“Dangerous” by Michael Jackson | Album Review
I attempt to sift through the music and deeply conflicting legacy of Michael Jackson.
This album review wrestles with the King of Pop’s legacy through the lens of his most underappreciated record.
Genre: Pop, R&B, New Jack Swing
Label: Epic
Release Date: November 26, 1991
Vibe: 🎭
👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform
Content warning #1: This post is about Michael Jackson. His music. His legacy. Whatever that means to you.
Content warning #2: I won’t be discussing that part of his legacy. Not in full, anyway.
The reason for that is you probably already have a strong opinion about that aspect of his life. That’s fine. I’m not here to persuade or dissuade you. To “pick a side” would be inherently contradictory because you can’t boycott a legacy that looms as large as his. If you’ve listened to and enjoyed pop, R&B, hip-hop, electronic, or rock music made in the past 50 years, there’s a good chance you’ve enjoyed material that owes at least a passing debt to MJ’s artistry. Without him, artists Usher, The Weeknd, Bruno Mars, Rihanna, Beyoncé, and countless others wouldn’t have shaped their sounds the way they did. That shadow also reaches far beyond the music business, encompassing television, film, fashion, and dance. His cultural footprint rivals that of Picasso or Hemingway in that it’s far too vast to quantify in a single phrase or thought. It’s like trying to chisel a stone sculpture with a toothpick. You could try, but it would take you forever.
Like those other two men, Michael Jackson is, for many, the ultimate test of separating the art and the artist (again, to the degree that it’s possible). Can you genuinely appreciate beautiful art when it’s made by someone with a well-documented history of loathsome behavior? If yes, how do you rationalize that decision morally? However you grapple with those questions, it’s safe to say there are no more neutral opinions about Michael Jackson or his legacy. I’ll never forget hearing the story about how Sundance had grief counsellors standing by outside the Leaving Neverland screening room. I can’t imagine being among the first to see what I would classify as one of the toughest watches I’ve ever sat through. As Kristen Baldwin put it in her review for Entertainment Weekly, “For the viewer, [there] is the loss of… peace of mind, let’s call it. No matter what you think of [the] claims — which the singer’s estate call ‘absolutely false’ — it is all but impossible to leave Neverland unscathed.” And yet, years after such a large-scale public reckoning, millions of people still bought Jackson’s records in 2024. Millions more will do the same this year, I suspect.
This cultural tension can be traced all the way back to Dangerous, his eighth solo album released in November 1991. It was the moment when the music and the myth began pulling away from each other, resulting in a listening experience that’s as disjointed as it is dazzling, caustic as it is confident. It’s also essentially two albums smushed together, keeping one foot in soft, tender adult contemporary while using the other to kick down the door that separated Jackson from a hipper, Blacker sound influenced by hip-hop and New Jack Swing. It’s an album that’s clearly at war with itself, weighed down by intense scrutiny and commercial expectation. Sony Music had recently signed him to the most lucrative deal in pop music history, giving him partial ownership of his masters and unprecedented creative control. The recording process was also long and insanely expensive, taking two years to complete and costing Jackson’s new corporate overlords a cool $10 million. But, when your previous two albums—Thriller and Bad— sell north of 100 million copies combined, no one’s going to tell you “no.” Still, the pressure was on. Big time. As David Browne noted then, “there is more riding on the success of Dangerous than on any other album in pop history.”
Jackson attempted to make history again without Quincy Jones, his primary creative partner, in the fold. It can’t be underestimated how important Jones was to Jackson’s success, having shepherded him out of his kiddie pop Jackson 5 era and, beginning with Off the Wall in 1979, into the conversation as the most talented performer on the planet. But, after some viewed Bad as a more bloated, calculated version of its predecessor, Jackson parted ways with Jones, opting instead to hire a then-24-year-old Teddy Riley, the man who basically invented New Jack Swing through his hits with his group, Guy, to come and be the main producer. His production credits for Wreckx-n-Effect, Big Daddy Kane, and Keith Sweat, along with the widespread success of his sister Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation, make up a solid microcosm of the shifting tastes Jackson was chasing. Out went the glossy aesthetic of the Jones era, and in came syncopated drum loops and sharper digital textures. Every beat and lyric was obsessed over, with more than 60 songs reportedly recorded for Dangerous. The 14 tracks audiences eventually got in 1991 have an anxious, restless quality, as if MJ still wasn’t satisfied. The tighter he pulled on the reins, the more it sounded like the control he craved was slipping through his fingers.
Right from the jump, “Jam” grabs you by the shirt collar and lets you know this will be a different Michael Jackson album. The sound of shattering glass gives way to a lithe Riley groove and an underappreciated vocal from the King of Pop. His voice begins just above a whisper, building until he’s practically screaming the words in clipped, guttural fits. His status as a tabloid fixture who was rumored to bleach his skin and sleep in a hyperbaric chamber was clearly on his mind (“I have to find my peace 'cause no one seems to let me be”), as was his resolve against the haters (“You can't hurt me, I found peace within myself”). He leans into the latter theme on the next track, “Why You Wanna Trip on Me,” where he lists a litany of societal problems, including poverty, inner city violence, drug addiction, police brutality, and illiteracy that merit more media coverage than him. Besides being one of the best-produced songs on the entire record, it’s also one of the most unsettling, since it implicates you in the same narrative. By listening to his music and purchasing the album, are you complicit in the same wilful ignorance he lays out in seething detail?
In addition to addressing the Wacko Jacko era head-on, there are plenty of other firsts on Dangerous. “In the Closet,” originally intended as a duet for him and Madonna, was arguably the first time he’d written such an unequivocally sexual song, while “She Drives Me Wild” was Jackson’s first notable experimentation with sampling’s potential, building out the percussion with sliced-up automotive sound effects. The boundary-pushing ethos extended to the adult contemporary second half, which was produced primarily by Bruce Swedien and Bill Bottrell, both of whom had worked with MJ on Bad. “Heal the World,” “Will You Be There,” and “Keep the Faith” are feel-good maximalism, each spoonfeeding you schmaltz into the side of your mouth while you’re distracted by joyously uplifting Jackson vocals. “Will You Be There” in particular hits you right in the feels with that choir coming in during its second half. After listening to as much music as I have in my life, you’d think that I’d be above the emotional manipulation going on here, but I must confess that, hearing it again for the first time in years, I teared up at the end. It may be Jackson’s most human, uplifting moment as a performer.
The Dangerous song that’s aged the best to my ears is “Remember the Time,” a Riley/New Jack all-timer that would still get a nightclub dancefloor to turn all the way up if it were thrown into the middle of a DJ set. It’s not hard to get swept away by its shimmering, joyous charm, aided greatly by Riley’s loose, bass-first groove. Jackson’s voice floats through it like someone trying to wrap their fingers around a bittersweet memory, but his first clutches nothing but air. He sings about a blissful romance that fizzled out long ago and, clearly, one he wishes he could return to, and, in the process, adds nuanced emotional layers to what, on the surface, sounds like a straightforward dance track. His performance aches with resignation more than anything else. It’s more complicated than regret. Between each breathy syllable, you can almost hear him asking himself whether he’d be worthy of such a love again in his lifetime. With the benefit of hindsight, that underlying question was a prescient one.
By 1991, Jackson was less a person than he was a spectacle. The media nicknames, the constant tabloid attention, the swarming paparazzi—it all calcified into a narrative, one that was at least partially designed by the singer’s publicity team. At the time, demand for new MJ music was so overwhelming that this album’s lead single, “Black or White,” premiered simultaneously to an estimated audience of 500 million people in 27 different countries. In the U.S., it was broadcast live on MTV, VH1, BET, and FOX, giving those networks their highest-ever Nielsen ratings to that point. That level of control over the mainstream pop culture conversation had never happened before and will likely never happen again. Though Dangerous would initially outpace Thriller and Bad, selling 5 million copies worldwide in its first week, and eventually grossing over 32 million in sales, I’d argue the “Black and White” saturation levels are the more impressive commercial achievement.
What’s fascinating is how confrontational, confusing, and crass the video’s content is. Remember, this is post-80s Michael Jackson we’re talking about here, a man who was still viewed as family-friendly. In the original version, he dances with indigenous tribespeople, grabs his crotch repeatedly, proclaims “I ain’t scared of no sheets” (read: Klansmen) as he seemingly walks through a burning cross, and stands on a replica of the Lady Liberty torch as it and he dominate the foreground while other international landmarks of note shrink in his presence. He later smashes car windows, makes a neon sign explode by ripping his shirt in half, and, finally, if all that weren’t enough, he transforms into a black panther. As an instrument of sociopolitical commentary, it’s blunt and pretty goofy, but, as a look-at-me showmanship flex, it’s undeniably entertaining and incredible to look at. As a result, the central conflict around separating this art from this artist intensifies.
As I researched more and more, I think I redrafted this piece at least half a dozen times over the course of a year. The entire time, I kept thinking of a famous Joan Didion quote: “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” The truth is, I’m still not entirely sure what I think about my relationship with MJ’s musical legacy or what it signifies. I own and enjoy listening to every studio album he released during his lifetime. Does that make me a bad person? I’ve held onto those records in the years since Leaving Neverland. Does that make me an even worse person? There’s a fine line between denial and searching for redemption through empathy, a balance Jackson continually tries to strike throughout Dangerous. You can hear the effort, the stress, the beauty, the anguish. It’s a psychological profile set to impeccable production.
This record isn’t the fan favorite. It’s not Thriller or Bad. There’s too much baggage for it to feel that seamless. But it is an endlessly fascinating showcase for Jackson at his most powerful and, in fleeting glimpses, vulnerable. It’s an attempt at reinvention while his world began to crumble around him. Where the real heartbreak lies for fans is how high a pedestal he sat on before the ensuing fall from grace. He wasn’t simply a star. He was the pop star, a truly global figure who united disparate factions better than most celebrities, politicians, and humanitarians. People thought there was so much good in him and what he strived for in his music. To relisten to Dangerous now is to travel back to a time when we trusted art to mean more than the artist. To many, it’s understandably uncouth to celebrate Jackson’s work. But does that mean we can’t love what shaped us, even if we’re willing to question the essence of who shaped it?
Like I said, I don’t think I know for sure. But having that internal dialogue has been an eye-opening experience.
Do you have a favorite song off this album? Sound off in the comments.
This was the MJ album I listened to least. The previous three were so popular and produced so many classic hits that perhaps he was doomed to fall from those heights. When I look at the track list of "Dangerous" I barely remember any of its songs, other than the ones you mention. "Black or White" was most interesting for its video which I found very creative but also a bit creepy for some reason! Thanks for your review!
Your honesty, musical insight, and willingness to sit with discomfort really struck me. A compelling, deeply human reflection on a complicated cultural touchstone.