As a drummer, there is one thing I especially love about funk. That is that, for this music, every instrument is actually percussion. That's the beautiful principle at work in "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough." The most melodic instruments are the strings, and they still hit their staccato, percussive points. The guitars are about the click. The horns are about the punch. The bass and drums are one funk organism. The vocals of the chorus are pure percussion - soon Michael Jackson would be writing songs with almost no lyrics at all, just his own patented sounds, like his mentor James Brown. That is extremely hard to pull off. Notice almost everyone who sings a Michael Jackson song avoids hitting all the rhythmic utterances and grace notes of the original. When I hear someone try to, it's funny.

Incidentally, the long falsetto verse vocals sound Prince-esque. Prince's first album came out the year before this song. Maybe the rivalry was already forming and deriving its mutual benefits.

Michael Jackson departed from pure funk/dance/disco music beginning on the Thriller album, adopting rock elements to give his sound an even wider appeal after the Off the Wall album failed to sell as well as he dreamed. The success of "Beat It" almost assured the rock elements would be pushed to the breaking point on Bad.

I just wish Michael would've had the self depreciation to put all that aggrandizing aggressive stuff away for a spell and just get another funky dance album recorded before all was said and done. Nothing of his later music seems to have gone back to that lightness. And why would he feel like providing the world with escapist fun by then?

Well, there was only one time for the 1970s anyway.