Michael Jackson made some of the most recognizable pop records ever. So the obvious assumption is that his car stereo was full of it — his own hits, the charts, whatever was current.
It wasn’t, according to the bodyguards who drove him for years: when Michael got in a car, he almost always chose classical music.
Bill Whitfield and Javon Beard protected him from 2006 until he died in 2009 and spent an enormous amount of time in vehicles with him. If an R&B station came on, he might leave it. But the default, over and over, was classical.
This wasn’t background noise or an affectation. He had studied it since childhood.
Michael Jackson’s Favorite Classical Music And The Composers Who Influenced Him
The composer he came back to most was Tchaikovsky. In a 2007 interview with Ebony, Michael explained something genuinely revealing about how he thought. He admired The Nutcracker Suite because every section mattered — there was no filler, no weak passage you could skip
That idea is the whole philosophy behind Thriller. He said openly that he wanted to make an album where every track could be a single. He got that ambition from a ballet score written in 1892.
He also named Claude Debussy and Aaron Copland as composers he admired, and talked about melody, arrangement, and composition as things he had genuinely studied rather than picked up by instinct.
Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative”
But there was one exception, and it is wonderful.
One day a song came on in the car that broke the routine completely: Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative.” According to the bodyguards, Michael liked it so much he asked them to get him a copy — and then played it over and over in the car, singing along from the back seat.
Picture that. The most successful recording artist in history, in traffic, belting out somebody else’s record.
He built his masterpiece on Tchaikovsky. He could not stop playing Bobby Brown.