You’ve heard it at weddings and parties for years now, maybe even in your own kitchen. It’s got that finger-snap beat and that playful back and forth, with Michael Jackson strutting down a city street after a girl who’s playing hard to get. “The Way You Make Me Feel” is one of the most fun songs he ever made.
Most people don’t know how it came together.
Michael was deep into his “Bad” album in 1987, the follow-up to his record-breaking “Thriller.” By then he was the biggest star on the planet. But one of the catchiest songs on that record didn’t start with him chasing an idea in the studio. It started with a simple request from someone very close to him.
The single came out in the fall of 1987, which makes it 39 years ago this fall. Before you read who asked for it, the official video is the easiest way to remember why this one stuck around.
The official “The Way You Make Me Feel” music video
So who made the request? It was his mother, Katherine Jackson.
Katherine raised all nine Jackson children, and music filled that house from the very start. She came up loving the older songs, the kind with a loose, bouncy, swinging rhythm that made people want to get up and move. Musicians have a name for that feel. They call it a shuffle, and it’s the rolling beat you hear in a lot of early rock and blues records.
As the music writers at Stereogum tell the story, Katherine wanted her son to write a shuffle. She asked Michael for one. And “The Way You Make Me Feel,” with all its strut and snap, turned out to be his answer to his mom.
Think about that for a second. The King of Pop, sitting at the very top of the music world, writing a song because his mother wanted to hear a certain kind of beat.
It worked out pretty well for both of them. The song climbed all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard chart in January 1988. It became one of the signature numbers of the whole “Bad” era, and Michael sang it on tour all over the world.
And there’s a sweet little piece of film that goes with the story. Someone caught a moment backstage on the Bad tour, and it shows a side of the family you’d never expect to see from the wings of a huge concert.
Watch who’s singing along in the background while Michael does his thing out front.
Rare backstage footage of Katherine and Janet singing along on the Bad tour
That’s Katherine, the very mother who asked for the song, singing every word of it. Right beside her is Janet Jackson, Michael’s younger sister and a giant pop star in her own right. The song their mom requested, and there the two of them are, loving every second of it.
It’s a short clip and the quality is rough. But once you know who asked Michael for this song in the first place, that little backstage moment means a whole lot more.