Michael Jackson’s Joy

Michael Jackson’s Joy

I have mentioned that MJ originally had sung the Blackstreet song joy. Teddy Riley and Michael wrote the song for MJ's Dangerous album. but MJ turned it down. Riley was one of the major producers on MJ's later albums and he got to make the decision on which songs made it on the final track listings. This song didn't make it. Teddy says that MJ didn't feel it. Here's Teddy's story behind the switch and so on.

I heard about this song being a Michael Jackson song years but I didn’t know that there was an actual demo out there. So to my surprise, I discovered that there really is an MJ demo. Michael did all the lyrics for the song with the even instrumental strings for backup.

So Teddy’s group took up the song under the Blackstreet name. If you listen carefully you can hear Teddy singing in the background of the demo. In the final Blackstreet song, you can hear the tone of Michael Jackson's singing in the final product. This song turned out to be a major hit for Blackstreet.

There are three versions of this song worth noting. There is the more string heavy music video version and the normal album version. Then, there is a slightly faster hip-hop remix.