INVINCIBLE, Michael Jackson/ GREATEST HITS VOL.2, Madonna

MICHAEL JACKSON
Invincible
(Epic)

RATING: two and a half


MADONNA
Greatest Hits Vol.2
(Maverick)

RATING: four


Imagine how it would be for people in the distant future, Douglas Coupland once tongue-in-cheek posited, if they only had preserved entertainment magazines to tell us of the late 20th century. Ours would seem like such a strange world—ruled by a king named Michael Jackson who lived in Neverland and raised llamas, and a queen named Madonna who ate men for breakfast and would change into a new person every three years or so.

And the music? What about the music? When all is said and done, would anybody remember that King Michael Jackson was responsible for Thriller, the best-selling album in all of history? Would anybody remember “Beat It,” “Bad,” or “Billie Jean”? Or that Madonna would be responsible for such genre-definitive albums as Madonna, Like a Virgin, or Ray of Light?

Don’t be surprised if the image lasts longer than the music. Madonna has never made a secret of her media savvy, and her romance with the public eye has less to do with her music than who she is. Michael Jackson hasn’t put out anything impressive in a decade, will likely never again live up to the promise of Thriller, and looks all but doomed to be a ridiculous caricature of fame.

Jackson’s latest, Invincible, does nothing but confirm the once-Invincible pop star’s slide into irrelevance. Working with a slew of collaborators, Invincible is a 16-song confusion that offers no personality, no great hooks, no memorable songwriting, not even an identity. The songs here are no better than mediocre pop and R&B pieces that are only burdened by all the things that the producers tried to cram into each song.

The muddle that is the title track would tell you how chaotic the entire effort is. Opening with ominous industrial sounds that quickly degenerate into a weak pop beat, Michael’s vocals sound desperate and strained, and the music never really gets going. There’s a lot of weird background sounds that keep popping up—maybe someone’s idea of “texture”—but it all sounds out of place, and the entire song never quite falls into rhythm. There’s even a rap solo performed by someone called “Fats” that rears up in the middle of the track, but the song will be over before you figure out what it’s doing there in the first place.

This stumbling pace continues throughout the album, with such perplexing tracks as pseudo-futuristic “2000 Watts,” which sounds like a bad pastiche of his sister Janet’s “Rhythm Nation.” Then there’s “Butterflies,” which sounds like Michael trying to do—you guessed it!—a Mariah Carey. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s the stomach-turning “You Rock My World,” which is as horrible as its title suggests. It kicks off with spoken intro featuring annoying not-so-funnyman Chris Tucker engaging in some streetside babe-watching with Michael: “That girl is fine, that girl too fine! And she knows she fine, too,” babbles Chris Tucker in that deeply irritating way that he does. But irritating gives way to nauseating when Michael tries his hand at it, unconvincingly professing his love of booty: “She is banging. She looks good, you’re right.” It’s scary.

Michael crams the ballads into the latter half of the album, and a few of these songs are good enough to save Invincible from utter ruin. “You Are My Life” is a refreshing throwback to simpler pop times, but this is perhaps thanks to master songwriter Carole Bayer Sager than to Michael. Sager shares the songwriter credits with Michael and with Babyface, whose usually terrific vocals are buried in the track. This is the kind of track that reminds listeners of Jackson’s pop prowess, though you’ll have to wonder if he’d have done as well without Sager.

The heartfelt “Don’t Walk Away” is even more solid, a ballad that makes great use of Michael’s Motown roots by giving him a lot of space to emote. The music is kept even and well-paced, so even the violins don’t become histrionic. This highlight is followed by the uplifting “Cry,” a similarly spare number that recalls Michael’s best R&B ballads—that it was written by the talented R. Kelly might be telling, though. The focus that makes this song so tight is missing in the tracks that Michael wrote.
The songs for which Michael takes sole credit, “The Lost Children” and “Speechless” both start out promising, but later give in to melodrama. “Speechless,” in particular, is ruined by this lack of restraint. It starts out as a beautifully sung love song to God, beginning a capella before being joined, gently, by the swelling music. In the chorus, however, Jackson isn’t content with the slow buildup, and it quickly implodes when he calls in a choir—a choir! And then it ends with Jackson brokenly whispering, “I am lost for words/ words like, ‘I love you’.” It’s high melodrama.

In the final analysis, Invincible is pretty damn bad (and, as more than one critic has pointed out, it’s not Bad), and unable to justify the tens of millions spent on production and marketing. Jackson’s self-imposed exile inside Neverland and his growing list of weirdnesses have isolated him from the rest of the world, and from the rest of the pop world. Small wonder that Time magazine took this occasion to declare Michael Jackson “ irrelevant until proven otherwise.”

Madonna, on the other hand, has kept obsolescence at bay by keeping in step with the march of pop music. And if any proof were needed, you only have to look at Madonna’s Greatest Hits Vol.2, the second of a well-chosen catalogue of her hits over the past two decades.

GHV2 features her latter hits, and while GHV1 was interesting as an archeological artifact of her skanky 80s, it’s GHV2 that shows her truly impressive range. Although GHV2 mostly showcases Madonna’s electronica age—many of the tracks are dance edits—the 15-song selection includes the more interesting detours that Madonna took in the 90s. Her rendition of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” performed in Alan Parker’s movie version of Evita (for which she took the title role), is arguably the definitive version of the stage classic. Even “Beautiful Stranger” from the Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me soundtrack, a throwback to her more playful early work, finds its place amongst the more serious oeuvre. It certainly says something good about Madonna’s talents that neither of these diversions sound lost coming in with such dissimilar tracks as “Take a Bow” or “Bedtime Story.”

Many Madonna fans will disagree, but in my opinion, Madonna’s best work came in recent releases. Ray of Light (1998) and Music (2000) showed Madonna not following trends, but actually forerunning them. Tracks like “Ray of Light” (included in GHV2), “Don’t Tell Me,” “Music” (also included), “Frozen” (ditto), and “Runaway Lover” renewed my flagging faith in Madonna when they came out. When she sings, “music makes the people come together,” she put her money where her mouth is, and these tracks did cross genre boundaries and silencing opposition of MTV’s choice of Madonna as Artist of the Millennium.

Both the queen and the king of pop have plenty of royal retainers helping out with the music, but Madonna’s far and away the winner when it comes to picking her retinue. First she got musical genius William Orbit, then picked another winner in Mirwais Ahmadzaî. For the new studio album she’s working on now, she’s rumored to have asked Stephen Trask, responsible for the off-Broadway cult hit Hedwig and the Angry Inch, to collaborate. It promises to be interesting.
The promise to continue being interesting: in the end, that’s what Madonna can give that Michael Jackson can’t. The king of pop is dead; long live the queen.—Kristine Fonacier