Say, say, say: it's a state of shock!

December-January is the period in which I listen to the least new music; I usually replay favorites. This week it's been Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Alexander O'Neal's first album, The Beatles' White Album (which I now own for the first time on CD), Dusty in Memphis, and Paul McCartney's All The Best, which has since been supplanted by 2001's Wingspan but is still the best single disc Macca comp extant, not least because it's the only place you'll find "Say, Say, Say," the gynormous Michael Jackson collaboration that still sounds opulent and state of the art.

Since there were hits roughtly six months from one another a comparison between "Say, Say, Say" and the Jackson's "State of Shock" is instructive. Here you have the world's biggest star expanding his popularity (how high can he go??) by hitching himself to the two biggest acts of the sixties. On the McCartney single Jackson feels like an appendage; it's like Macca left Jackson's part blank until he knew which token black singer had signed the contract. The track is fulsomely sexless, like lots of McCartney songs; usually when a singer struggles to keep his distance as assiduously as McCartney does here he instead creates some welcome homoerotic tension. There's none of that on "Say, Say, Say." Nothing's at stake: the words and music exist to sell a McCartney record (Jackson could be singing the "Sister Susan" part in "Let'Em In)." Expert kids' music recorded by two children who'll never grow up, suitable for "Sesame Street."

"State of Shock," on the other hand, exists to sell a reified Stones track, complete with "grungy" guitar lick and grunts. Since Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson are an even more ludicrous pairing than Jackson and Macca there's no point wasting time on who's doing whom a favor (although I should point that Mick was so desperate for any kind of solo name recognition that he let The Jacksons have a big chunk of his dearly beloved money to get it). "Beat It" is a better rock song than "State of Shock" or, for that matter, almost anything on Undercover. The version Jagger sang with Tina Turner at Live Aid is interesting in a pneumatic sort of way.