“Smooth Criminal” by Michael Jackson

"Smooth Criminal" is where Bad, Michael Jackson's seventh album, from 1987, turns into a pulp crime story. Jackson wrote it and co-produced it with Quincy Jones, and the words dwell on an attack on a woman called Annie in her own apartment. Bruce Swedien recorded and mixed it, with Jerry Hey and Gary Grant's trumpets and Christopher Currell's Synclavier tightening the screws. Rolling Stone later heard it as the point where Jackson began turning toward darker, tougher material.

Out as a single in October 1988, it reached 7 on the Hot 100, the sixth top-10 single from Bad, and topped the charts in Belgium, Iceland, the Netherlands and Spain. Its video, the centerpiece of Moonwalker, is set in the 1930s, Jackson's white suit and fedora a nod to Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon, and it's where he and his dancers pull off that seemingly impossible anti-gravity lean.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.