Michael Jackson has managed to secure a deal with Sony worth $200million. If only he had managed to pull off such a coup when he was alive!
I have always been a touch uncomfortable with the sale of musicians after their death. Not the continued playing of their songs, because good music should live on, but the constant digging up of ‘unreleased’ material. Is there perhaps a reason why the material is unreleased?
Sony are planning to re-release the three good MJ albums, Off The Wall, Thriller and Bad. There will also be a DVD of his music videos, a video game (?), and apparently, enough live concert footage to release two albums. In my opinion, the live album thing will go on and on. A goldmine like Jackson will make money for anyone with a dusty VHS in the loft. But this is a bad thing for the memory of a once great star.
Since Freddie Mercury died, Brian May and Roger Taylor have pissed on his grave every Christmas since. The third Greatest Hits album was an appalling concoction of rejected studio stuff, with new versions of songs that appeared on Mercury’s 1985 solo album Mr Bad Guy. Would Freddie have wanted us to remember him that way? Or would he have preferred us to remember the good stuff? I am sure that John Lennon would not have wanted 'Free As A Bird' releasing, otherwise he would have released it when he was alive. Kurt Cobain certainly would not have wanted his wife to soil his memory by releasing everything with his name on it.
The old cliché about death being a good career move is actually spot on. The movie Bring Me The Head Of Mavis Davis exploits this idea by suggesting that a struggling singer fakes her death. The week after Jackson’s death saw the hit parade fill up with his songs, so death is actually an asset. This weeks chart has entries from Johnny Cash, Dean Martin, Matt Monroe, Gracie Fields and Jimi Hendrix. I really don’t want to hear a ‘new’ Hendrix album, I bought a CD a few years ago from one of those record labels that release out of copyright shit, and it was just noise.
But it was the noise of a dead rock star, so obviously worthy of sale.
