Name: How Michael Jackson Crafted His First Solo Hit
Uploaded: 2026-02-13T17:12:26.000Z
Duration: 7 min 42 s
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1979 was an inflection point for both popular music and for who in the next decade would become pop music's biggest star.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

It's hard to think back on that period now to a time before Michael Jackson became Michael Jackson, a world famous megastar whose work is so ubiquitous it's less like music and more like the air we breathe.

It was before Thriller and Beat it and Billie Jean and Smooth Criminal.

It was four years before the world first saw Jackson do the moonwalk on Motown 25.

And critically for him at the time, it was 10 years after I Want yout Back and the hits of the Jackson 5.

In the intervening years, as Michael entered adolescence and outgrew the cute little boy that the world wanted him to be forever, he released four solo albums that tried to bridge the gap from his Motown roots to whatever was supposed to come next.

The last of those, forever Michael failed to crack the top half of the Billboard 200.

In the late 70s, Jackson's pop domination was far from a foregone conclusion.

But behind the scenes, he was paying attention to the changing trends in music.

And in the mid to late 70s, there was one trend that was growing faster than any other.

In 1977, the disco subculture was juiced by an unlikely hit film, Saturday Night Fever.

Of course, disco had been around for almost 10 years by then, growing out of soul and funk music and out of black, Latino and LGBT cultures.

Though you wouldn't know it watching John Travolta dance to the Bee Gees for an all white crowd.

But a year later, Jackson and his brothers had a disco hit with Shake youe Body down to the Ground.

And at that point the stage was set for what would become Michael's re arrival as a show stopping solo artist.

In August 79, Jackson released Off the Wall, the first of three partnerships with producer Quincy Jones.

The first single off that album was Don't Stop Til you Get Enough, a song that Jackson wrote himself and co produced and his first number one in seven years.

The song was a worldwide smash, one that still has legs 40 years later.

I think it's been played at every wedding I've ever been to.

For Jackson, it was the crossover hit that helped him turn a corner in his career.

It was number one on the soul charts, but more important, it was a pop hit.

It was inspired by disco and funk, but it was more than that.

When we listen to the song now, it doesn't carry the historical baggage of disco.

In the popular imagination, Don't Stop is pure dance music.

There are reasons for this beyond Jackson's undeniable charisma as a performer.

But if you look closer at the musical DNA of Don't Stop, you can see why the song has such appeal.

Grounded by bass drum and bass guitar and richly layered with snare drums, shakers, guitar, and

Jackson banging on a glass soda bottle, this is the part of the song that makes you want to dance.

As Danielson notes, the rhythm is taking a lot of its cues from funk music, which emphasize the first beat in every measure of four, something that was made famous by James Brown.

This emphasis is one thing that makes the song more danceable.

Another is syncopation, or something that disturbs the regular flow of the beat.

Syncopation creates tension in music that you want to resolve with your body.

In the case of funk, that syncopation can be very complex and very noticeable.

But in Don't Stop Till youl Get Enough, Jackson minimizes the distance between the beat and its syncopated sound, which comes only a handful of milliseconds before.

But it registers subconsciously, resulting in a cleaner feeling sound, something that attracts a mainstream pop audience.

A cleaner sound is also a feature of disco, and

Don't Stop's rhythm is incorporating those elements as well.

The shaker, for example, is sounding consistently every 16th note, and

the main pulse, though emphasizing the first beat in every measure, is designed to combine the bass guitar and the bass drum to create the same sound every time, as opposed to funk or rock, where you can mostly hear the difference between instruments.

On top of this undercurrent of rhythm, which is balancing the features of funk and disco, Jackson spreads a tapestry of sounds that fill in the gaps between beats and help to smooth everything out.

Strings and horns and electric piano, again reaching for that clean surface that defines the pop sensibility.

The icing on the cake is the harmony and Jackson's falsetto.

As Ethan Hein points out over at his blog, the song only has two chords, A and B, which alternate back and forth to create a trance like modal groove, something more associated with Eastern music than Western.

And above this, Jackson sings a melody marked by the first two notes in the first two syllables in every line.

These notes are D sharp and A, and the interval between them is what's called a tritone.

As Hynes says, the relationship between these notes is somewhat off kilter, and your mind notices that, and

that infuses the song with an urgency that it wouldn't otherwise have.

As I said before, Jackson's charisma here is unmistakable.

This is where the world was introduced to the grunts and ticks that would become a signature of his style.

Don't Stop is effectively the birthday of a new artist, one who would take over the world in the decade to come, and

this song goes a long way to explaining how and why that happened.

You can see Jackson and Jones taking the syncopation of funk, the pulse of disco, the vibe of Easter music, even the structure of a rock song.

With its verse, chorus, verse, chorus pattern, complete with a euphoric bridge by Greg Billingame.

Jackson recalibrates all these elements toward the end of pure pop music and electrifies them with the power of his voice.

The song is greater than the sum of its parts.

No don't stop till you get enough and you haven't had enough no way, no way hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.

So I turned 30 on Saturday, which is just unbelievable to me.

So this is the official first video of my 30s.

And it was a great one to work on for the past few weeks just because I got to jam out to off the wall for my birthday.

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