It Sucks To Agree With Will.I.Am

I have mixed feelings about Will.I.Am protesting Sony’s release of Michael Jackson’s unfinished work. The new single came out this weekend, with a new album (the first of many, apparently) due in December. Will says:

“Whoever put it out and is profiting off of it, I want to see how cold they are. He just wasn’t any ordinary artist. He was a hands-on person. To me, it’s disrespectful. There’s no honoring. Michael Jackson songs are finished when Michael says they’re finished. Maybe if I never worked with him I wouldn’t have this perspective. He was very particular about how he wanted his vocals, the reverb he used … he was that hands-on.”

I mean, I agree with his point. It’s like what Joan Didion said about why it was wrong to publish any of Hemingway’s work posthumously: “You care about the ‘ands’ and the ‘buts’ or you don’t, and Hemingway did.” For this reason, I am generally against releasing any artist’s unfinished work after he or she has died. So much bad Tupac music has come out that never should have. (Though I’ve been listening to Elliot Smith’s New Moon and From a Basement On a Hill a lot recently, and they’re both great and I’m very thankful I have access to them. So… it’s difficult.)

But to hear Will.I.Am talk about the subject of “honoring” versus being “disrespectful” — especially while he works in the pukily self-congratulatory notion of how he worked with Michael and so therefore knows hims so much better than most everyone else — is incredibly hard to do! Though, I guess I have to accept it: what I consider to be the debasement of songs I love by Bob Dylan and The Who — well, I suppose those guys signed off on Will.I.Am’s interpolations. Why, I’ll never know. But they are still alive.

Anyway, here’s the new song. It’s very catchy, but very treacly to me on first listen. I’m not much of an Akon fan. But some people (some people who I like very much!) love it.