37
“ I really got to know him later, on the set of The Wiz,” he confided in an interview that has stayed etched in the memory of soul music fans everywhere. That’ s where the nickname that would stick with Michael for the rest of his life was born: Jones called him“ Smelly”— because the young man, too shy to say“ funky,” preferred to say“ smelly jelly.” A childlike modesty in a boy who was already famous the world over.
Because this is the original paradox of Michael Jackson: he never had a childhood, and he spent the rest of his life trying to get one back. The private amusement park at Neverland, the exotic animals, the sleepovers with children who weren’ t his own— his defenders have read all of this as the pathetic, touching attempt of a man trying to reclaim what had been stolen from him. His critics, meanwhile, have seen in it the early signs of a carefully orchestrated system of predation. Both readings have coexisted for more than thirty years now, and neither has ever fully won out over the other..
Building the“ King of Pop”
In 1979, Michael was twenty years old. He released Off the Wall, his first truly adult album, produced by Quincy Jones. The record became the first solo album in history to place four singles in the US top 10. But according to Jones himself, no one at the time imagined the scale of what was coming next.“ Like everyone else, I always go into the studio with the intention of making a number-one record, but anyone who tells you they knew in advance that a record was going to be a hit is a flat-out liar,” he explained decades later, recalling the genesis of Thriller.“ You have to leave space for God to walk into the room.”
Flashmag! Edition 174 Juillet 2026
That space— whether filled by God, by chance, or by the stubborn genius of a twenty-four-year-old— was filled in 1982. Thriller came out in the middle of an American recession, at a time when the record industry itself was wondering whether it would survive. Quincy Jones would later say he listened to more than eight hundred songs before settling on the album’ s nine tracks. Sound engineer Bruce Swedien, for his part, told one of the most delightful stories of that whole saga: the night before a recording session with a seventy-piece orchestra, Quincy Jones still hadn’ t written a single note of the arrangement.
37