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"Price of Fame"

Date range assessed by the facts in Mike Smallcombe’s “Making Michael” (“Over the course of the second half of 1985 and most of 1986, Michael and the B-Team created many demos… Michael wrote several ballads, including ‘Fly Away’, ‘Loving You’, ‘I’m So Blue’... and ‘Price of Fame’... these songs were never fully completed and wouldn’t be brought to the A-Team at Westlake”); vocals were most likely recorded in 1986.

Michael presold the song "Bad" to Pepsi for one commercial, and for the other he is providing a non-album cut called "The Price of Fame."

Matt Forger, sound engineer, “The Atlantic” (September 11, 2012) (archived)

Bill [Bottrell] and I worked on this one and I believe this is Bill's mix from that era... You can just tell it's an emotionally charged song. It's clearly based on his experience. But Michael often did songs that are based on his experience but blended with other characters and people's experiences as well.

“MJ Data Bank” (October 9, 2012) (archived)

Here is a song that has a long history in the MJ fan community. Price of Fame was scheduled to be the main theme of a Pepsi campaign. The song was not released and was eventually replaced by a special version of BAD with new Pepsi lyrics. Matt Forger remembers: “there was a special version of The Price of Fame with different lyrics for Pepsi. I don’t think a lot of people ever heard it. But this is the original version of The Price of Fame on BAD 25, and it was recorded at Hayvenhurst”.

As it sounds like a sequel to Billie Jean and a prequel to Who Is It, Price of Fame also has its own identity and originality. It is built around a smooth Ska / Reggae beat, one of Jackson’s scarce incursion into this genre (he also recorded background vocals for Joe King Carrasco’s 1982 Don’t Let A Woman (Make a Fool out of You)).

The lyrics perfectly reflect the state of mind Jackson may have been in as soon Thriller reached heights that to this day remain untouchable: “This is Michael talking about very personal experiences”, explains Forger. “It is about the kind of things that happened in his life especially after the success of Thriller. His popularity was so extreme that he was not able to go out in public at all without attention”.