People have said a lot about Michael Jackson, but what is undeniable is that he was a brilliant musician, and songs like “Smooth Criminal” prove it. What is “Smooth Criminal” built on harmonically? Almost nothing. It’s one vamp, repeated with a discipline most pop songwriters don’t have the stomach for, and a bassline doing the job chord changes usually handle. It somehow captured all the best aspects of pop, funk, and electronica – just as Michael Jackson did his entire career.
“Smooth Criminal” came out on Michael Jackson’s 1987 album, “Bad,” which had several massive hits like the title track, “The Way You Make Me Feel,” and “Man In The Mirror”. It’s easy for a good song to get lost on an album like that. It’s one of the best-selling albums of all time. “Smooth Criminal” was the seventh of nine singles released from that album, and there were only 10 songs on the original vinyl version of the album. But that didn’t stop it from becoming a quintessential Jackson track.
Most pop songs move – the verse goes somewhere, the chorus opens up, the bridge gives you a release valve. Oddly, this one sits in an A minor center and relies heavily on a static minor vamp for nearly the entire runtime. Chart it the way you’d chart a typical “Bad”-era single, and you’ll come up short on chord changes fast. What you won’t come up short on is one very specific bass figure that drives the song relentlessly.
The Brilliant Bassline Vamp in ‘Smooth Criminal’
That figure is a descending, syncopated ostinato that never breaks character. A static vamp should, by all rights, bore us all to death. This one holds your attention because the bass keeps landing in places your ear doesn’t expect against the beat, and that creates motion without a single new chord ever showing up. You get the illusion of harmonic movement out of rhythmic displacement alone, which is much harder than writing a bridge with a key change, a la many pop songs, and it’s why the track feels like it’s chasing you for four minutes instead of just looping. The rhythm section is so tightly locked in on this song – almost as if it were recorded by a computer… so you may not be surprised to learn that it was mostly a computer – a Synclavier, to be more precise.
When Jackson would play the song live, later on, he did have a bass player, and it ended up sounding a bit funkier. But for the original 1987 recording, it was all done with synths, a drum machine, and some live studio drummers. Synths or not, the bassline is fantastic and a foundational part of the song. Christopher Currell programmed and played that Synclavier bass figure; John Barnes and Michael Boddicker filled out the synths, and Barnes built the rhythm arrangement with Jackson.
Slow that bassline down, and it’s deceptively simple to read off a page. Lock it into tempo, the way the record demands, and it’s a different animal entirely. None of the syncopation is decorative – every note is placed to keep tension alive in a harmonic environment that’s got none to spare. It is the tightest four minutes on the whole “Bad” album. Perhaps that tightness is owed to the line being played on a synth rather than an actual bass.
Vocals Acting Like Rhythm
Everybody wants to talk about Jackson’s vocal hooks, the hiccups, the “hee-hee”, or just his pure magnetism – fine, that’s real, the dude was the ultimate showman – but underneath nearly all his biggest tracks is a bass part doing the structural work chord progressions do for other writers. “Smooth Criminal” is just the most naked version of it, because there’s so little else in the arrangement to hide behind.
As listeners, we’re often looking for the vocals to give us melody. But if you listen to the gasps, the hiccups, the clipped consonants in Jackson’s vocals, they’re landing right on the beat – none of that’s ornamental phrasing. It’s rhythm. Jackson’s using his voice the way a drummer uses a hi-hat: short percussive hits that lock into the groove instead of floating over it. The melodic content in the verses is almost beside the point. What matters is where each hit lands relative to bass and beat, and Jackson’s placement is precise enough that it reads less like singing and more like a second percussion track that happens to have a human voice attached.
You hear the same instinct in “Beat It” and “Bad,” but this song pushes it further because there’s so little harmonic information competing for attention. With the chords frozen, your ear’s got nowhere to go but the interplay between bass and vocal, which is exactly where Jackson and his collaborators wanted you locked in.
If you get ahold of a multitrack for the song and mute everything except bass and vocal, it still grooves. That tells you the bass and the voice were never just bass and voice – the bass supplies the propulsion you’d expect from a kit, the voice supplies the bite you’d expect from a hat or a rim shot, and the actual rhythm section is almost free to just keep time. It’s like James Brown used to say (and I’m paraphrasing… badly), every instrument is just a drum.
