You may as well know now that this will be my final contractual obligation record; until the next one. I’m not sure how many of them I have to put out to cover $100 million of personal debt, but it’s gotta be at least two, doesn’t it? I don’t know – I was never very good with figures anyway, I always just wanted to play!When I died, I died with a lot of hidden gems buried all over the world. Hey silly – it wasn’t like I spent the last decade of my life choking out duck butter and weeping into gold sarcophagi! I was really embarked on a quest to find ways to change music all over again. If only that goshdarned music industry had allowed me to put out a record, instead of thwarting me by demanding that I first have a dozen finished songs.I told ‘em I did. There was, uh, that song I wrote in Vegas with the playboy son of an old millionaire friend, about how, like, everyone’s always talking about Michael Jackson and that’s unfair, called “Breaking News”. There was the time I sung over a Yellow Magic Orchestra sample for no particular reason. There was that outtake from the Thriller sessions that had been kicking around for 28 years. And some of the studio floor sweepings from Dangerous. For the rest, I told my manager “I only want to work with today’s freshest talent”. So he found me 50 Cent – not many people know about this young rapper yet, but he is definitely coming up in the world. He told me he was once a gangster. I said “So was I – haven’t you seen the “Smooth Criminal” video?” We made this track together called “Monster”. It’s about what a pain in the trouser-area it really is being Michael Jackson, and 50 Cent raps on it like his cheeks are stuffed with acorns. Which in turn gave me the idea to work with Akon. Lovely guy. Really on the cutting edge of ringtone. And Lenny Kravitz? Not only is he at the cutting edge of what today’s 16 year olds are digging, he’s also the natural successor to Jimi Hendrix. It’s not like this is all just crap that they found down the back of the couch. The fact that the first three tracks are “A Polo Mint”, “A Pound Coin” and “The Remote Control” is pure coincidence.All of these have now been lovingly finished by the people at Sony’s best studio: Sonic Chop Shops R US, by adding a tonne of airbrush-style reverb to every track, to give it that lack of definition that has become the hallmark of posthumous records everywhere. The choirs were my idea, though. There’s nothing like the moment when a choir kicks in three minutes into a six minute track, and you know that everything is going up and up and up from here. Weeee!I know what you’re thinking: is this a better album than Tupac’s Loyal To The Game, or indeed Pac’s Life? Well yes. Yes it is. Those were posthumous records four and five, whereas we only had people who worked directly with me, or at least met me once in a lift. All were issued with strict instructions to “imagine how Michael might have finished the track based on the conversations we’d had”. Can you imagine? All these people pretending to be Michael is a great first start in making the world a better place! Someone even found the note where I said that I wanted the Akon one to be the first single.You know, when I look down from heaven, I see a lot of music industry lawyers with tears welling up in their eyes because they’re so happy for me and my projected first week sales of 340, 000 units. That, to me, says ‘mission accomplished’. In my life, I liked to buy any old crap, and it’s so heartening to see that my fans are all continuing with that legacy.THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN WHILE THE SPIRIT OF MICHAEL JACKSON WAS POSSESSING GAVIN HAYNES
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