In 1986, the two biggest pop stars on earth were Michael Jackson and Prince.
Jackson had just made Thriller, the best-selling album in history. Prince had just made Purple Rain. They were the same age, both extraordinary dancers, both obsessive perfectionists, and the press had spent years pushing them against each other. Then Jackson’s producer had an idea that could have been the single biggest record of the decade. He would put them on the same song.
The song was “Bad.” The plan, according to producer Quincy Jones, was his own — right down to the video, which he pictured as the two superstars squaring off against each other before coming together at the end. Jones brokered a secret meeting at Jackson’s family home in Encino in the summer of 1986, and sent Prince an early demo.
Prince turned it down. And the reason he gave in public, years later, is one of the funniest things ever said about a pop song.
Prince vs. Michael Jackson in “Bad” | The Chris Rock Show (1997)
In a 1997 interview with comedian Chris Rock, Prince explained exactly where the problem started. The opening line of “Bad” is “your butt is mine.” As Prince put it: “Now I’m saying, ‘Who’s gonna sing that to whom? Cuz you sure ain’t singing it to me, and I sure ain’t singing it to you.’ So right there, we got a problem.”
He also pointed out what the video would have meant for him. The finished clip, directed by Martin Scorsese, features a young Wesley Snipes as the rival Jackson faces down. Prince’s line about it is perfect: “That Wesley Snipes character? That would have been me. Now you run that video in your mind.”
Michael Jackson – Bad (Official Video)
Quincy Jones tells a gentler version. In his telling, Prince was “very intelligent about it” and let Jackson down politely, saying: “You don’t need me to be on this. It’ll be a hit without me.” Jones has also said something revealing about why he wanted it in the first place — that the line “your butt is mine” was designed for Prince, and that with a small edit to the lyric, the whole thing might have gone ahead.
Others close to Prince have given blunter accounts. Wendy Melvoin of Prince’s band The Revolution said in a book about Purple Rain that Prince thought the song was terrible, and did not want to be around the people involved. And Jones has always maintained the real issue was competition, saying flatly: “Prince was always competing with Michael.”
So “Bad” went out with Jackson alone. It became one of the defining singles of the eighties; the Bad album has sold around 35 million copies, and Wesley Snipes became a film star off the back of that video. Prince offered Jackson a different song of his own instead, called “Wouldn’t You Love To Love Me?” Jackson passed on it.
The two of them never recorded together. The biggest duet in pop history died over four words — and to the end of his life, Prince clearly thought he had made the right call.