Michael Jackson - Streetwalker (1986 - 1988)

Streetwalker is a previously unreleased song by Michael Jackson, released as the 12th track on Bad: Special Edition The song was first written and recorded in July 1986 with Bill Bottrell under the working title Florida Groove during the Bad sessions, with further work and vocal recording taking place in Fall that year. The song was originally planned for the final track list but was replaced with Another Part Of Me. As Quincy stated in an interview included on the special edition of Bad: "[...] Michael liked Streetwalker, and I wanted to do Another Part of Me. He wrote both of them, so it didn’t make any difference to him [...] we were going to listen to them, the three of us, objectively and listen to decide which one was gonna get picked. And so DiLeo was sitting down when Streetwalker was on, and when Another Part Of Me came on, he got up with his little fat ass, you know, and started [dancing]. I said, "You’re not helping Michael at al!" It was so funny [...] Michael had a funny name for him, like, ‘Rubber…what are you doin’ man, you just blew my whole case here!’. But that was a choice instead of Another Part Of Me. DiLeo helped me get ‘Another Part Of Me’ cause he started shaking his butt on it”. Bill Bottrell did further work on Streetwalker at Smoketree Studio in California in 1988 after the completion of Bad. In the same year, Bill Bottrell created the music for Dangerous, using the bassline of Streetwalker. In the demo of Dangerous recorded in September, 1990 and released on The Ultimate Collection, bits of Streetwalker still can be heard. In 1994, during the Cartier v. Jackson case where MJ was accused of stealing Dangerous from Crystal Cartier, he talked about how Streetwalker evolved into Dangerous: "Yes, I wrote a song for the Bad album called Streetwalker and it had driving bass melody, strong bass lick. That bass lick was taken by my engineer, Billy Bottrell, cause I was kinda frustrated with this song in general, so he took the bass and put new chords to the bass melody, which is what inspired the song Dangerous." The 1988 version was finally released in 2001 as part of Bad: Special Edition and later re-released on Bad 25. The 1986 demo was first leaked online in 2020 as a a low quality recording from Brad Sundberg's seminars was leaked online. On January 27, 2023, the same version was leaked in HQ after Brad's laptop was stolen.