No album in pop history had a harder assignment than this one. Thriller had sold roughly 30 million copies in the United States alone, spent 37 weeks at Number One, and won a record eight Grammys in a single night. Whatever Michael Jackson did next was going to be measured against the best-selling album ever made — by definition, a losing proposition. Bad, released August 31, 1987, was Jackson's answer: two and a half years in the studio with Quincy Jones for the third and final time, nearly every song written and co-produced by Jackson himself, and a title track defiant enough to double as a mission statement. It debuted at Number One, stayed there for six weeks, and became the first album in history to generate five different Number One singles. By almost any reasonable standard, it was a triumph. By the standard Thriller had set, it could only ever be the follow-up.
“The strongest and most consistent black pop album in years.”
The Impossible Job: Following Thriller
Jackson and Quincy Jones began work on the follow-up in January 1985, back at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles, the same rooms where Thriller had been built. There was no illusion about the pressure: Epic Records was banking on another Thriller-sized event, and the music press had already started keeping score before a single track was finished. Jackson's response was to write almost the entire album himself. Where Off the Wall leaned on Rod Temperton and outside songwriters, and Thriller mixed Jackson's writing with Temperton's, Bad is credited to Jackson alone on nine of its eleven songs — a deliberate assertion that the sound of the decade's biggest album was his, not a collaborator's.
The title track set the tone before the album even had a tracklist. Built around a defiant, almost confrontational lyric, "Bad" was Jackson's answer to years of being characterized in the press as shy, fragile, eccentric — a public persona increasingly at odds with a 29-year-old who had just sold tens of millions of records. Quincy Jones, producing Jackson for the third and last time, later described the two years of sessions as some of the most exacting of his career: multiple full re-recordings of vocals, arrangements built and discarded, and a perfectionism that occasionally tested even Jones's famous patience.
What emerged from those two and a half years was, in commercial terms, almost impossible to overstate. Bad debuted at Number One on the Billboard 200 and held the position for six consecutive weeks. It sold an estimated 2.25 million copies in its first week alone, making it the fastest-selling album in American history at the time of release, and went on to become the best-selling album in the world in both 1987 and 1988.
The Duet That Never Happened
Before Jackson recorded the title track alone, he wanted a duet partner who could match his energy line for line, and he asked Prince. The two biggest pop stars of the decade in the same booth, trading verses on a song called "Bad," should have been an event in itself. It never happened. Prince turned it down flat, and a decade later he explained exactly why to Chris Rock.
“The first line in that song is, ‘your butt is mine.’ Who gonna sing that to whom? Because you sure ain't singing it to me, and I sure ain't singing it to you. So right there we got a problem.”
Quincy Jones later offered a gentler version of the same story, recalling Prince telling him the song simply didn't need him — it would be a hit regardless. Prince did counter-offer a song of his own, "Wouldn't You Love to Love Me?", which Jackson ultimately passed on. Decades later, Prince's percussionist Sheila E. confirmed that Prince had actually gone into the studio and recorded his own solo version of "Bad" out of curiosity, found it "so funky" his engineers were desperate for Jackson to hear it — and then erased the entire recording before anyone else could.
Martin Scorsese's 18-minute short film for the title track, co-starring a then-unknown Wesley Snipes, was loosely inspired by the real case of Edmund Perry.
Scorsese, Snipes, and an 18-Minute Short Film
For the title track's video, Jackson didn't hire a music-video director — he hired Martin Scorsese, fresh off The Color of Money, and Scorsese brought in his Color of Money screenwriter, novelist Richard Price, to build a real narrative rather than a performance clip. The result ran a full 18 minutes: Jackson plays Darryl, a prep-school student who returns to his old Brooklyn neighborhood on break and is confronted by his former gang, led by Wesley Snipes in one of his first screen roles, for having left them behind. The confrontation resolves into the song, shot in black-and-white until it explodes into color at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station — six weeks of filming, in the winter of 1986, staged as a direct homage to the "Cool" sequence from West Side Story.
The story wasn't invented from nothing. Price and Scorsese drew on the real 1985 case of Edmund Perry, a Harlem teenager and prep-school graduate who was shot and killed by a plainclothes police officer days after his graduation — a case that had gripped New York with exactly the questions the film dramatizes, about what a young Black man owes the neighborhood he's left and the world he's entering. When Jackson died in 2009, Scorsese looked back on the shoot with something close to awe at what he'd been given to direct.
“When we worked together on ‘Bad,’ I was in awe of his absolute mastery of movement on the one hand and of the music on the other.”
The Song Michael Didn't Write
Of the album's eleven tracks, only two weren't written solely by Jackson — and one of them became the record's most enduring song. Songwriter Glen Ballard had already pitched Jackson roughly ten songs over the course of the Bad sessions; every one had been turned down. On a Thursday night with the album nearly finished, his writing partner Siedah Garrett called and told him they needed to write one more for Michael. They had a title Garrett had been carrying around for about a year — "Man in the Mirror" — and finished the song in about an hour at Ballard's Rhodes piano.
Garrett brought the demo to Quincy Jones's house the next day. Jones liked it immediately, but he and Garrett both knew the odds: two and a half years into the sessions, Jackson hadn't recorded a single song on the album he hadn't written himself. He heard it anyway, and connected with it immediately — a rare exception on a record otherwise built as a statement of total authorship.
“I screamed. Couldn't believe it,” Garrett later said of learning Jackson wanted to record it. During the vocal sessions, Jackson asked her to stay in the booth with him — “I want to sing it like you,” he told her, chasing the exact phrasing of her original demo. The finished song, with its call for self-examination before social change, became the fourth of the album's five consecutive Number One singles and, for many listeners, its emotional center.
Essential Tracks
“Bad”
The title track had to work as both a song and a thesis statement, and it manages both. Built on a stuttering bassline and a chorus engineered for stadiums, "Bad" is Jackson at his most percussive and least melodic — a deliberate departure from the smoother funk of Off the Wall and Thriller, written to sound like a challenge rather than an invitation.
The song exists in two very different forms: the radio single, and the 18-minute Scorsese short film that reframes it as the climax of a story about identity and belonging. Heard on its own, it's a hard, minimal groove. Seen in context, it's the payoff to one of the most unlikely director-artist pairings in music video history.
It spent two weeks at Number One as the second of the album's five consecutive chart-topping singles, proving that Jackson's post-Thriller pivot toward harder, sparer production hadn't cost him the audience Off the Wall and Thriller had built.
“Man in the Mirror”
The one song on the album Jackson didn't write is also the one that has aged into his most quoted. Siedah Garrett and Glen Ballard built it around a simple, almost sermon-like structure — verses of quiet self-examination building into a gospel-choir climax — and Jackson's vocal performance matches that architecture exactly, starting restrained and ending in full-throated conviction.
The video breaks from every other clip on the album by never showing Jackson performing at all. Instead it cuts together archival footage — civil rights marches, famine relief, Reagan and Gorbachev — turning the song's call for personal accountability into a montage of the decade's biggest unresolved problems.
It became the fourth of Bad's five consecutive Number One singles and has outlived the rest of the album's charting singles as Jackson's most frequently invoked song in tributes, eulogies, and benefit performances — the rare hit written by someone else that came to define how the writer of everything else on the record was remembered.
“Smooth Criminal”
Built on a relentless, almost mechanical rhythm track, "Smooth Criminal" is the album's most purely choreographic song — the one written with a specific piece of physical performance already in mind. Jackson conceived the track's signature forward lean specifically for the accompanying film sequence, and had shoes custom-designed with a peg-and-slot mechanism in the heel to make the gravity-defying angle physically possible on stage.
Unlike the album's other singles, "Smooth Criminal" didn't reach Number One — it peaked at #7, the lone charting single from Bad to fall short of the top spot. That made it, paradoxically, the song most responsible for the "only five" asterisk on Jackson's chart record, and the clearest sign of how absurdly high the bar had been set by the rest of the album.
Its full choreography and story arrived later, as the centerpiece of 1988's Moonwalker film, but the song itself — and that lean — became one of the most imitated and referenced pieces of Jackson's catalog, sampled and covered for decades after.
A rare Jackson video that never shows him performing, cutting archival footage of the decade's crises into the song's call for self-examination.
Five in a Row, and a Grammy Shutout
"I Just Can't Stop Loving You," "Bad," "The Way You Make Me Feel," "Man in the Mirror," and "Dirty Diana" — released across more than a year, from late 1987 through July 1988 — each reached Number One on the Hot 100 in sequence, making Jackson the first artist in history to generate five chart-topping singles from a single album. No one has matched it since.
None of it satisfied the Recording Academy. At the February 1988 Grammy Awards, Jackson picked up four nominations — Album of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Performance, Best R&B Vocal Performance, and Best Engineered Recording — and won exactly none of them, with Album of the Year going to U2's The Joshua Tree. Four years after sweeping a record eight Grammys for Thriller, the shutout for an album that outsold nearly everything else released in 1987 was widely read at the time as "Jackson fatigue" — a voting body reluctant to hand the same artist the industry's top honor in back-to-back cycles, whatever the commercial numbers said.
That gap between commercial dominance and industry recognition became the defining story of Bad's reception. Retrospective critics have been kinder than the Grammy voters were — Robert Christgau's "strongest and most consistent black pop album in years" verdict came with real reservations about the record's moralizing lyrics, but it also placed Bad's craft and consistency above nearly everything else on pop radio that year.
The Bad World Tour
Bad also launched Jackson's first tour as a solo headliner. Opening in Tokyo on September 12, 1987, and running until January 1989, the Bad World Tour played 123 shows across 15 countries to an estimated 4.4 million people, grossing $125 million — a total Guinness World Records recognized as the largest-grossing tour in history at the time. A run of dates at London's Wembley Stadium alone drew 504,000 fans, including a night attended by Diana, Princess of Wales.
At the tour's close, Jackson announced it would be his last, saying he intended to shift his focus to filmmaking. It wasn't — the Dangerous and HIStory tours followed in the 1990s — but as a statement of scale, the Bad World Tour set the template for what a global pop stadium tour was supposed to look like for the next two decades.
A Quarter-Century Later, a Second Look
It took twenty-five years for the album to get the archival treatment its commercial numbers had always justified. Director Spike Lee — who had worked with Jackson on the "They Don't Care About Us" video years earlier — spent the album's 25th anniversary combing through vault footage and conducting more than forty interviews with the choreographers, musicians, and engineers who built the record, released as the documentary Bad25 in 2012 alongside an expanded reissue of the album itself.
The documentary made the case, essentially, for treating Bad as more than a Thriller footnote — as a record whose five Number One singles, whose Scorsese short film, and whose stadium tour would have defined any other artist's entire career, and that only looked like a disappointment because of what had come immediately before it.
“The closest thing to genius here is the CD-only ‘Leave Me Alone,’ which isn't all that close.”