We all know the “Smooth Criminal” cover made by Alien And Farm but did you know they contacted Michael Jackson to approve the music Video?
In a recent interview as the song and video are going viral in 2022 when the song was released in 2001 and was a No. 1 single in Australia and New Zealand, a No. 3 single in the UK, and No. 1 on the US Modern Rock charts.
The music video features numerous homages to Michael Jackson and his videos. Corso, the band’s guitarist, addressed this in an MTV interview on the set of the music video, saying, “We want to pay homage to Michael Jackson, but on our level. Obviously we’re not that glitzy, so we just want to tastefully take the stuff that’s cool in his videos and apply it in our own dirty little backyard way.”
The band recalled what happened with the video:
If I remember correctly, either MTV or our label DreamWorks was trying to connect us with some soundtrack for the WWE. … Although [the song] didn’t tie into wrestling at all, that’s where the ring came in.
When you asked if we had any reservations of how it would be received, the only person we were mindful of was Michael Jackson himself. We were kind of worried. We sent the video to MJ to get his nod of approval. And he commented back that he didn’t really dig the kid with the mask. We were like, “Oh s—, maybe we should remove it.” We were already on tour. But a few weeks later, the director of the video [Marc Klasfeld] went to the same street, got a bunch of the extras together and reshot the dancing kid without the mask. We went through quite a bit of money and bulls— to make sure that we were appeasing Michael Jackson. We sent it back to him a few weeks later with the kid with no mask and he said, “You know what? I like it better with the mask!”
