Michael Jackson toured the world for decades and played the songs from Thriller thousands of times. “Billie Jean.” “Beat It.” “Thriller.” “Human Nature.” “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” But there is one Top 10 hit from that album he never sang on stage in his life. Not on the Victory tour. Not on Bad. Not on Dangerous. Not on HIStory. “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” was performed live by Michael Jackson exactly zero times.
The song itself has a strange origin, and it starts with a piece of underwear. Quincy Jones, producing Thriller, got the title from his wife, the actress Peggy Lipton, who had brought home some lingerie with the words “pretty young thing” printed on it. Jones liked the phrase enough to look for a song to hang it on, so he handed the title to several songwriters and asked them to build something around it.
P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing) (Demo Version)
Michael took a crack at it himself. He co-wrote and recorded a demo with keyboardist Greg Phillinganes, who was a regular on his records, and Phillinganes then presented it to Quincy. Quincy turned it down. Michael’s own explanation of why is refreshingly unbitter and very practical: “Quincy wanted a fast song. Mine was mid-tempo.”
Then James Ingram brought in his version, built on the same title but musically nothing like Michael’s. Jones heard it and said two words: “that’s it.” He sent Ingram home to finish the lyrics. So the song that ended up on Thriller was written and composed entirely by Ingram and Jones, with Michael as the singer rather than the author. Michael’s rejected demo eventually surfaced two decades later on The Ultimate Collection in 2004, and was remixed by Will. i am for Thriller 25.
Hidden Mystery Behind Michael Jackson’s ‘PYT’
He did keep it in the family, though. Listen to the women singing back at him near the end, credited as “the P.Y.T.’s” — two of them are his own sisters, Janet and La Toya Jackson.
Commercially it worked. Released on 19 September 1983 as the penultimate single from Thriller, it went to number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it the sixth Top 10 hit from a single album. It reached number 11 in the UK and did best in Belgium, peaking at number 6. It has since been covered and sampled endlessly, most famously by Kanye West on “Good Life.”
So why did he never sing it? Michael never publicly explained, and anyone telling you they know for certain is guessing. But the likeliest answer is the least dramatic one. It was not his song. He had written or co-written the vast majority of the material he built his live shows around, and by the mid-eighties his setlists were packed with hits he owned outright. “P.Y.T.” was somebody else’s composition that he had sung on, and it never made the cut.
There is one tantalizing exception: the version he actually cared about. During rehearsals for the Dangerous World Tour, Michael sang a fragment of his own rejected demo — the mid-tempo one Quincy passed on — and described it to the room as “something I wrote that I haven’t recorded yet.” Nine years after the hit version went Top 10, the only part of “P.Y.T.” he ever performed was the version nobody released.