Michael Jackson wrote a song about abortion? I first thought it was a joke, but it turned out it wasn’t!
Sony has released a box set to mark the 25th anniversary of ‘Bad’ this fall, and some never-heard-before songs were added to the pack, probably to justify the whopping price of $35. One of these bonus songs is a tune called ‘Song Groove (a.k.a. Abortion Papers)’, with lyrics that are totally and straightforwardly against abortion:
‘Those abortion papers/Signed in your name against the words of God/Those abortion papers/Think about life, I'd like to have my child’, sings Jackson. Wow, there is also question of ‘Christian soul’, ‘Bible verse’, and it totally sounds like some Christian moralizing gibberish… and what are abortion papers anyway? It’s not a very good song, it has Jackson’s typical bad-angry voice over hard dance beats, but it is only remarkable because of the subject.
A few questions come to mind. Is it autobiographical? May be. Was he really thinking what he says? The simplistic reasoning is ridiculous, especially the line ‘Don't know the worst, she knows a atheist’… insinuating that atheists are the bad guys responsible of evil abortions!
Actually, according to the notes in the booklet that comes with the box set, the song is supposed to be a girl’s internal dialogue expressing her guilt about having an abortion, since she was raised by a catholic family or a pastor father, I am not sure… Jackson doesn’t give any hint in the song he is speaking as a character, so why not,… but I would tend to believe this conservative Christians’ way of thinking was part of him, after all he was raised as a Jehovah’s witness.
At the end, all this sounds too preachy for me, have we reached the point where the I-slept-with-little-boys-poster-guy dares to make a stance about morality? But when I think about it, this could at last be a song that Republicans could use during their campaign!