A new single is set to be released along with ""This Is It,"" a movie about the rehearsals leading up to what was to be Michael Jackson's final tour. The song was unfinished, only a piano with Michael singing and some of the lyrics. On top of this, a significant amount of unfinished tunes have been recovered. But if any artist is so electric and dynamic their work deserves to be preserved the way they left it, it is Michael Jackson, though there are some odd cases of posthumous work in the past that also warrant questioning.
Elliott Smith's From a Basement on the Hill was a posthumous release for which his songwriting partner on the album was not consulted. In this situation, the responsibility of overseeing the unfinished production was given to his closest emotional and musical companions at the time of his death, longtime girlfriend Joanna Bolme and Rob Schnapf, the last person working with Smith on production, though not involved in most of the creative process. In this case, I've learned to take the album with a grain of salt, appreciating the fact that it was the last of his work, even if it's not exactly as he'd have liked it.
However, with someone like Jimi Hendrix, only his live recordings seem fitting as posthumous releases. Jimi's music needs his electricity, and without him alive to mold it, I have a hard time holding it to his standards.
Which is why it is surprising that some of the most prolific posthumous projects belong to rappers. Most of their work is created too organically—and often spontaneously—for me to trust a producer who was irrelevant at the time of its creation.
For someone like J Dilla the product is still legitimate because raps are rarely added over the top as his production can often carry itself. Nonetheless, the most prolific posthumous artist, Tupac Shakur, has had more content released since his death than prior to it.
The release of Shakur's seventh posthumous album has been slated for release June 16, 2010, and it will be the sixth release following his death 13 years ago on which he won't see any creative control. Even more, alterations to Tupac's tone and flow to match producer-specific beats and changes to word choice as well as creation of new words in order to match contemporary dialect make a wack alteration to an artists' intellectual property when they aren't around to approve it.
Yet as much as I'd like to dismiss all of these unauthenticated releases as distorted objects of remembrance, they have to represent more than that because at heart the song is not only the memory of the actual artist, but also a small part of the living artist; one more snapshot into their soul. On top of that is the fact that in some of these cases, particularly Tupac's, it is not crazy to think his work with Eminem would have gone much differently in using common studio tricks.
In cases where an artist's identity is properly carried out—an unavoidably vague, open-ended stipulation—fleshing out the sketches of a deceased artist can bring just as much pleasure to fans in memory as they would have in life.
This unwieldy task falls in the lap of the families of the deceased responsible for the recordings. Smith's case provides an example of a situation stable and caring enough to carry out his visions properly, and his music went to the trustworthy hands of Schnapf and Bolme.
But not with Jackson. With all of the shadiness in his family, both past and present, I will not be putting as much legitimacy into his posthumous recordings. This might not be fair considering Jackson's living catalogue contains some over-dramatic numbers featuring absurdly lavish orchestrations. But still, I feel like that was just his ambitious, pretentious eagerness to ""Heal the World,"" while deep down you knew the genius of ""Beat It"" and ""Rock With You"" was still there. He was just above stellar pop music at the time. But with the hundreds of unpolished recordings reported to be in contention for release, something has got to be gold for the digging. I just hope somebody involved cares about forgetting all of the drama surrounding the later decades of his life and does him the justice of giving the public what they want: classic MJ.
