His estate has responded to the debate over their authenticity.
Even 13 years after his death, Michael Jackson is still a lightning rod for controversy.
Three of Jackson’s songs have been removed from streaming services including Spotify and Apple Music after years of speculation about whether the vocals on those tracks were actually provided by someone other than the King of Pop. The songs — “Monster,” “Breaking News,” and “Keep Your Head Up” — originally appeared on the 2010 album Michael, which was released posthumously and featured recordings Jackson made in the years leading up to his 2009 death.
The drama over these songs specifically dates back to 2011, when a Michael Jackson soundalike named Jason Malachi claimed credit for the vocals. “I guess it’s time to confess,” Malachi wrote on Facebook, adding that he “had [an] agreement with the record company, but now the cat is out of the bag.”
Malachi’s manager later said the Facebook post was faked and the allegations weren’t true, but the claim nonetheless inspired a 2014 lawsuit, which argued Sony Music knew the vocals weren’t actually Jackson’s and had nonetheless promoted them as such. In 2018, a court ruled in favor of Sony, which had previously put out a statement saying the company had “complete confidence in the results of our extensive research as well as the accounts of those who were in the studio with Michael that the vocals on the new album are his own.”
Even so, the Michael album faced disapproval from others, including Jackson’s own father, Joe, who lambasted the record company for putting out music that the notorious perfectionist hadn’t approved for release himself.
“If Michael had wanted this music released he would have done so before his death,” Joe Jackson’s attorney said in a 2010 statement. “The songs which are being released on the new Michael Jackson album were unfinished and incomplete tracks that Michael said over and over many times he never wanted released. We should honor Michael Jackson’s wishes.”
As we know, they were released anyway, which eventually led to the uproar about whether all of the vocals were actually Jackson’s. And that brings us to this week, when Sony Music and Jackson’s estate officially confirmed that the three songs have been pulled from streaming.
But here’s the interesting caveat: They say the removal is not because the tracks are inauthentic, but because the debate surrounding them is a distraction from other Jackson-centric projects.
“The Estate of Michael Jackson and Sony Music decided to remove the tracks ‘Breaking News,’ ‘Monster’ and ‘Keep Your Head Up’ as the simplest and best way to move beyond the conversation associated with these tracks once and for all,” the statement said. “The focus remains where it belongs — on the exciting new and existing projects celebrating Michael Jackson’s legacy. … Nothing should be read into this action concerning the authenticity of the tracks — it is just time to move beyond the distraction surrounding them.”
This is, of course, hardly the most explosive controversy to surround Jackson since he died. Accusations of his habitual, sexual abuse of children remain a troublesome stain on the pop superstar’s legacy, and they were perhaps most cogently presented in the 2019 HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, in which his alleged victims spoke in excruciating detail about how they were groomed and taken advantage of by the singer they idolized.
