LL Cool J was still a teenager when he started hanging out with Michael Jackson in the studio. He was a young rapper from Queens with records of his own on the radio. Michael was the man who’d made “Thriller,” and the “Bad” era was underway. One day, sitting right there with him, LL let slip the kind of sentence no teenager wants to say out loud in front of Michael Jackson.
He told the story this fall on Trevor Noah’s podcast, What Now? The show posted the moment on its official YouTube channel under the title “LL Cool J Reveals What Michael Jackson Was Really Like.” It runs only a few minutes, and it’s one of the friendliest Michael stories to surface in a long while.
How they met
LL says he first met Michael at “18, 19,” and he places it “after Thriller.” By then Michael was the most famous entertainer on the planet. LL was a kid with a hit record, and he found himself around Michael in the studio, close enough to see how he behaved when no cameras were rolling.
What he saw was a man who liked a joke. LL remembers Michael walking in late one day with the most ordinary excuse there is: “Sorry I’m late. There was traffic.” Michael Jackson, stuck in traffic like everybody else.
The moment in the studio
The bigger story came on another day. LL was in the studio with Michael and needed to excuse himself for the most human reason there is. He didn’t dress it up. In his own words, he turned to Michael and said, “Mike, I got to fart.”
Michael’s answer was easygoing. “Well, go ahead, man,” he said. That could have been the end of it, but Michael got on the phone, and LL was right there to hear every word.
So what did Michael tell the person on the other end?
He turned the whole thing into a cover story. “Guess what LL did?” Michael said. “He ordered ice cream.”
There was no teasing and no punchline at LL’s expense. A teenager’s awkward moment became a harmless little fib about dessert, told by the biggest star in music. Looking back, LL has no doubt Michael knew exactly how to play it. “He knew what he was doing,” he says.
LL Cool J tells the ice cream story on What Now? with Trevor Noah
Listen for the traffic line first. The studio story follows about a minute later.
This is the official upload from the What Now? with Trevor Noah channel. LL talks about meeting Michael at about 2:18 and tells the traffic story at about 2:46. The studio story starts at about 3:47 and runs to about 4:40.
A good dude
LL has spent four decades in the business since those studio days, from the rap charts to a long run on “NCIS: Los Angeles.” He’s met just about everybody. The Michael he describes is the friend who apologized for traffic and got a teenager out of an awkward moment with an imaginary bowl of ice cream.
LL sums him up in five words at about 4:40 in the clip: “Mike was a good dude.” From there the conversation turns to Quincy Jones, the producer behind “Thriller” and “Bad.”