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AV Club slams the Michael Jackson remixes

There are going to be far, far too many “Thriller” Michael Jackson’s on the streets Halloween night who haven’t listened to the recently deceased pop legend’s back catalogue. Jackson had plenty of R&B hits before the ‘80s, but that was largely when he was a young kid. A new compilation takes many of those early hits and hands them over to various recording artists—largely DJs and club hit makers—for a steady string of remixes.

The result, according to Nathan Rabin of The AV Club, is a record that is wildly uneven and largely unoriginal. There’s a very legitimate question about the need for this record, to begin with, and even the songs on there that do work just don’t push things in a new direction. If a remix doesn’t lend something new to a song, it might not be necessary in the first place.

Rabin claims “too many of the remakes are overly faithful or generic exercises in getting asses on the floor…Great remixes forever change the way we perceive familiar songs, or put classic songs in radical yet strangely perfect new contexts. This forgettable footnote of a posthumous cash-in does neither.”

Too bad. It could have been a welcome parting gift to serious Jackson fans who had bought concert tickets to see the King of Pop before he passed.