Michael Jackson is one of those characters in the music industry everyone has an opinion on. However, whatever one thinks about his personal life and choices, his music still manages to stand strong. His album Dangerous (1991) can be considered a classic ’90s cd. (I was almost ten years old, so truthfully this is the first album by him I legitimately remember.)
Going back and listening to Why you wanna trip on me, it is hard not to look at this as an early condemnation of the American cult of celebrity. It literally asks why spend so much time on one person when there are so many more important things going on in the world. In the here and now, this is still a question that bears asking. This song also could be considered his motto for the rest of the nineties. In much the same vein, Black or White points to the running issue of racial relations in America. Heal the World is an appeal for change in the world. In our current age, some of the problems have changed, but a good number of them remain the same. Before you think Dangerous is one long socio-politic statement, let us look at a couple of other well known songs.
Remember the Time is perhaps the most well known song off of the album. (I personally remember being fascinated by the video once I saw it with the costumes and the choreography.) The entire song turns on a relationship which apparently started out hot and heavy only to die for reasons undisclosed to the listener. Remember the Time brings the listener back to what Michael Jackson seemed to do best throughout the ’80s and ’90s: sing relationship songs. One cannot really call them all love songs because the songs go from infatuation to frustration, all the stages of relationships…making it easier to classify them as songs about relationships than really love songs. Dangerous boasts several relationship songs: Remember the Time, In the Closet, She Drives Me Wild, Who is it, and the title track Dangerous.
