy in the Jackson 5. He was very cute then. My older sisters loved him. We danced to his music from tweens on. My kids got hooked on his music as tweens when his untimely demise was announced. My grandkids will probably be fans. He was as good as they get.

So many singles it’s effectively like listening to a greatest hits album.

Is this aggressively 80s? Yes. Is MJ morally questionable? Also yes. But it's such a bop! The fact it includes Leave Me Alone meant it was always getting a minimum of a 4 (because that song is fantastic) but as a whole it's just a really entertaining record.

5/5

It's my least listened to album of his from that era, but it's a classic nonetheless. The synths are on point.

Standout: Liberian Girl

It’s not bad .. but he was.

Listen to the words of the pedophile: change your ways 👍

Classic.

Feel like this album is feeling it's age a bit with some of its sounds, but its still basically one of the best examples of that sound.

I do prefer Jackson's harder edge on some songs here, but Dirty Diana and Smooth Criminal are the only songs that I'd really come back to. Very much don't really care for the lighter R&B songs here.

There are two or three decent songs on this (I liked Another Part Of Me), but quite a few one-star efforts too. Jackson's delivery on Man in the Mirror doesn't suit the song at all. Overall, a massive drop off from earlier Jackson material.

Hee hee!

There are some great songs on this album! I knew half of them - and them songs alone would have been a very easy 5 star

Sadly the other half of the album were just filler. Liberian Girl in particular absolutely killed the vibe

Smooth Criminal will now be stuck in my head for the next 3-5 business days

4 ⭐️

At least three quentesential pop singles. Incredible how this man captured the whole zeitgeist. If you want to know what pop music was in 89, this is it.

Poco se puede decir, es el puto Michael Jackson. Como en los discos que salieron previamente, la calidad de sus canciones siempre es alta y el disco no aburre, pero no llega a conectar del todo conmigo para que sean favoritos. Pero un gran tiempo.

Canción destacada: Smooth Criminal

Shame about the molest

you've been hit by
you've been struck by
truck

Not Thriller level, but amazing nonetheless.

I had this on 12 inch when I was 9 and listened to it almost constantly. It totally loses its focus after those first two tracks, and his sister Janet's output is far more interesting, but it's so emblematic of that particular time and place, that aesthetic.

Even more of a singles compilation than Thriller is. I prefer it over Thriller, even though it doesn't have anything to top the fantastic trio of songs on there. Bad is good, The way you make me feel is bad. Speed Demon has one of the coolest baselines known to man. Dirty Diana, Smooth Criminal and Leave Me Alone are all classic tracks, the rest in between could be stolen. Overall somewhere in the middle.

Excellent album