Black or White

This one opens with a comedy sketch — a father, a bedroom, a guitar amp cranked past reason — before Slash's riff kicks the door in and the track settles into a hybrid of hard rock, new jack swing, and a bouncing pop chorus. Bill Bottrell's production layers a chugging rock guitar against a programmed beat and a rap interlude, and the whole thing moves with a hopped-up, almost cartoonish energy quite different from Jackson's earlier, more sinuous grooves. He sings it in a bright, defiant upper register, more anthem than seduction, hammering the hook with the kind of repetition designed to be shouted by stadiums. The lyric is a blunt argument for racial irrelevance in matters of love and belonging, delivered without ambiguity — a stance that has aged into complicated territory but was, in 1991, a genuine mass-audience statement, amplified by the video's then-astonishing morphing sequence and its unresolved controversy. Culturally it was the moment Jackson tried to convert global superstardom into a universalist message. It plays well as a burst of daytime brightness — a kitchen, a car with the windows down, a playlist that needs a jolt of unembarrassed optimism between heavier things.