Akon regrets the stalled Jackson duet

It seemed a great plan, bringing together Michael Jackson and Akon, uniting two of music's most notable bad-story magnets. And yet the plans have crumbled to dust. Why?

Some suggest that it could be down to the Jackson team's inability to see any project whatsoever past the initial press release stage. Others, that Jackson's court problems with that Sheik had scuppered everything. Nobody, though, seems to think that the disappearance of the scheme could be down to Akon.


Apart from Akon, of course. He killed the track:

He tells British newspaper The Daily Star, "Musically we were on the same level and we wanted it to be special. We wanted it so that when people got my album, it was something that was never heard. But the leak stopped those plans. We will be doing more things together in the future, though."

Well, yes, there'd be every chance that a Jackson-Akon duet might be a track on an album that would never be heard; it is a prospect that was probably on the designer's mind when they came up with the 'skip entire track' function. But Akon seems to be hinting that he didn't bother to put the song on the record because it had been leaked online, doesn't he?

That kind of makes sense - if you're really hoping that the 'features Michael Jackson' sticker on the jewel case is going to add sales, 'features clunking, woefully mismatched pairing of clapped-out former star and over-rated poor judge of age that you'll have already heard' isn't going to have the same allure, is it?