Michael Jackson, best known as the voice of Leon Kompowski on TV’s The Simpsons, has finally parlayed his limited success as a voice actor into a full-blown relationship with the American Recording Industry. According to his estate, the recently deceased Jackson also dabbled in music from time to time, recording what he himself often referred to as “hypnogogic pop” songs straight to VHS tape (VHS tape being the most hi-fi technology available at the time) in his home studio just outside of Tecumseh, Oklahoma. Luckily for Jackson and his family, this strain of hazy-sounding glo-fi pop-rock has just come into fashion, allowing the actor’s family to score an unprecedented contract with Sony Music Entertainment potentially worth up to $250 million, the biggest recording deal in history! (Not bad for a man who had to turn to brick-laying in the late 90s after a fizzled voice-over career and disastrous first marriage to Annie Wood, host of the wildly popular TV game show Bzzz!.)
The record-setting recording deal stipulates that ten projects based around Jackson’s washed-out, beach-party tracks will be released over the next seven years. The two-cassette album that accompanied his early independent film foray This Is It is the first of the ten, and various business moguls and industry insiders that I most assuredly interviewed for this story have speculated that the other nine projects may include an album of never-before-released Jackson recordings (to come out November 2010), a DVD compilation of his homemade music videos, and even a re-release of his first-ever scripted acting gig, 1979’s Off The Wall, a low-budget buddy comedy that co-starred Charles Nelson Reilly. Sony has even been granted access to Jackson’s entire back catalog, which means we could be hearing many of his soon-to-be-classic songs in movies, TV commercials, TubroGraphx-16 video games, ice-dancing routines, and more! Wow. Only in America, people. Only in America…
• Michael Jackson: http://www.michaeljackson.com
