In February 1993, Oprah Winfrey sat down with Michael Jackson at his Neverland ranch in California. More than 90 million people tuned in, and it’s still called the most-watched TV interview in American history.
At one point, Oprah wanted more than answers. She asked Michael to sing something for her right there, with no music playing behind him.
Michael didn’t jump at the chance. He smiled, ducked his head and seemed a little shy about it, the way most of us would if someone asked us to sing in front of a room full of people.
Oprah didn’t give up. She had a song in mind, one of his own, and she asked for it by name. She even asked him to “do that whole beat thing.”
There was nobody around to play along with him. So Michael started making the music himself.
What came out of him next had Oprah hanging on every sound. A thumping drum beat and a deep bass line came out of his mouth at the same time, as if a whole band had been hiding inside him. Here’s that moment from the interview.
Michael answers Oprah’s request
For Michael, this was simply how he worked.
He often built his songs with his voice first. In his own words, he’d “sing the bass part into the tape recorder.” One of his studio engineers remembered Michael singing every note of every chord to a guitar player, and sometimes a whole string part, one piece at a time, into a little cassette recorder.
An early demo of “Beat It” shows the same thing. Michael is alone on the tape, beatboxing and singing the song the way he wanted it to sound.
So when Oprah asked, he didn’t need to think about it. The music was already in his head, every layer of it.
The song Oprah asked for was “Who Is It,” from his 1991 album “Dangerous.” A few weeks after the interview, it came out as a single in America. It climbed to No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and went all the way to No. 1 on Billboard’s dance club chart.
Here’s the finished record. This is the version of the music video that aired in America, packed with clips from his earlier videos and concerts.
The finished song, as fans heard it in 1993
Listen closely to the drums and the bass line, then go back to the Oprah clip and compare. The beat Michael made for Oprah at Neverland, with nothing but his mouth, is right there under the music.