“Who is gonna sing that to who? Cos you sure ain’t singing it to me and I sure ain’t singing it to you”: the reason that Prince turned down Michael Jackson’s request to do a duet on an 80s classic

(Image credit: Paul Natkin/Getty Images/Richard E. Aaron/Redferns)

The 80s mostly belonged to Prince and Michael Jackson, the pair contesting a cold war for pop supremacy throughout that decade. But if Jackson had had his way, then they would’ve put the rumoured rivalry to bed by performing together on the title track to his monster 1987 album Bad, but Prince was not having it.

In an interview with the comedian and actor Chris Rock in the 90s, he outlined his chief objection. “The first line of that song is ‘Your butt is mine’,” he said. “Now I’m saying, ‘Who is going to sing that to who? Cos you sure ain’t singing it to me and I sure ain’t singing it to you so right there, we got a problem’.”

Funny that this was Prince’s issue with the song, rather than the fact anyone who was actually bad would never proclaim to be “really, really bad”. Prince insisted to Rock that he never felt there was a problem between the pair, but in an interview with Esquire a few years ago, Black Eyed Peas’ will.I.Am relayed to interviewer Steve Knopper that Jackson certainly felt there was after Prince had discovered Jackson would be present at one of his Las Vegas concerts and had ventured towards where the Thriller man was sitting and “started playing bass in Jackson’s face”.

“The next morning, Will went over to Michael’s house for breakfast, and they’re talking about Prince and the show,” Knopper reported. “And then Michael goes, ‘Will, why do you think Prince was playing bass in my face?’. Michael was outraged. And then started going on. ‘Prince has always been a meanie. He’s just a big meanie. He’s always been not nice to me. Everybody says Prince is this great legendary Renaissance man and I’m just a song-and-dance man, but I wrote Billie Jean and I wrote We Are the World and I’m a songwriter too.'”

Despite the fact that Prince turned down the chance to vocally spar with Jackson on Bad, earlier this year the Purple One’s ex-bandmate Sheila E. revealed on the podcast The Jason Time that he had actually recorded his own version of the song. “We went and we re-recorded Bad,” she said. “It was so funky, it was so amazing. It was an incredible rendition of what it should have been. We were like ‘Oh my God, we can’t wait for Michael to hear it.’ And then Prince went and he erased the whole thing.”

Now that the two are probably making moody faces at each other in the great sealed-off backstage area in the sky, we will never know.

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Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, Champions Journal, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleague Ted Kessler. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he's interviewed some of the world's biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Radiohead, Liam and Noel Gallagher, Florence + The Machine, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more.