In 1972, a 14-year-old Michael Jackson released a gentle, string-drenched ballad about a misunderstood friend that nobody else could see the good in. It went to number one in America, won a Golden Globe, and got nominated for an Academy Award. Couples slow-danced to it. People played it at funerals. And almost none of them had any idea what the song was actually about. It was about a rat. Specifically, a rat that leads an army of other rats to kill people.
Here is where it comes from. In 1971, a horror film called Willard was released, about a lonely young man who discovers he can command rats, and who trains them to attack his enemies. The lead rat is called Ben. At the end of the film, the rats turn on Willard and devour him. The film was a hit, so the following year the studio gave the rat his own sequel, titled Ben, in which the rodent befriends a sick little boy named Danny and protects him from bullies — before things go badly wrong again.
Michael Jackson – Ben 1972 (4K Remastered)
Every horror film needs a theme song, and this one got a very good one. It was written by composer Walter Scharf, who had done the music for Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and lyricist Don Black, who had written James Bond themes. Black has been open about how bizarre the assignment was. At his Songwriters Hall of Fame induction, he recalled his own reaction to being asked: “When it came to writing about a rat, I said, ‘You can’t write about a rat.’”
So they did something clever. They removed every trace of rodent from the lyric. Not one line refers to a rat, a tail, a sewer, or anything else. Instead, they wrote a song about a loyal friend that the world has misjudged — and that is exactly how the entire world heard it.
Michael Jackson’s First #1 Hit? The Shocking Story Behind ‘Ben’
It was not even meant to be Michael’s. The song was first offered to Donny Osmond, who was the same kind of star in the same kind of family group and was on tour, unable to record it in time. So it went to the 14-year-old from Gary, Indiana instead. And the pairing that followed is genuinely funny. That same year, Osmond had his own animal hit with “Puppy Love.” Osmond told an interviewer that he and Michael laughed about it for the rest of their lives: “We stayed up to like two in the morning, laughing about the fact that I had a hit about a puppy and he had a hit about a rat.”
“Ben” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in October 1972, making Michael Jackson a solo chart-topper at 14. It went to number one in Australia for eight weeks and hit the top 10 in Britain. He performed it at the Academy Awards the following year. And he clearly loved it, singing it live for decades afterward.
There is one line that comes closest to giving the game away, and once you know, you cannot miss it: “you’re always running here and there.” Otherwise, one of the most beloved songs about friendship ever recorded is a fourteen-year-old boy singing to a rodent.