Top 10 Melodies of the 1980s

4. “Human Nature”, Michael Jackson. (1983). Written by Steve Porcaro and John Bettis.

How can you deny the call and response of the chorus? The “Why, why?” building tension that’s perfectly resolved by the most perfect descending melodic cascade, over a classic descending chord progression, in the entire library of pop music (“Tell ‘em that it’s human nature”). This, fol-lowed by the perfect alteration to the couplet, ending with “…does he do me that way”. This is a perfect pop chorus, beautiful, catchy, sufficiently complex. How did it take until 1983 for music to deliver a hit song with this chorus? It’s so compelling, so perfect, so obvious. Now, let’s couple that with a verse that is equally brilliant in its obviousness, that belongs equally to that class of melodies that ought to have been famous hundreds of years earlier, but somehow waited until 1983 to be delivered to the listening public. And you have a sophisticated thing of beauty that stands as the best song of perhaps the most celebrated singer ever. “Human Nature” is too so-phisticated and subtle to be thought of as Michael Jackson’s most important song—that distinc-tion will forever belong, probably, to “Billy Jean”—but many musicians I know consider it the best piece of music to occupy space on a Michael Jackson album. Thanks largely to the melody, it is.