Victory - Jacksons (The) (CD 1984)

It probably seemed like a great idea for all involved. Get the band (or family, in this case) back together to cash in on one of them recently reaching the thermosphere with his dance moves, videos, silly white glove, and astronomical record sales. Keep everybody from killing each other, call in the guys from Toto to do all the difficult work, and the Jackson brothers all walk away several millions richer and not quite as eclipsed by Michael as they all deserve to be anyway.

Oh, wait I see. There really wasn t much of a reason for Jacko to be involved in this at all, other than whatever loyalty to kin he may have still harbored then. Apart from Jermaine, who wasn t exactly tearing the charts up the way he thought he would (and talk about a black man not being able to dance- Great Christ in Pittsburgh, that guy was whiter than Richard Dick Cheney), Michael was the only one who had a real career when The Jacksons reconvened to record the Victory album. It s little wonder that the only song most people remember from it is that horrendous State Of Shock thing that Michael did with Mick Jagger. Who in the name of all that s sane ever reckoned that those two belonged in a studio together?

Victory was plagued by bickering between the Jacksons from moment one. Instead of being a leave your ego at the door and work together kind of project, this incarnation of The Jacksons was clearly designed to let each member take his moment in the spotlight. Michael s presence is only strongly felt on two songs, the aforementioned State Of Shock and an extraordinarily sappy non-event called Be Not Always. Therefore, if you came here looking an unofficial follow-up to Thriller, you might wanna moonwalk in the other direction. For the record, Jermaine is basically a non-entity as well, literally as it turned out when the time came for making promo videos (neither he nor Michael appear in the clips that were made for Body and Torture).

Speaking of Torture, it s the reason I picked this up in the first place, and really the only reason I d recommend the album. Written by Jackie Jackson and starring the ever-magnificent but now dead Toto skinsman Jeff Porcaro on drums, it s a dark and sultry number that features the sound of whips and harmony vocals, which I normally don t like to hear in a song together. Somehow it works, and still leaves behind a bit of the same spooky residue that it did when I first heard it as a kid.

Beyond that, the album is almost entirely a mountain of crap. Jackie and half of Toto (including keyboardist David Paich and guitarist Steve Lukather, who unleashes a far better solo than the song deserves) bounce like The Pointer Sisters through the very mediocre Wait, Tito contributes a mildly grooving and exotic track called We Can Change The World, and Randy handicaps an otherwise acceptable dance number called The Hurt with his irritating falsetto, but those are hardly what I d want on my resume as the better moments . Randy s super-boring love song One More Chance and Marlon s Body round out this most unspectacular and disjointed series of failed compositions; my theory is that they only released the latter as a single because it sounds like a clone of Michael s Wanna Be Startin Somethin . And not a very good one at that.

There are supposedly all kinds of outtakes that exist from the Victory sessions, but hearing them would be like looking at photographs from a date that ended on a sour note. Despite the massive tour launched to support the album, the fanfare whipped up by the media, and Michael s participation, Victory came and went without making much of a mark. Michael distanced himself from the project once the tour concluded (as did Marlon), no doubt thinking that he d be better off on his own. What this album sounds like to me is a bunch of deadweight sitting on the coattails of a famous relative, who only shows up for about five minutes anyway.


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