Zubissou Sounds

The room › Artists › Michael Jackson

Where to start with Michael Jackson

Start with Keep the Faith — Dangerous, 1991. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 17 Michael Jackson tracks in Zubissou Sounds — a listening room of 15,847 tracks placed one at a time by hand, not an algorithm.

This page is not a discography and not a ranking. It describes exactly one thing: the 17 Michael Jackson tracks that one person put in one room, and where they sit relative to each other. The starting point above is chosen by a rule you can check — of the 17 tracks, it is the one nearest the average position on the four knobs the room runs on, and where two sit equally close the one on a named record wins. Nothing here calls any record better than any other.

The collection leans hard on one record: 14 of the 17 tracks come from Dangerous alone.

The years need a caveat: 14 of 17 dated tracks land in the 1990s and come from 1 record, while the rest come from elsewhere — the mark of a reissue carrying its own date rather than the music's. Read the year column below as the date on the copy in this room, not the date the music arrived in the world.

17tracks in the room
3albums
1982–2001years covered
popfiled under

Three ways in

The one track, if you only play one

Keep the Faith — Dangerous, 1991. Of the 16 Michael Jackson tracks here that have actually been listened to, this one sits closest to the average of them across the four knobs the room runs on. The other 1 arrived carrying the default for their genre, and averaging a placeholder in would move the centre towards nothing. It is the least surprising thing among the tracks that were read, which is what an entry point should be.

If you want the melancholy end

Dangerous — Dangerous, 1991. The lowest mood reading of any Michael Jackson track in the room (51 out of 100). This is as far towards melancholy as the collection goes.

If you want the euphoric end

Beat It — Thriller, 1982. The highest mood reading here, at 90 out of 100 — a 39-point swing across the collection towards euphoric.

Where Michael Jackson sits in the room

Zubissou Sounds does not have playlists or genres you click. It has knobs. Every track carries a position on each one, set by hand when the track was added, and you find music by setting the room to a state rather than by searching for a name. These are Michael Jackson's average coordinates and the range they cover.

mood61avg
melancholy51–90euphoric
energy67avg
ambient48–75driving
density67avg
sparse58–88wall
head · body73avg
cerebral65–84groove

All four run 0–100. They are placed by a person, not derived from audio analysis or from any streaming service's feature data.

What is here, record by record

AlbumYearTracks
Dangerous199114
Thriller19822
Invincible20011

Every Michael Jackson track in the room

TrackAlbumYear
Baby Be MineThriller1982
Beat ItThriller1982
Black or WhiteDangerous1991
Can't Let Her Get AwayDangerous1991
DangerousDangerous1991
Give In to MeDangerous1991
Gone Too SoonDangerous1991
Heal the WorldDangerous1991
In the ClosetDangerous1991
JamDangerous1991
Keep the FaithDangerous1991
Remember the TimeDangerous1991
She Drives Me WildDangerous1991
Who Is ItDangerous1991
Why You Wanna Trip on MeDangerous1991
Will You Be ThereDangerous1991
ButterfliesInvincible2001

Near neighbours in this room

These are the artists whose average knob position sits nearest to Michael Jackson's in this room. It is a coordinate match, not a claim that they sound alike.

What the open databases say

MusicBrainz lists Michael Jackson as a solo artist, from Gary, the United States and born in 1958. Its contributors tag the artist pop, disco, dance-pop, r&b and soul. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.

Questions

How many Michael Jackson tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?

There are 17, across 3 albums. 17 of them carry a date, running from 1982 to 2001. That is the whole of what this room holds — it is one person's collection, not a discography.

Is this a best-of, or a ranking?

No. Nothing here is ranked and no track is called better than another. The starting point is picked by arithmetic — the track closest to the centre of all the others on four measured axes — and the rule is printed above so you can disagree with it.

Where do the knob numbers come from?

They are set by hand, one track at a time, by the person who added the track. They are not audio analysis and not a Spotify feature. Mood, energy, density and the head/body balance each run 0 to 100. 16 of these 17 tracks have been read that way. The other 1 arrived with the default for their genre and nobody has listened to them yet, so they are left out of the centre, the ends and the spread quoted above.

Can I listen to these here?

Not yet from this page. Zubissou Sounds is in private beta — the room itself plays through Spotify, and 17 of these 17 tracks are matched to a Spotify ID and ready to play the moment you are in. The waitlist form is at the bottom of this page.

Get on the list

The room is in private beta — 15,847 tracks by 7,473 artists, including these. Leave an address and you go in the queue in order. No newsletter, no marketing, no third parties: the address is used once, to let you in.