Thirty-nine years ago tomorrow, on October 24, 1987, Michael Jackson’s “Bad” climbed all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It sat on top for two weeks. If you grew up with it, you know the snarl in his voice, the attitude, the way he throws down a challenge in the very first lines.
Here’s the part most people never heard. Michael didn’t write that song to sing alone. He wanted a duet.
And the man he wanted beside him was one of the only other performers on the planet who could stand toe to toe with him in those years. Michael asked him. The man said no.
So who was it?
It was Prince.
If you’re younger or just not a deep music fan, Prince was the pint-sized genius behind “Purple Rain,” a guitar player and showman who ruled the 1980s right alongside Michael. The press loved pitting the two against each other. A Michael and Prince duet on “Bad” would have been the biggest record of the decade before a single note played.
But Prince turned it down, and years later he finally explained why on television. The place he chose to tell it is what makes the whole thing so good.
Think about how “Bad” opens. One singer is daring the other, getting right in his face. The famous line is “Your butt is mine.” Prince took one look at that and saw the problem straight away. If he and Michael sang it together, one of them had to say those words to the other.
In 1997 he sat down with the comedian Chris Rock, who had his own late-night talk show on HBO at the time. Prince broke it down for him. As the story is usually quoted, he asked, “Who’s going to sing that to who?” Then he added the kicker, “because you sure aren’t singing that to me, and I sure ain’t singing it to you.”
He wasn’t being mean about it. Prince always said there was never any real bad blood between them. He even offered Michael one of his own songs instead, a track called “Wouldn’t You Love to Love Me,” though that one didn’t work out either.
Prince telling this himself, with that sly grin, beats any secondhand retelling. Here he is explaining it to Chris Rock.
A short clip where Prince lays out, in his own words, exactly why he said no to Michael.
Prince tells Chris Rock why he turned Michael down
Michael went ahead and made “Bad” his own, with the great jazz organ player Jimmy Smith adding a solo to the record. It became one of the signature songs of his career, and the video with the subway dance crew is a classic all by itself.
Give the song another listen and picture Prince standing next to him, trading that opening dare. Then try to imagine either one of them backing down.
Michael Jackson, “Bad” (official video)
Two of the biggest stars who ever lived, one song, and a question neither of them could answer with a straight face. Prince made the call, and honestly, it’s hard to argue with him.