Category: Arts & Culture Key figures: Michael Jackson (artist, co-producer, songwriter), Quincy Jones (producer), Siedah Garrett (co-writer of “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You”; featured vocalist), Martin Scorsese (director of the “Bad” short film), Walter Yetnikoff (Epic Records president)
Bad is the seventh studio album by Michael Jackson, released on August 31, 1987, on Epic Records. Produced by Quincy Jones and Jackson — their third and final collaboration — the album was recorded at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles between January 1985 and July 1987. It followed Thriller (1982), then the best-selling album of all time, and arrived under enormous commercial pressure.
The album opens with “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” a pop duet with Siedah Garrett (who also co-wrote the song), followed by the muscular title track “Bad,” accompanied by an 18-minute short film directed by Martin Scorsese and shot in New York City. Other tracks include “The Way You Make Me Feel,” the anthemic gospel-tinged ballad “Man in the Mirror,” the rock-inflected “Dirty Diana,” and “Smooth Criminal,” which featured Jackson’s trademark 45-degree “anti-gravity lean.” The record contains 11 tracks in its standard release, with “Leave Me Alone” added as a bonus track on CD editions. Jackson wrote nine of the 11 songs and is credited as co-producer on all of them.
Bad debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and remained there for six consecutive weeks. Over the following year, five of its singles — “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” “Bad,” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “Man in the Mirror,” and “Dirty Diana” — each reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. This made Bad the first album in history to spawn five Hot 100 number-one singles, breaking the record of four previously held by the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack (1978). In the United Kingdom, the album debuted at number one on the Official Albums Chart on September 13, 1987, and remained there for five weeks; in its first week it sold over 350,000 copies, then the fastest-selling album debut in UK chart history.
The accompanying Bad World Tour ran from September 12, 1987 to January 27, 1989, covering 123 concerts across 15 countries and drawing 4.4 million attendees. It grossed approximately $125 million, making it one of the highest-grossing tours of the era. The tour opened at Korakuen Stadium in Yokohama, Japan — where Jackson played 14 consecutive sold-out shows — and closed at Roundhay Park in Leeds. It was the first major stadium tour by a solo pop artist.
Bad sold over 35 million copies worldwide, was certified 11× Platinum in the United States, and became the best-selling album of both 1987 and 1988. At the 30th Grammy Awards (1988), it won for Best Engineered Recording — Non-Classical.
Bad cemented Michael Jackson’s status as the dominant commercial force in popular music during the late 1980s and demonstrated that a follow-up to the best-selling album of all time could sustain its predecessor’s momentum at an unprecedented scale. Its record of five Hot 100 number-one singles from a single album stood for more than two decades until Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream matched it in 2011.
Beyond chart metrics, Bad shaped the visual language of popular music. The short films — especially the 18-minute “Bad” directed by Scorsese and the elaborate “Smooth Criminal” — elevated the music video from promotional tool to cinematic event, influencing the format throughout the 1990s. Jackson’s choreography on the tour, including the moonwalk, the anti-gravity lean, and the “crotch-grab” move, became global visual shorthand for pop stardom and influenced dancers and performers across genres for decades.
The album also marks the peak of the three-album creative partnership between Jackson and Quincy Jones, a collaboration that defined mainstream pop production in the 1980s and remains a benchmark for the crafting of commercially successful, sonically polished popular music.