The most expensive album in music history arrived with a gold-painted face and a pixelated eye, and almost nobody was allowed to hear it properly. Michael Jackson, the pop singer who had defined the previous two decades, released Invincible on October 30, 2001, his tenth and final studio album issued while he was alive. It had taken four years to make, cost nearly 30 million dollars, and involved ten producers and more than a hundred musicians. Yet within months, the record was effectively abandoned by the very company that released it.
It had taken four years to make, cost nearly 30 million dollars, and involved ten producers and more than a hundred musicians.
Four years of recording
The trouble had been building long before the album hit stores. Jackson had been recording since 1997, moving between studios in New York, Miami and Hollywood, but most of the final material was written only in the last year of production. One song, "You Are My Life," was recorded just eight weeks before release. Only five tracks dated from earlier sessions. The singer wanted a sharper, more aggressive sound, and he chased it through a rotating cast of producers including Rodney Jerkins, Teddy Riley, Babyface, R. Kelly and Dr. Freeze.
The record itself was a sprawling mix of R&B, pop and soul, running over 77 minutes across 16 songs, fourteen of them written or co-written by Jackson. It swung between hard, percussive tracks and soft ballads. The opening song, "Unbreakable," carried a line that felt like a mission statement: a line about surviving everything and still being here. Other songs drew directly from his life. "Privacy" addressed media intrusion and tabloid inaccuracies. "Speechless" came from the joy of a water-balloon fight with children. "You Are My Life" was dedicated to his two children, Prince and Paris.
Collaborators and the gold cover
Jackson also reached for collaborators who could give the album a harder edge. Carlos Santana played on it, as did Slash, and the late rapper Notorious B.I.G. appeared posthumously. For one track, Jackson had wanted an unknown rapper and chose Fats from New Jersey; after hearing the finished song, he decided to record another one with him. The cover was just as deliberate. Jackson had been inspired by a 1992 photograph called "The Golden Boy" by the Scottish photographer Albert Watson, who shot him through mirrors to create a series of poses. The final image showed Jackson with gold makeup and gold hair, his right eye, his name and the album title all pixelated. Four color versions were released: red, orange, blue and green.
The dedication page pointed somewhere darker. Invincible was dedicated to Benjamin Hermansen, a 15-year-old Afro-Norwegian teenager murdered by neo-Nazis in Oslo in January 2001. The dedication included words about judging a person not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. The album was also dedicated to Nikki Sottile and to Jackson's parents, Joseph and Katherine. It was a strange mix of messages: a record about survival, privacy, lost children and healing the world together, wrapped in gold and pixels.
First-week sales and singles
At first, the numbers looked strong. The album entered the Billboard 200 at the top spot, selling 363,000 copies in its first week, and reached number one in 13 other countries. The lead single, "You Rock My World," was produced by Rodney Jerkins and cut in 1999 at Criteria Studios in Miami; it reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. A promotional single, "Butterflies," climbed to number 14 on the Hot 100 and spent five weeks at number two on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles Chart. Jackson had wanted "Unbreakable" to be the first single, but it only appeared as a promo release.
Then the machinery stopped. A world tour in support of the album was planned but cancelled, partly because of the September 11 attacks and partly because of a deepening dispute with Sony. The conflict was not about the new record but about the master recordings of Jackson's older albums, which should have returned to him after 1999 but stayed with the label. Jackson discovered that a lawyer who had prepared his contract had also been working for Sony, a conflict of interest that poisoned the relationship. A promotional budget of 25 million dollars existed, but little of it was spent. After Jackson left Sony, the label cancelled all promotional events and the release of a charity single recorded in response to September 11.
The public break came in July 2002, when Jackson called the head of Sony Music, Tommy Mottola, a devil and a racist. Sony denied underpromoting the album and said Jackson had refused a US tour. By then, Invincible had become the most criticized album of Jackson's career, with initial reviews ranging from middling to harsh. The second single, "Cry," was not even released in the United States and found only moderate success in Spain, Denmark, France and Belgium. The album eventually sold more than eight million copies worldwide and went double platinum in the US, but for an artist of Jackson's scale, it felt like a defeat.
Time has been kinder than the label was. Retrospective reviews praise the album's musicality and production, and in 2009, after Jackson's death, readers of Billboard voted Invincible the best album of the 2000s. The record that was too expensive, too long and too embattled to succeed on its own terms now stands as the last full statement from a singer who was still fighting to be heard. On the cover, his eye is pixelated, half-hidden, but the gold still gleams.