Michael Jackson chased after the Beatles most of his adult life. He wanted to break their chart records, he wanted their legend ... hell, he even wanted their songs, which he bought the rights to back when he really was the King of Pop. Undeterred even by death, Jackson is still following the Beatles' career template. Just like the Fab Four resurrected the deceased John Lennon for new Beatles songs on their Anthology albums, Jackson's posthumous Michael gathers 10 unfinished songs he was working on during the last few years of his life and dresses them up with glossy new production and cameos by Akon, 50 Cent, and Lenny Kravitz. And it's pretty much the hodgepodge you'd expect. The shimmering "Hold My Hand" and plaintive "Much Too Soon" probably don't sound all that different than they would if Jackson were alive to sign off on them. But the self-referential "Breaking News" and Kravitz's overbearing "(I Can't Make It) Another Day" should have stayed on the scrap pile. — Michael Gallucci
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