Michael Jackson - Hello World - The Motown Solo Collection

As a 10-year-old, Michael Jackson mimicked adult emotions, like most child performers. As a teenager, he was able to reach places most mature singers can't touch. Jackson's first four solo albums — released from 1972 to 1975, between his 13th and 17th birthdays — document his transition from boy wonder to precocious teen.

This triple-disc anthology shows that Motown didn't always know what to do with a kid who could wail like James Brown but competed for fans with Donny Osmond. Jackson's early solo records spanned Fifties rock & roll (his smash remake of "Rockin' Robin") and funk (the protodisco "Dapper-Dan") but favored campy puppy-love ballads. Liberace-esque piano flourishes make Jackson's cover of "Too Young" even tackier than Osmond's.

But the best songs are anything but cute: Jackson summoned pains beyond the realm of adolescent experience on his aching cover of "Ain't No Sunshine." The rage he brought to sophisticated soul melodramas like "What Goes Around Comes Around" foreshadows the moral ambiguities of "Billie Jean." And no other vocalist could've turned a celebration of a pet rat into a chart-topping declaration of love between outcasts: Thirty-seven years after its release, Jackson's first Number One solo hit, "Ben," remains eerie and extraordinary.

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"Michael Jackson could make you forget he was so young." So writes Suzee Ikeda, a Motown artist and A&R assistant who was a creative confidante of a teenaged Michael, in her introductory essay to Hello World: The Motown Solo Collection, a new 3-CD set that features every MJ recording released from 1971 to 1975, plus the Motown-era songs that were released after he left the company. At the height of the Jackson 5 mania in 1970-71, a solo career for young Michael was not a given. But when Donny Osmond went solo while staying in the Osmonds family group, Michael went solo as well, and was given material that made him sound more mature. "Got To Be There," his first solo hit, featured a stunning, declamatory phrase that provided the name of this collection. The LP Got To Be There, released in January 1972, was followed by Ben, after the No. 1 hit title song from a film about a pet rat. Ben was first issued with a cover featuring lurid artwork from the film, which was quickly replaced by a simpler image of MJ; our package reproduces both covers in the 48-page booklet. Music And Me was next, featuring a few Adult Contemporary covers, followed by Forever, Michael, which had a harder dance age; it included the now-classic hits "We're Almost There" and "Just A Little Bit Of You." Although MJ and the J5 left Motown in 1975 to go to Epic Records,that wasn't the end of the story. "One Day In Your Life," released in the aftermath of MJ's solo Off The Wall, turned into a No. 1 hit in the U.K. and top 40 AC in the U.S. Following the crazy ride of Thriller, Motown released Farewell My Summer Love, a batch of songs from the vault with contemporary overdubs; the title song went top 10 R&B. There's more: in 1986 Motown issued Looking Back To Yesterday, a collection of more vault masters--some with the J5--that contained further unexpected gems. Hello World has all of that and these extra gems: all nine songs from Farewell My Summer Love are included in their original,undubbed mixes. Plus, we unearthed the original mix of "Twenty-Five Miles"--Michael's cover of the Edwin Starr hit that has previously been available only in a 1987 vault collection. It's all in a splendid, hard-backed 8"x 5.5" package with an introductory essay by Motown's Suzee Ikeda, a main essay by Mark Anthony Neal, pages of annotations, rare photos and repros of the LP jackets. It's deserving of the one of the greatest performers the world has ever known, at any age.

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