MICHAEL JACKSON THE NUMBER ONE ARTIST IN WORLD?

Last summer when "The Girl Is Mine" was starting to ascend the charts—the first detonation from the mega-platinum explosion for which it was blazing a trail—a good friend of mine was swooning over the whispy ballad to her soon-to-be-formergirlfriend. As she continued to gush starry-eyed over the merits of the tune, her soon-to-be-former girlfriend curtly attempted to bring her back to reality.

"It's just an ordinary song," sniffed the highfalutin dame, whose tastes run towards Sonny Rollins. "The melody isn't that interesting, the chorus is forgettable and the production is pedestrian. I would expect that when two alleged superstars like that get together that they would come up with something slightly less feeble."

"It isn't feeble," my incensed friend said, baring her teeth. "And anyway, it's going to be number one, and who cores what you think anyway, and it's Michael Jackson and he's the best and his last album sold six million copies and he's the greatest and who cares what you think anyway and..."

Faced with such an onslaught of irrefutable logic, the offender retreated into her opinions and her jazz collection and was never heard from again. With all due deference to Paul McCartney, who was fighting Michael for the girl in the song and who at some point in his career probably inspired that kind of unbiased worship, such passion is the province (though not the exclusive turf) of the number one artist in the world. As I write this, that person happens to be Michael Jackson.

Some would shrug off the designation as the product of the feverish imaginations of record company executives who—while they were hoping for at least another Off The Wall, which sold in the area of six million units—have seen Thriller go through the proverbial roof to the tune of over ten million units, just in the U.S. of A. Thriller has almost singlehandedly pulled the record business out of a four-year slump.

By the time the second single, "Billie Jean," hit the streets, consumers were already used to advancing like lemmings to the nearest cash register clutching copies of their latest fixation. People bought the record who probably don't even own a phonograph, and have no intention of ever playing the thing. Instead, it'll hang on their walls as a testament to their Saturday Night Fever: they bought the record simply because it was there, and that ain't no flashdance!

At any rate, what artist on or near the charts is more deserving of being called number one in the world? David Bowie? He can't dance backwards, so forget it. Paul McCartney? Name his last hit record. "The Girl Is Mine" doesn't qualify. Rod Stewart? He still wears love beads in his videos. Donna Summer? She's just coming back. Diana Ross? She's just going. Need I continue? What other artist has ever had four singles from one album go top ten, only to follow it up with five singles in the top ten with his very next album? What other artist wears a jerrycurl so well? What other artist can even think of offering competition? I-rest my case...and hope Prince doesn't write me a nasty letter.

Even if none of the above matters, "The Girl Is Mine" and the album it lit the fuse for certainly inspired one of the best lines of 1982 and beyond.

"No matter how you look at it," one wag was overheard to say with a leer, '"The Girl Is Mine' means that someone in that menage a trois is having interracial sex—and 'Billie Jean' means Michael Jackson is finally getting laid."

Such risque interpretations aside, I still want to know when my favorite song from Thriller, "Baby Be Mine," is going to be a single. Michael Jackson has upped the ante. It used to be that the average superstar wasn't expected to come up with more than one or two hit singles per album. Ever since albums were designated as long playing art forms back in the '60s* a lot of good vinyl has been sacrificed to the space between the hits. Now Michael Jackson has brought back the purpose for which the IP was originally designed, and that's as a collection of hit singles. Only now the singles are all released in advance, in album form, instead of being compiled after each song has proven itself.

Of course you wouldn't expect anything less from Michael Jackson, who has never known anything but the inside of a recording studio and the inside of a bus traveling from gig to gig. Even though he's the next-toyoungest boy in Joe Jackson's minitribe (there are a total of nine singing Jacksons), Michael became the star of the group as soon as it was discovered at the age of four that he had the best voice. About five years later, the Jackson Five were discovered on the road by Gladys Knight and Bobby Taylor of Bobby Taylor And The Vancouvers. Both acts were signed to Motown at the time, and being faithful employees, immediately took the word to their boss Berry Gordy. The rest is history.

If the Jackson Five hadn't actually existed, someone would have invented them. Indeed, some people tried. In the '60s, there were the Five Stairsteps, another family of talented teens and sub-teens who had the misfortune of not being able to hook into a hit machine like Motown. When the Jacksons were at the peak of their career at Motown, the Osmonds came along and with "One Bad Apple" tried to muscle in on their territory. The eagerness with which the Osmonds' pale imitation was lapped up makes you wonder how much the establishment wanted the Five replaced as the leading pre-teen idols. About the same time as the Osmonds, the Sylvers tried to grab their share of screams, and right now a young group called the New Edition is making a career recycling the J-5. But nothing since the Beatles has come close to creating the mass hysteria spawned by the Jackson Five's live appearances.

For Michael Jackson, sending the little girls into a swoon came as naturally as walking. He'd been doing it almost since he learned how to walk—and the transition from anonymous nightclubs to The Ed Sullivan Show was just a matter of getting the right records.

Motown saw to that. The Jackson Five had four consecutive Number One singles after they jumped aboard Berry Gordy's hit train. They were "ABC," "The Love You Save," "I Want You Back" and "I'll Be There"—and from that point on, there was no looking back. With such a large portion of the record buying audience consisting of teenage girls, it's amazing that the record companies didn't try to clone as many imitators as they could find. But the Jackson Five were naturals, you could hear it in their records and you could see it on stage. Michael Jackson was born a star. And it's one thing to imitate his pubescent screech in the studio, but can Donny Osmond float backwards?

When the Jackson Five decided to leave Motown for the bigger bang of CBS, the conventional wisdom was that they had seen their finest hour.

Motown had the machine, the stable of writers and producers who seemingly spent 24 hours a day cranking out tunes. Motown had the system. They would cut and re-cut a song with different arrangements, different mixes, different production styles and even different artists until the "Quality Control" department decided it was fit • for public consumption. Motown had Berry Gordy, perhaps the best A&R man of the last 25 years. What Motown didn't have after 1976 was the Jackson Five.

As Michael Jackson told me shortly after defecting to CBS, "I've been writing since I was 12 but I never got any of my songs recorded at Motown, because it wasn't in my contract. It's a matter of contracts and publishing— they can give you freedom to write, and we didn't have that before. We have over 100 songs already written. I think if you're not happy with a certain company, then you should move to another one. It's like going to school, if you're not happy with one school then you move to another one. We weren't fighting Motown, we're not arguing or hating one another, and we're still friends."

There were only two producers at the time whose system closely resembled Motown's; Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff's Philadelphia International monolith. Like Berry Gordy, they kept a group of writers and producers busy night and day.

After one album with Gamble-Huff, Jackie Jackson confided in me that "they're the best. They don't get uptight if you don't like their songs and they don't try to tell you how to sing. How can a producer tell an artist how to sing? Some producers sit in the middle of the board and try to play the role of the big producer and don't let the artist touch anything. Gamble and Huff sit off to the side and they let you work the board and they tell you anything you want to know about production. That's the only way you're gonna learn, by asking the best."

After two albums with the best, the Jacksons decided it was time to take what they had learned from them and apply them to their own material. The conventional wisdom was proving correct as they had been unable to come close to what they had left behind at Motown. The single that put them back in the big time, "Shake Your Body Down To The Ground," was a shaking, shimmying dance groove that reached back to party poppers like "Dancing Machine." But this time it was all Jacksons, as it was written by Randy and Michael and performed by the Jacksons with a little help from their friends. The groove they found in their own material and production set the stage for Michael's solo album domination. "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough," "Rock With You," "Beat It" and "Billie Jean" are all the legitimate offspring of "Shake Your Body," and there isn't any doubt that, all sentiment aside, Michael Jackson's solo work -surpasses everything he did with the Jackson Five and the Jacksons.

The most provocative question of the decade is, of course, how long Michael Jackson will stay a Jackson. The obvious answer is forever, after all he was a Jackson before he was a Jackson Five and he has confessed that he wished "Jermaine was still with the group." So we know that, in his own mind, blood is thicker than mud—and it may even be thicker than money. If he can keep making platinum albums with his brothers and mega-platinum albums by himself, who cares if certain nefarious characters in Hollywood keep whispering in his ear every time they get close enough that he should forget about the group and concentrate on his own albums and on his movie career (which keeps getting put on hold, because between servicing two recording careers, doing the occasional multimillion dollar tour, writing and producing the occasional hit for other stars in need of young genius and playing with the pets on his pdlatial estate, he has no time for a career as a movie star)?

Yet he did tell me back in '76 that "one day we'll stop touring. I don't know how long we'll keep singing but we don't want to sing forever. I don't want to sing all my life, I want to go into acting."

Who says it isn't possible to maintain a full career as both a singer and an actor? It never stopped Elvis Presley, and he couldn't even dance backwards. Some people would also say he couldn't act. We still don't know if Michael Jackson can act; his debut in The Wiz as a chocolate scarecrow didn't exactly give him an opportunity to bare his emotional depth, and his two videos, "Billie Jean" and "Beat It," the first of which has him ending up in bed with himself, the second of which has him getting out of bed to show a bunch of hoods how to beat it (heh heh), both prove that he can not only float backward, but that he also has four-way hips. But will it get him an Oscar in some future fantasy?

As Michael Jackson sees it, "When you're acting, you're just being yourself. And who can teach you to be yourself? You can't teach a person how to act, just like you can't teach a person how to sing, it's inside of you. Singing is a form of acting, the way you do certain lines, the feeling, you can call it acting."

So if Michael's singing career is any indication of his future in cinemascope and technicolor, he can start making space in his video game room for that little golden statue.

In the meantime, when are they gonna release "Baby Be Mine"? I don't think five top ten singles from one album is too much to expect from the number one artist in the world!