This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
And Finally Beef Of The Week
CMU Beef Of The Week #30: Will.i.am v Michael Jackson
By Andy Malt | Published on Sunday 8 August 2010
Okay, that was a mildly sensationalist title for this particular beef. Will.i.am has not been trying to pick a fight with a corpse. Not as far as I know, anyway. And certainly not Michael Jackson’s corpse. He is angry about the new Michael Jackson album due to come out in October. So his beef is really with Sony Music and the Jacko estate. But that’s not as fun a title.
Although little is yet known about what will appear on the album, it has been reported that it will span unreleased songs from the mid-80s up to recording sessions in 2006, which saw one Will.i.am sitting in the producer’s chair.
The album is the first release under a seven year deal signed by the Jacko estate with Sony earlier this year, which will also see some of Jackson’s classic albums reissued, plus new greatest hits compilations and a DVD collection of all the singer’s videos released. Producer Rodney Jenkins recently revealed to Vlad TV that he has been working on the new album.
Raising expectations regards the quality of the tunes likely to appear on the new album, Frank DiLeo, Jackson’s manager for the latter half of the eighties, told Rolling Stone: “There are a couple of songs we recorded for the ‘Bad’ album that we had to cut that are just sensational”.
But the Black Eyed Peas frontman, who was one of the last producers to work with the singer before his death when he produced the 25th anniversary edition of ‘Thriller’ in 2008, has hit out at the decision to begin plundering the Jackson archives. He told Associated Press: “I don’t think that [album] should ever come out. That’s bad. [Michael] was a perfectionist and he wouldn’t have wanted it that way. How you gonna release Michael Jackson when Michael Jackson ain’t here to bless it? Now that he is not part of the process, what are they doing? Why would you put a record out like that? Because he was a friend of mine, I just think that’s disrespectful. What’s wrong with what he already contributed to the world?”
When it was pointed out that there is still a high demand amongst fans for new material from the late singer, Will.i.am added: “So what? You don’t disrespect someone when they’re gone … How much can you suck from his energy? … Freaking parasites!”
This Beef Of The Week comes from this edition of the CMU Weekly. Subscribe to the CMU Weekly here.
