The Michael Jackson Story the Biopic Film Can’t Fit Into Two Hours

On April 24, 2026, Michael — the long-anticipated Michael Jackson biopic directed by Antoine Fuqua — opens in theaters worldwide. Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s own nephew, steps into the white glove and the fedora for the lead role. The teaser alone was viewed more than 116 million times in its first 24 hours, breaking every record set by Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, and even Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concert film. A whole new generation is about to meet the King of Pop.

But here’s what no two-hour biopic can ever fully capture: the hidden music history inside Michael Jackson’s catalog. The near-cuts. The car fires. The grunge singers who stripped his songs to the bone and found something aching underneath. The Latin jazz orchestras that revealed what Latin America had known all along — that Michael Jackson’s music was never just American property.

That’s the story we tell on the latest episode of Uncovering the Cover: the music history podcast dedicated to the hidden journeys of the world’s most important songs. Before you see Michael in theaters this week, here’s a look at what the movie doesn’t have time to tell you.

You can read the full transcript of the episode further down below.

What Jaafar Jackson’s in the ‘Michael’ Biopic Performance Can — and Can’t — Show Us

Any biopic is a highlight reel. Michael will recreate the iconic moments: the moonwalk debut at Motown 25 in 1983. The Thriller video shoot. The global concert spectacles of the Bad and Dangerous tours. The Neverland years. The trial. The tragic ending.

And the Michael movie soundtrack — which will inevitably dominate streaming charts for weeks after release — will reintroduce a generation to “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” “Smooth Criminal,” “Rock with You,” and “I’ll Be There.” These are the songs everyone knows. The songs the biopic has to hit.

What a movie can’t do, though, is follow those songs after Michael Jackson. And that, honestly, is where the most interesting story lives.

Because Michael Jackson is the most covered artist in pop music history. His catalog has been reinterpreted by grunge legends, pop-punk bands, reality-TV stars, Grammy-winning sopranos, and Latin jazz orchestras. Every single one of those covers is a piece of evidence: evidence that his songs are not artifacts of a moment. They are living structures that keep generating new meaning.

The Night ‘Billie Jean’ Almost Got Cut From Thriller

Start with the most important song in the entire catalog. “Billie Jean” — the song that opens every Michael Jackson conversation — almost didn’t make it onto Thriller at all.

Michael Jackson wrote “Billie Jean” alone. The bass line, he later said, came to him while he was driving down the Ventura Freeway in Los Angeles. He was so absorbed by what was forming in his head that he didn’t notice his car had caught fire. A passing motorcyclist had to pull alongside and alert him to the flames. He pulled over, put the fire out, and went back to the bass line.

The lyrics came from real terror. Michael Jackson had been receiving letters from a woman claiming he was the father of one of her twins. He had never met her. The escalation ended with her sending him a photograph of herself, a gun, and instructions to die at a specific time so they could be together in the afterlife. Out of that experience, he wrote one of the most famous refrains in pop: “The kid is not my son.”

Then he presented the demo to Quincy Jones. And Quincy — one of the most musically sophisticated producers alive — said the intro was too long. Too repetitive. Cut the bass down.

Michael refused. In one of the most consequential artistic standoffs in pop music history, the bass stayed. The 91 drum takes stayed. The four-bar predatory intro that sets the entire emotional register of the song — stayed. If Quincy had won that argument, “Billie Jean” as we know it would not exist.

This is the kind of hidden music history a biopic can gesture at but rarely has time to excavate. And it’s only the beginning.

Why Chris Cornell Stripped ‘Billie Jean’ to Its Bones

In 2007, Chris Cornell — lead singer of Soundgarden, Audioslave, and one of the most distinctive voices in rock history — released his solo album Carry On. On it was something nobody saw coming: a cover of “Billie Jean.”

The origin of that cover is one of our favorite stories in music. Cornell’s wife had challenged him: cover a song nobody would ever expect you to touch. The first name that came to mind was Michael Jackson. The first song was “Billie Jean.”

His first attempt was electric guitar, trying to turn the keyboard line into a rock riff. It was, in his own words, embarrassingly awful. So he abandoned the sonics and went back to the lyrics. He read them carefully. As poetry. And he realized something that an entire generation had been dancing past for twenty-five years: “Billie Jean” is not a dance track. It’s a lament.

It’s a song about the terror of fame. About being falsely accused by a stranger. About the loneliness that lives inside being loved by people who don’t actually know you.

Cornell stripped the arrangement to an acoustic guitar in a minor key. He let the words breathe. The result is one of the most celebrated cover songs of the 21st century — and one of the purest demonstrations of what a great cover can do. It doesn’t copy. It translates.

A year later, on American Idol Season 7, a contestant named David Cook performed Cornell’s arrangement of “Billie Jean.” A cover of a cover. It charted at #47 on the Billboard Hot 100 and helped Cook win the show. The song had now traveled so far from its origin that it was spawning its own generational lineage.

Fall Out Boy, John Mayer, and the Five-Minute Guitar Solo

In 2008, Fall Out Boy stumbled into a “Beat It” cover by accident. Vocalist Patrick Stump started playing the riff at a soundcheck. The band fell into it. They ended up recording it for their live DVD — and then had to decide who was going to replace Eddie Van Halen’s legendary guitar solo.

Bassist Pete Wentz had a philosophy: Van Halen had been the defining guitarist of his era when he played on the original “Beat It.” So the replacement had to be a generational equivalent. He called John Mayer.

Five minutes later, Wentz’s phone buzzed. It was Mayer. He had already recorded the solo.

The Fall Out Boy / Mayer version of “Beat It” peaked at #19 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent 21 weeks on the UK charts. An entire generation of pop-punk kids who had grown up on Blink-182 suddenly discovered that Michael Jackson lived in their world too.

The Covers That Prove Michael Jackson Never Belonged to America Alone

This is the part of the story the Michael movie soundtrack won’t fully tell you: Michael Jackson’s relationship with Latin America is one of the most underreported legacies in music.

Thriller holds the all-time record for the best-selling album in Mexican history. In 1993, during the Dangerous World Tour, Jackson performed five consecutive concerts at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City — a total attendance of 550,000 people. His music crossed every linguistic and cultural barrier because it was built on emotional truths that required no translation.

In 2015, the Peruvian-American musician Tony Succar made that relationship explicit. He released Unity: The Latin Tribute to Michael Jackson — a full reimagination of twelve Jackson classics with a 37-piece orchestra, featuring vocalists like Sheila E. and Tito Nieves. “Billie Jean” became a Latin jazz fusion. “Smooth Criminal” became salsa. The album aired as a PBS special and became the first commercially released Latin homage to the King of Pop.

And in 1992 — on her MTV Unplugged set — Mariah Carey added a last-minute cover of the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” to her setlist. The performance became a #1 hit. A song originally sung by eleven-year-old Michael Jackson in 1970 became a chart-topper again 22 years later, in the voice of one of the greatest sopranos of the modern era.

What every one of these covers tells us is that Michael Jackson built something that time cannot reach.

The Complicated Legacy No Biopic Can Resolve

Of course, a full account of Michael Jackson’s legacy cannot avoid the controversies that have defined and contested it since 1993. The settlement with Jordan Chandler. The 2005 trial and full acquittal. The 2019 Leaving Neverland documentary.

Michael arrives in theaters with that complexity unresolved — and director Antoine Fuqua has said his intention was to humanize without sanitizing, and let audiences decide how they feel. Paris Jackson, Michael’s daughter, has publicly distanced herself from the film.

On the podcast, we hold the complexity openly. Not because it’s comfortable. Because it’s honest. Genius and trauma can coexist. A man can leave the world something irreplaceable and also be someone the world cannot fully exonerate. Choosing sides before the full story is known is not critical thinking — it’s just speed. And the story of the King of Pop demands something slower.

Listen to the Full Story

Our latest episode of Uncovering the Cover — “King of Covers: The Michael Jackson Story” — is a 38-minute deep dive into the music history the biopic doesn’t have time to tell. The origin of “Billie Jean.” The covers that redefined what his songs could mean. The Latin America relationship that shaped his global legacy. And the complicated questions we’re still asking.

Whether you’re seeing Michael this weekend, revisiting Thriller for the first time in years, or just trying to understand why Jaafar Jackson’s performance has the world talking — this episode is the companion piece you’ve been looking for.

🎧 Listen now on [Spotify] | [Apple Podcasts] | [YouTube]

Follow Uncovering the Cover on Instagram and TikTok — and tell us which song you’d like uncovered next.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE

COLD OPEN

Picture this. 

1983. March 25th. A Tuesday night in Los Angeles. Forty-seven million Americans are sitting in front of their television sets, watching NBC. The Jackson brothers are being celebrated for their twenty-fifth anniversary at Motown Records. A great night. A sentimental night. 

Then Michael Jackson walks to the center of the stage. Alone. He picks up a fedora. He sets his jaw. A bass line begins — deep, patient, almost predatory.

And for two minutes and thirty seconds, he performs “Billie Jean.”

Nobody planned what happened next. Not the producers. Not the network. Not Michael himself — at least not in the way that word “planned” would suggest. What happened was this: he did the moonwalk. Right there. On live television. In front of the biggest audience of his life. A dance move he’d been privately refining for three years — and the world sees it for the first time.

Motown founder Berry Gordy later said it was the greatest moment in the history of entertainment. Fred Astaire — the Fred Astaire — called Michael Jackson at home and told him he was a hell of a mover.

 Now picture this.

2007. A recording studio. A man named Chris Cornell — the voice of Soundgarden, the architect of “Black Hole Sun,” one of the greatest rock singers of his generation — is sitting alone with an acoustic guitar. His wife has just challenged him: “What song would you cover that nobody would ever expect you to touch?” The first artist that comes into his mind is Michael Jackson. The first song is “Billie Jean.”

His first attempt — electric guitar, trying to turn the keyboard line into a riff — is, in his own words, embarrassingly awful. But then he reads the lyrics. Really reads them. As poetry. As a story. And he understands something that the whole world had been dancing past for twenty years.

“Billie Jean” is not a dance track. It’s a lament. It’s a love song written by a man terrified of false accusation. It’s a window into what it actually cost to be Michael Jackson.

He strips it to an acoustic guitar. He plays it in a lower register. He lets the words breathe. And the song — which for a generation had been a dance floor institution — reveals itself as something rawer, deeper, and more complex than any of us had understood.

 And now picture this.

April 2026. A theater near you. The lights go down. And the nephew of Michael Jackson — his actual blood, his family — appears on screen, wearing the white glove, attempting to resurrect one of the most celebrated and most contested legacies in the history of popular culture. One hundred and sixteen million people watched the trailer in its first twenty-four hours. More than any musical biopic in history.

The same songs. Three different worlds. Three different generations. And the same question hanging over all of them:

What does it mean when a song outlives not just its creator — but the entire world that made it?

Welcome to Uncovering the Cover — the podcast that explores the hidden stories behind music’s greatest transformations. Today, we have the story of “Billie Jean” — a song that almost never existed, that broke the racial barrier on American television, and that became the ultimate litmus test for every artist brave enough to cover it. And through it, the story of Michael Jackson: the most covered artist in pop history, the man who shattered every ceiling music had ever built, and the most complicated legacy our culture has ever been asked to hold.

Let’s go.

ACT 1: “The Night the Bass Line Changed Everything”

Here’s a fact that will reframe everything you think you know about Michael Jackson: Quincy Jones — his producer, his collaborator, the genius who made Thriller — didn’t want “Billie Jean” on the album.

To understand why that matters — and why it’s nothing short of miraculous that you’ve ever heard “Billie Jean” at all — we need to go back to the beginning. Not the beginning of Thriller. All the way back.

Gary, Indiana. 1964. A two-story house on 23rd Street, so small that a family of eleven barely fits inside. Joe Jackson — steelworker by day, musician by night — runs the household with an iron discipline that his children would later describe in terms ranging from driven to terrifying. He sees something in his sons. Something Gary, Indiana doesn’t yet know how to name. He decides to do something about it.

Michael Joseph Jackson is born the eighth of ten children, on August 29, 1958. He joins his brothers’ group at five years old. And before he turns eleven, he is the lead vocalist of the Jackson 5 — already, unmistakably, a supernatural force.

The Jackson 5 sign with Motown Records in 1969. Berry Gordy launches them with a carefully crafted mythology — claiming Diana Ross discovered them, booking them into the Hollywood club circuit before radio. It was a machine. A beautiful, ruthless machine. And it worked.

Their first four Motown singles — “I Want You Back,” “ABC,” “The Love You Save,” and “I’ll Be There” — all go to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Consecutively. No act had done that on their debut. No act has matched it since.

But here’s the part of Michael Jackson’s story that gets swallowed by the shadow of Thriller: the young Michael Jackson was himself a devoted student of the cover song. His second major solo single, in 1972, was a cover. “Rockin’ Robin” — a 1958 novelty hit by Bobby Day, written by a man named Leon René under a pseudonym because he thought so little of the song that he didn’t want to put his real name on it. René never renewed the copyright. He lost a fortune in royalties when Michael Jackson’s version went to number two on the Hot 100.

But here is what matters: Michael Jackson, at thirteen years old, heard that throwaway bird song and understood what was inside it. He took it and made it his. He learned, in that studio at Motown, what would become the animating principle of his entire artistic life: that a great song doesn’t belong to its first performer. It belongs to whoever loves it most. 

By 1979, Michael Jackson was twenty years old, and in danger of being defined by his childhood. Disco was dying. The Jackson 5 had moved from Motown to Epic. And the question hanging in the air was whether Michael could survive the transition from prodigy to adult artist.

The answer came from an unlikely partnership. Quincy Jones — a jazz arranger and composer who had worked with Miles Davis and Frank Sinatra — agreed to produce Michael’s fifth solo album. The result was Off the Wall: the first solo album ever to produce four top-ten singles. Critics called it brilliant. The public loved it. Michael Jackson expected more from the Grammys. He felt robbed. And that righteous fury — that feeling of being underestimated by the very industry he was about to conquer — he channeled every ounce of it into what came next.

 The story of how “Billie Jean” was born deserves its own film.

Michael Jackson was driving down the Ventura Freeway in Los Angeles, sometime in 1981. He heard it. Not a melody, not lyrics — a feeling. A bass line. Deep, patient, almost predatory. He later said he was so absorbed by what was forming in his mind that he didn’t notice his car had caught fire. A passing motorcyclist pulled alongside him and alerted him to the flames.

He pulled over. And then he went back to the bass line.

“A musician knows hit material,” he said. “Everything has to feel in place. It fulfills you and makes you feel good. That’s how I felt about Billie Jean. I knew it was going to be big when I was writing it.”

The lyrics were drawn from two real experiences. The first was the groupies who had circled the Jackson family since their Motown years — young women who would claim connections to whoever was famous in their orbit. “There were a lot of Billie Jeans out there,” Jackson said. “Every girl claimed that their son was related to one of my brothers.”

The second was more disturbing. In the early 1980s, Jackson received a series of letters from a woman claiming he was the father of one of her twins. He had never met her. The letters escalated. She eventually sent a parcel containing a photograph of herself, a gun, and a letter instructing him to die at a specific time so they could be together in the next life. She was hospitalized.

Out of that terror, Michael Jackson wrote the line: “The kid is not my son.”

He brought the demo to Quincy Jones. And Jones — one of the most musically sophisticated people alive — told him the introduction was too long. Too repetitive. The bass needed to come down. Michael Jackson refused. The bass stayed. Ninety-one drum takes stayed. The introduction that sets the entire emotional register of the song — stayed. It was one of the most consequential artistic arguments in the history of pop music.

“Billie Jean” was released in January 1983. It went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed for seven weeks. But its most important moment came in March, when its video was released to MTV. The network — then barely two years old — had been under fierce criticism for refusing to play videos by Black artists, hiding behind a “rock format” justification. CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff reportedly threatened to pull all label artists from the network if they refused to air it. MTV relented. “Billie Jean” cracked open a wall that had made American music television racially segregated since the network’s founding.

And then came March 25, 1983. Motown 25. NBC. Forty-seven million viewers. Michael Jackson alone on a stage with a bass line and a fedora. And a move he called the moonwalk, performed publicly for the first time in his life. Fred Astaire called him that same night. James Brown, by multiple accounts, watched in tears. Berry Gordy said it was the greatest moment in the history of entertainment.

 In a single performance, Michael Jackson didn’t just perform a great song. He announced himself as something the world had no category for. A singular force. A new kind of artist. The King of Pop.

 By the time Thriller finished its run, it had sold more copies than any album ever recorded — a record it still holds today. Michael Jackson was not just famous. He was a different category of famous. But fame at that scale doesn’t shield you. It illuminates you. Every flaw. Every secret. Every shadow. And in Act Two, we follow Michael Jackson to the summit of his empire — and into the darkness that lived beneath it.

ACT 2: “The Most Complicated Man in Pop History”

Here’s a number that will stop you: 550,000. That’s how many people Michael Jackson performed for across five consecutive nights at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City during his 1993 Dangerous World Tour. Five hundred and fifty thousand people. And Thriller, to this day, holds the all-time record for the best-selling album in Mexican history. The King of Pop was not an American phenomenon. He was a human one.

To understand Michael Jackson’s global empire, you need to hold the numbers in your body, not just your mind.

Thriller: released November 30, 1982. Twelve tracks. Seven top-ten singles. Eight Grammy Awards in a single night — the most in history at the time. Guinness World Record for best-selling album in 1984. Still the best-selling album in history today, with estimated worldwide sales between 66 and 110 million copies. No album has come close. Not Fleetwood Mac. Not The Eagles. Not Pink Floyd. Not anyone.

Bad (1987): five consecutive number-one singles from a single album. That record still stands. The Bad World Tour ran 123 shows across fifteen countries, attracting 4.4 million attendees — the largest solo concert tour in history at the time. The Dangerous Tour in 1992 and 1993 went even further: Africa, Europe, Asia, the Americas. In Bucharest, Romania — barely two years after the fall of communism — 90,000 people attended a single show, broadcast on HBO. For millions behind what had been the Iron Curtain, it was not just a concert. It was a signal from another world.

And in Latin America, something deeper was happening. Michael Jackson’s music crossed every wall — language, geography, class — because it was built on emotional truths that required no translation. In Mexico, Thriller didn’t just sell. It became the standard by which all popular music was measured. In the 1980s, families in rural communities who had never heard of James Brown could moonwalk. Children who didn’t speak English could sing the chorus of “Billie Jean” phonetically, with total commitment, as if it were their own native language. Because in every way that mattered, it was.

But the story of Michael Jackson cannot be understood through numbers alone. And it cannot be understood without sitting with its contradictions.

In 1985, Michael Jackson purchased the ATV Music catalog — 250 of the most valuable song copyrights in popular music history, including a vast portion of the Beatles’ catalog — for $47.5 million. His friend Paul McCartney had once advised him to invest in music publishing, never imagining that Michael would buy the very catalog containing songs they had performed together. The purchase made Jackson one of the most powerful figures in the music publishing industry. It also, quietly, ended the friendship.

There is a profound irony here for a show about cover songs: Michael Jackson — a man who built his early artistry on the art of interpreting others’ work — became the owner of the most covered catalog in rock history. 

And then — the skin.

In the late 1980s, Michael Jackson’s appearance began to change. His skin grew progressively lighter. He was publicly forthcoming about a diagnosis of vitiligo — a condition that destroys skin pigmentation in uneven patches, often making uniform depigmentation a medical choice rather than a cosmetic one. Dermatologists who later examined him confirmed the diagnosis. And yet the cultural conversation refused to accept the explanation at face value. The world watched the most famous Black man on the planet appear to change color and could not make peace with what it saw. Accusations of self-erasure followed him. Questions about his relationship to his own identity. Charges that the man who broke the racial barrier on MTV was somehow rejecting his heritage.

The truth, as it so often is, was more layered than any single narrative could hold.

 And then came 1993. And the name Jordan Chandler.

This episode is not a courtroom. We are not here to deliver a verdict. We are here to engage honestly with the full complexity of a life. And that requires naming what cannot be avoided.

In August 1993, a thirteen-year-old boy made allegations of sexual abuse against Michael Jackson. A civil lawsuit was settled in January 1994 for a reported $23 million, with no admission of guilt. The criminal investigation was dropped when Jordan Chandler declined to testify. Michael Jackson maintained his innocence for the remainder of his life.

In 2003, a Martin Bashir documentary introduced new allegations from a boy named Gavin Arvizo. Jackson went to trial in 2005 and was acquitted on all fourteen counts.

In 2019 — a decade after his death — the documentary Leaving Neverland presented testimonies from two men who claimed abuse as children. Radio stations pulled his music. Streaming numbers dropped. The reckoning that had been deferred by his death arrived with full force.

There is no clean resolution. There may never be one. What we can say — and what the biopic’s director Antoine Fuqua tried to honor — is that genius and trauma can coexist. That a man can leave something irreplaceable with the world and also be someone the world cannot fully exonerate. That holding both truths is not comfortable. But it is the only honest posture available.

Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, from acute propofol intoxication administered by his personal physician. He was fifty years old. At his public memorial, Al Sharpton looked at Michael’s three children and said something that has stayed with the world ever since: “Wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy. It was strange what your daddy had to deal with.”

What Michael Jackson left behind — beyond everything — was a body of music so structurally complete, so emotionally universal, so melodically inevitable that no cultural reckoning has been able to diminish it. His songs kept traveling. They kept finding new voices. They kept transforming into new things.

And that is where the story of Uncovering the Cover truly begins.

 The greatest test of a song’s immortality is not its chart position. It’s not its Grammy count. It’s not even its sales. The greatest test is this: when the greatest artists alive — the ones who can write anything, play anything, sing anything — when they need to show the world what they are capable of, what song do they choose? In Act Three, we find that the answer, again and again, is Michael Jackson.ACT 3: “The Songs the World Won’t Let Die”

In 2007, Rolling Stone asked Chris Cornell why he chose to cover “Billie Jean.” His answer is one of the most precise descriptions of what a cover song can do that I’ve ever heard. He said: “I realized it’s a lament, not a dance track. His moonwalking and the video — and just the bass line and the beat — took precedence over the meaning. The lyrics are brilliant. The story isn’t spoon-fed to you. It’s poetic.” Chris Cornell heard something in “Billie Jean” that the whole world had been dancing past.

 Let’s talk about what Chris Cornell did. Because his version of “Billie Jean” is one of the most consequential events in the cultural afterlife of Michael Jackson’s music — and it almost didn’t happen.

It begins with a conversation. Cornell’s wife challenges him: what song would you cover that no one would ever expect? He goes to the most extreme version of the question he can find. Who would be the least likely artist for him to attempt? The first name is Michael Jackson. The first song is “Billie Jean.”

His first attempt is electric guitar. He tries to turn the keyboard line into a guitar riff. The result is — in his own words — embarrassingly awful. But instead of abandoning it, he goes back to the lyrics. He reads them carefully. As poetry. As a story.

And he understands something that a generation of dancers had missed: “Billie Jean” is a song about fear. It’s about a man being accused of something he didn’t do, by someone he’s never met. It’s about the loneliness that lives at the center of extreme fame — being loved by people who don’t know you, and hated by people who don’t know you, and unable to tell the difference in the dark.

Cornell strips the song to an acoustic guitar. He plays it in a lower register. He plays arpeggios where Michael played bass. He extends certain vowels — pulling them out into something aching. And the song reveals itself as something it was always capable of being: not a moment of triumph, but a confession.

The cover appeared on Carry On in 2007. It became one of the most talked-about covers of the decade. MTV called it a “bluesier, more pained and impassioned” reading that stripped away “any pop elements of the original.” The Los Angeles Times called it “a grim, spooky take” — and added that the song survived the transformation with its greatness intact.

 Chris Cornell didn’t cover “Billie Jean.” He excavated it. He removed everything Michael Jackson had built on top of the song — the production, the rhythm, the dance — and found the bare, terrified human being underneath. That’s what the greatest covers do. They don’t copy. They translate.

But here is where the story of a cover song can become its own kind of legacy.

In 2008, a young man named David Cook auditioned for American Idol Season 7. He performed “Billie Jean.” But he didn’t perform Michael Jackson’s version. He performed Chris Cornell’s. A cover of a cover. A third-generation transformation of the original. That performance charted on the Billboard Hot 100at number 47 and played a significant role in Cook winning the entire competition. The song had now traveled so far from its origin that it was inspiring a third generation of interpretation — and each version was revealing a different facet of the original’s genius.

The chain of transformation: Michael Jackson writes a song about fear and false accusation. Chris Cornell strips it to its bones and finds the lament inside. David Cook covers the stripped-down lament and becomes a star. This is how great songs move through time. Not by staying the same — but by becoming, in each new mouth, something new.

The same year, 2008, a different kind of cover was making noise. Fall Out Boy — the pop-punk band from Illinois — had started playing “Beat It” at their soundchecks. Almost as a joke. Vocalist Patrick Stump started playing the riff one afternoon, the band fell into it naturally, and eventually they recorded it for a live DVD package. What they didn’t plan was releasing it as a single. What they really didn’t plan was having to find a replacement for Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo.

Here is the original story: Quincy Jones had asked Van Halen to play the solo on “Beat It” as a favor. Van Halen spent an afternoon in the studio and didn’t even bill for his time. When the song became a worldwide number-one hit, Van Halen reportedly expected his rock colleagues to respect the collaboration. Some did. The significance of his solo was not lost on anyone who loved guitar.

For Fall Out Boy’s version, Pete Wentz had a philosophy. He asked: “Back in the day, Eddie Van Halen played on Beat It. Who is a contemporary guitar guy who’s going to go down as a legend?” The answer was John Mayer. Wentz called him. Mayer agreed. And then Wentz’s phone buzzed. It was Mayer. Five minutes had passed. He had already recorded the solo.

Fall Out Boy’s “Beat It” peaked at number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent 21 weeks on the UK charts. Pop-punk kids who had grown up with Blink-182 and Green Day were suddenly discovering that “Beat It” lived in their world too. The generational gate was open.

To understand the full scope of what Michael Jackson’s catalog has meant to the world, you have to travel back to 1992. Mariah Carey is filming her MTV Unplugged special. She’s at the height of her early career — already the most important new voice in pop. At the last minute, her team suggests adding a Jackson 5 song to the set list. Not a Michael solo song. A Jackson 5 song. “I’ll Be There” — from 1970. The fourth of their consecutive number-one singles. A song Michael Jackson sang as a twelve-year-old boy.

Mariah performs it live, acoustic, with nothing to hide behind. And it becomes one of the biggest hits of her career. A song from 1970 reaches number one in 1992. A twenty-two-year gap between original and cover. An eleven-year-old’s voice heard through the mouth of one of the greatest sopranos in pop history. This is not nostalgia. This is resurrection.

And then there is the Latin story. The one that has been true the longest and received the least attention.

In 2015, a Peruvian-American musician named Tony Succar released an album called Unity: The Latin Tribute to Michael Jackson. Twelve tracks. A thirty-seven-piece orchestra. Vocalists including Sheila E. and Tito Nieves. “Billie Jean” became a Latin jazz composition. “Smooth Criminal” became a salsa arrangement. The album aired as a PBS special in October 2015. It was the first commercial Latin tribute to Michael Jackson ever produced.

It was also an act of cultural reckoning. Because Latin America did not need Tony Succar to discover Michael Jackson. Thriller holds the all-time best-selling album record in Mexico. Five hundred and fifty thousand people came to Estadio Azteca across five nights in 1993. There are documented stories of families in rural Colombia, in the highlands of Peru, in the cities of Venezuela, who could name every song on Thriller and perform the moonwalk without ever having set foot in a record store.

What Tony Succar did was not introduce Michael Jackson to Latin America. He returned Michael Jackson to Latin America — and showed the world, on PBS, that the relationship had always been there.

These covers — Cornell’s haunting lament, Fall Out Boy’s pop-punk reclamation, Mariah’s acoustic resurrection, Tony Succar’s Latin reimagination — are not imitations. They are translations. Each one takes the same source material and renders it in a different cultural and emotional language. And together, they tell us something fundamental about what Michael Jackson built.

His songs are not products of their moment. They are not vessels for nostalgia. They are musical structures so emotionally complete, so universally human, so melodically inevitable that they continue to generate new meaning every time a new voice touches them. They are what we call, in the deepest sense of the word, standards.

And now, in April 2026, as Jaafar Jackson steps into his uncle’s shoes on movie screens around the world, the culture is being asked once again to hold the full complexity of Michael Jackson’s story. The trailer gathered one hundred and sixteen million views in its first twenty-four hours — more than any musical biopic in history. The world is still watching. The world is still listening.

The songs are still traveling.

OUTRO

So what have we learned today?

We’ve learned that Michael Jackson began his career as a student of other people’s songs — covering Bobby Day’s “Rockin’ Robin” at thirteen and learning, in the process, what it means to love a melody so deeply that you make it new.

We’ve learned that “Billie Jean” — the most iconic song he ever recorded — almost didn’t exist. That it was saved by a refusal to compromise. That its bass line was born in a car that caught fire on a California freeway. That its lyrics were drawn from the terror of a woman who sent a gun and instructions for him to die.

We’ve learned that the measure of a song’s greatness is not its chart position or its Grammy count. The measure of a song’s greatness is what other great artists do with it when they need to prove what they can do with someone else’s genius. And by that measure, Michael Jackson’s catalog may be the richest body of work in the history of popular music.

We’ve learned that covering a great song is an act of courage and humility — and that the greatest covers don’t copy. They translate. Chris Cornell didn’t cover “Billie Jean.” He excavated it. Fall Out Boy didn’t cover “Beat It.” They carried it into a generation that needed it. Tony Succar didn’t cover Michael Jackson. He showed the world that Michael Jackson had always already belonged to Latin America.

And we’ve learned — and this is the hardest thing — that genius and trauma can coexist. That a man can give the world something irreplaceable and also be someone the world cannot fully exonerate. That holding both truths at the same time is not comfortable. But it is honest. And in a world that is often asked to choose sides before the full story is known, honest might be the most radical thing we can offer.

The biopic Michael opens on April 24, 2026. His nephew Jaafar steps into the role. The trailer broke records before the film was even seen. And the question the world is still asking — what do we do with Michael Jackson? — has no clean answer. But the songs keep answering it. One cover at a time.

This has been Uncovering the Cover, King of Covers: The Michael Jackson Story. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend who also enjoys music culture, because our culture is best preserved when music is shared. Subscribe, follow us and review us, so we can reach more music culture fans. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok, and let us know which song you’d like uncovered next. You can go to our website, which is linked in the show notes, to find a transcript and all the information regarding this episode. Uncovering the Cover brings you the hidden stories behind music’s greatest transformations. Until next time.