No matter how talented a musician is, song ideas can still feel like they come out of thin air. Countless musicians have said that songwriting is a supernatural force. There’s music theory to consider, yes, but there’s an “x” factor that no one has been able to pin down just yet. Michael Jackson certainly believed in divine inspiration. In fact, he believed in it so much that he never wanted to miss a day in the studio.
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Michael Jackson’s Prince Rivalry and the Reason He Never Wanted to Miss a Day in the Studio
Whether you attribute it to a divine source or not, it’s a proven fact that if you don’t act on your creative ambitions, someone else is bound to do it. There’s nothing really new under the sun, and similar ideas pop up all the time. Because of this, you have to strike while the inspiration is there. This approach is one that Jackson lived out to the fullest.
Jackson never wanted to pass up a good idea. If he did, he worried that God would turn around and give that idea away to one of his biggest rivals: Prince.
There are fan-proliferated stories of Jackson going into the studio in the middle of the night to lay down an idea before it slipped into someone else’s hands. Another anecdote comes from the This Is It Tour. Jackson would come in with a new request every day while working on the show, shortly before his death. While the asks just got bigger and bigger, his team asked him to temper his expectations.
“You don’t understand — if I’m not there to receive these ideas, God might give them to Prince,” Jackson reportedly said.
Michael Jackson and Prince’s Beef
The beef between Jackson and Prince went on for decades. As two of the most prominent black male artists of the 1980s, they faced some natural public competition. In actuality, their music wasn’t very similar. Sure, they both had soulful voices and dance-floor-ready songs, but their thematic differences put them in separate leagues—still, a rivalry formed.
“I don’t like to be compared to Prince at all,” Jackson once said. “I have proven myself since I was real little. He feels like he’s my opponent. I hope he changes because, boy, he’s gonna get hurt. He’s the type that might commit suicide or something.”
They were harsh words, but Jackson said they were spurred on by “rude” behavior from Prince. But bad behavior isn’t the only culprit behind this beef. Prince also repeatedly declined Jackson’s offers to collaborate, particularly on “We Are the World” and “Bad.”
“Michael [Jackson] coming to Prince and wanting him to do ‘Bad’, that really pissed him off,” Prince’s tour manager, Allan Leeds, once said. “Prince was like, ‘Oh, he wants me to punk out on record. Who does he think I am, crazy?’ He probably couldn’t get outside himself enough to realise that it was the kind of thing that probably could have benefited both of them.”
We have to agree with Leeds. A collaboration between these two artists would’ve been the duet of the century. But competition got in the way of what could’ve been.
(Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage)
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