I was so excited I tripped going up the stairs. P.S.: I’m pretty sure that “Baby Be Mine” was the song that was playing on the late winter afternoon in 1983 when I walked into my house and realized that we’d purchased a copy of Thriller. The countermelody in the last set of choruses. Key change during the last chorus! That’s a Quincy trademark. No one does backgrounds like Mike and Janet.
#Dazz band let it whip chords crack#
He uses his entire vocal range (minus falsetto), dipping into his lower register in the middle of each verse line (for example: “there’ll be no more mountains for us to climb” finds MJ starting in his normal register, descending furthest during the last syllable of “mountains” and then climbing up high enough that his voice sounds like it’s going to crack at “climb”.) He even gets raspy during the song’s bridge. Even if there was some studio trickery involved (small potatoes compared to the vocal manipulation that goes on these days), the fact is that Mike sung the shit out of “Baby Be Mine”.
“Baby Be Mine” is one of those songs that makes me wonder about that. I’ve often wondered if MJ’s voice was occasionally sped up in the mix on certain songs (“Lovely One”, “Beat It”). But why does my man have to take every story and add bells and whistles to it?
Also, is Q the music industry king of tall tales, or what? I mean, it’s Quincy, so he has the right to spin stories however the hell he wants.
We can’t verify whether that’s true or not (because Rod Temperton, who wrote the song, is deceased), but it’s true that the verse melody has a bit of a jazzy feel to it. Quincy’s told a (probably apocryphal) story about how the vocal melody of “Baby Be Mine” was inspired by John Coltrane. Which, looking at that list of titles above, is not a bad thing, at all. Thriller is at the head of the table, of course (or at least Mike shares it with Prince), and really, the worst thing you can say about “Baby Be Mine” is that it sounds like an R&B record from 1982. 1982 was such a great year for Black music– Thriller, 1999, What Time Is It?, Vanity 6’s debut, Marvin’s Midnight Love, Lionel’s solo debut, Evelyn King’s Get Loose, “D” Train’s debut, Diana’s “Muscles”, the new songs from Stevie’s Original Musicquarium, “Planet Rock”, “The Message”, Grace Jones’ Living My Life, Janet’s (underrated) debut, Shalamar’s Friends, Luther’s Forever For Always For Love, The Dazz Band’s “Let It Whip”. That stutter-step drum intro is fucking killer. Here are a few reasons why I love “Baby Be Mine”, starting from the beginning. Purple Rain’s a better album (in mine and Chris’s opinion), but “Baby Be Mine” has nothing to do with that. And one of those is a negligible three, a goodwill/treasured childhood memories “3″. The two non-5 star songs on Thriller have 3-star ratings. Here’s where things veer off: the other 2 songs on Purple Rain are songs I’ve assigned 4-star ratings to. 7 of the 9 songs on Purple Rain are also rated 5 stars in my iTunes library. 7 of the 9 songs on Thriller are rated 5 stars in my iTunes library. Everything I say is, of course, subjective.
#Dazz band let it whip chords plus#
Don’t worry, I won’t give up any spoilers for the rest of this list (except to say that there will be additional songs from Thriller plus two songs from Purple Rain on this list before I get out of the “B” titles. Grown-Ups 2 is wrong in a paragraph or two, but I decided to do my own side-by-side comparison of the two albums. Rock specifically quoted Thriller’s “Baby Be Mine” as one of the tracks that constituted “filler”, and a lot of folks assume Mike and his record company felt similarly as, “Baby Be Mine” was one of only two songs from Thriller that never made it to single release. There was a quote attributed to Chris Rock, in which the conversation revolved around Prince being a better musician than Michael Jackson (he is.) When comparing the albums that represented the commercial peaks for each (Mike’s Thriller and Prince’s Purple Rain), Rock’s reasoning for picking Purple Rain as the better of the two albums (it is) was that there was no filler on it.
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