It might be that Michael Jackson's running feud with Sony Music has as much to do with his attempts to release a charity record than the major’s performance in marketing ‘Invincible’. Last Autumn during post-Sep 11 hysteria, Jackson announced he was organising a charity single called ‘What More Can I Give’. The ‘We Are the World’-type song, featuring the vocal talents of Mariah Carey, Ricky Martin, Usher, Shakira and Nick Carter amongst others, was set to raise $50 million for victims of terrorist attacks. Eight months after Jackson announced the record was ready for release some of the reasons it never hit the record shops are coming to light.
The LA Times has reported that the project was abandoned after label bosses discovered that the song's executive producer, Marc Schaffel, had a background in porn, a fact which caused McDonald's to back out of an agreement to sell the single in its restaurants. Some sources close to the project have said it was the Jackson camp who got cold feet after discovering some of the films on Schaffel’s CV. They say having Jackson linked with porn would have been disastrous for his already troubled image. "One press organisation, an entertainment television show, found out about it, and they threatened to expose it," a source close to Jackson told reporters. "It got stopped because it was made clear that they would never get to work with Jackson again. But then it was like, ugh, we don't want to work with it anymore, because it would be an uphill battle and it was not part of the bargain." The Jackson camp tried to sack Schaffel from the project, but he argued that he owned the song and therefore couldn’t be fired. While Jackson claims ownership of the song the tapes of both the recording and the video are with Schaffel so the project could not develop further.
But Schaffel blames Sony for the delays. While he agrees his porn past caused some problems (even though, he is keen to add, his porn work is very much softcore) he insists he was never fired and that the delays were caused by Sony. He told MTV in the US: "Sony didn't want the single to take away from the release of ‘Invincible’. So they wanted to make sure it didn't come out at the same time. After that, they had other excuses. I don't think the porn was a legit excuse. But let's say that it is. No one picketed, and I still get hundreds of e-mails from fans wanting to know what the problem is. No one cares what I did before."
The extent of the major’s involvement is unclear – some insiders deny that Sony every agreed to release the single at all and rumours that Zomba label Jive had expressed an interest in putting it out suggests Jackson was offering the track around. But Schaffel maintains that despite the lack of a formal agreement, Sony was involved, since many of the artists participating were signed to Sony labels Columbia and Epic. "Do you think any of these major artists would have stopped what they were doing and recorded their parts without Sony authorisation?” he continued, “They can't do anything without an OK from Tommy Mottola."
McDonalds meanwhile deny every agreeing to sell the single at all – they discussed it with Jackon’s people but no agreement was reached for ‘timing, distribution and cost’ reasons. Sony has made no official comment.