Pitchfork

If you lived under a rock and heard Michael Jackson sing: "One more chance in love, one more chance in love," you wouldn't think twice; we know better. To the rest of us, Michael may as well be crooning "Acquittal!" Who'd have thought pedophilia could so completely saturate a man's public image? (Put your hands down, kids.) Regardless of your position on bad touching, all this would be trivial if Mike could get it together long enough to write a decent single. If history has taught us anything, it's that people don't care about anything but entertainment. For example: Chuck Berry and R. Kelly were once found to possess the wholly insatiable desire to pee on girls' faces, but the entire world either forgot or forgave such personal trivia for the simple fact that the guys could rock a crowd. Michael, this could be you!

Sadly, Jackson's songwriting ability has waned with his modesty, shifting his pop culture status from King of Pop to Pervert Laureate. He's no longer really creating music, but infomercials for insanity. Humorously, he didn't even try with "One More Chance", a song with exactly no musical value whatsoever when compared to the earlier brilliance of "Beat It" or "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough"-- he called in the services of another accused child molestor, perhaps as a means of achieving that extra special level of creepiness. Even with Kelly's songwriting at work, this track is like being raised on velvet pillows and then, on your 18th birthday, having a crazy albino mannequin begin to rub sandpaper on your face. The instrumentals sound sampled from my prom, and Michael's voice sounds sampled from the bargain box in my OWN PERSONAL HELL (prom). So what's left in this vacuous husk? Nothing! It's bizarre, like an actualized hybrid of Dada-art and reverse-existentialism. What we are witnessing is one man being consumed by emptiness, as the collapse of his image drags down with it his very soul. Come to think of it, that is pretty entertaining stuff. Michael, maybe there's hope for you yet.