JACKSON COMEBACK

Oh, rotten plans from Sony-BMG who are hoping to try and rebuild Michael Jackson's reputation as "The Guy Who Made Thriller" in place of his current standing as "a one-man freakshow who if he doesn't actually fiddle with kids certainly behaves like someone who might."

And how do they plan to do this? By releasing a single a week from him every week for the next five months.

Now, the weakness of this idea - and it's inability to capture any sort of public imagination - is that we read a lot of music-related stuff and only found about it via the Sunday Herald and, more crucially, we'd not even have known about it if Gennaro Castaldo, our favourite HMV spokesperson, hadn't offered his opinion ("In the case of Elvis, the first single got to number one because it was released in January, which is traditionally a time of low record sales, but they may have left it a little late with Jackson. Next week he’ll have to compete with some pretty strong releases, particularly Madonna’s new single, Sorry.")

What makes it even more of a bad idea is that they're kicking off by re-releasing Thriller as a single, which could just about work - it was a mighty fine single - but then working their way through subsequent singles chronologically. In other words, in a couple of months time they'll be on Earth Song, or one of the McCartney duets, or Blood on the Dancefloor. Which means, if the sales are high enough to register, people might wander around next week going "can't stop this driller! thriller! tonight!" and thinking "actually, Jackson's pretty good, I wonder why I stopped listening to him"; a dozen days later there's going to be the song about how it really doesn't matter if you're black or white coming out the radio and they'll be thinking "oh, yes, I remember now - he went shit really quickly."

If Sony had any brains, they'd have started with Blood on the Dancefloor, and gone in reverse chronological order, so the campaign would have ended on a high point. Instead, we're going to have to endure a former giant crumbling on fast-forward.

music gennaro castaldo sony bmg michael jackson