The Man in the Mirror

Lore & Background

The song was written by Glen Ballard and Siedah Garrett. Quincy Jones invited Garrett to his home with other songwriters and asked them to write material for Jackson's next album, saying 'I just want hits, that's all I want.' Garrett took the brief to Ballard, who began playing a keyboard figure; Garrett wrote the lyrics. They recorded a demo over a week, with Garrett on vocals. At Jackson's request, they wrote a longer middle eight and modified the lyrics. Jones enlisted the Andraé Crouch Choir to record gospel vocals. The song runs 5 minutes and 19 seconds in the key of G major, with a key change to A-flat major after 2 minutes and 53 seconds.

In Their Own Story

The corridor in the Slums was narrow and smelled of wet stone and old blood. The Nameless One stopped because the light was wrong—too still, too silver, pooling on the cobblestones as though the moon had been poured out and left to set. There, in the middle of the alley, stood a figure whose shoulders caught the lamplight and threw it back in fractured arcs. Its face was the Nameless One's face, but smoother, younger, stripped of the scar tissue that years of dying had left behind. It tilted its head with a slow, deliberate curiosity, the way a person tilts their head toward a sound they cannot yet name.

"You look at me," it said, and its voice was the Nameless One's voice, but without the rasp, without the weight of all those other lives pressing against the back of the throat. "And I look back. And neither of us is sure which of us is the reflection." It raised a hand—palm out, fingers spread—and the Nameless One saw their own eyes staring back from the glass, wide and unblinking. "Tell me. If I am you, and you are me, which of us is the one who is allowed to die?"

Reader's Guide

The music video is a notable departure from Jackson's other videos; Jackson does not appear in it aside from a brief clip toward the end. It features a montage of footage of various major news events and famous people, including starving children in Africa, Adolf Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and others. The video was directed, produced, and edited by Don Wilson.

Did You Know?

• "Man in the Mirror" became Jackson's ninth number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified triple platinum.
• It was nominated for Record of the Year at the 31st Grammy Awards.
• The song reached number 21 on the UK singles chart in 1988, and number 2 there following Jackson's death in 2009.
• An instrumental version was played at Jackson's memorial service.