“He was a great motivator – he would motivate me, and part of that was this has to out-sell Thriller and things like that.” Bottrell worked closely with keyboardist John Barnes and Jackson at his home studio creating demos for Bad. “There was a lot of pressure on Michael,” producer and songwriter Bill Bottrell tells Rolling Stone. In Spike Lee’s 2012 Bad documentary, his collaborators remember him writing “100 million” on a mirror to keep his album-sales goal front and center.
But even during the era of super-sales, one LP flying off the shelves was not a guarantee of an equally explosive follow-up – take the example of Fleetwood Mac, who famously dominated with Rumours and then shipped several million fewer units of Tusk. Jackson had a strong tailwind propelling him into Bad: Its predecessor Thriller featured seven Top 10 hits and went on to become the best-selling album of all time. To achieve five Number Ones, he suggests an artist requires three key ingredients: “momentum, clarity of vision and chemistry with your collaborators.” With these elements in mind, we look back at Bad in honor of its 30th anniversary.Įvery Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best Anokute – now Senior VP of A&R for Epic Records – helped sign Perry to Capitol a decade ago, and he served as an A&R on Teenage Dream.
Only one other artist has ever matched Jackson’s feat: Katy Perry, who scored her fifth Number One from Teenage Dream when “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” topped the Hot 100 in 2011.
“I never imagined an artist could do that kind of magic.” “It was godlike to watch Michael Jackson’s videos and hear those songs,” he says. When Michael Jackson released Bad in 1987, he accomplished something astonishing: One after another, the singles “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” “Bad,” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “Man in the Mirror” and “Dirty Diana” shot to the top of the Hot 100.Ĭhris Anokute, then a kid in New Jersey, was wowed by the hit parade.
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