In 1987, Michael Jackson was at the height of his fame with the album Bad. The pop smash spawned a record five No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100—and one of them was fueled by a glossy MTV music video produced by a former TV star.
The song was “The Way You Make Me Feel,” and the music video was produced by The Monkees legend Mike Nesmith and directed by Joe Pytka.
Written by Jackson, the song featured a shuffle beat and lyrics about the rush of a new romance. The accompanying video, which played on heavy rotation on MTV, featured model Tatiana Thumbtzen as the object of Jackson’s affection. Set on a dark city street, the music video was shot on Skid Row in Los Angeles, according to Stereogum. It featured dynamic dancing as Jackson pursued the gorgeous model by showing off his moves in front of her and her friends, one of whom was Jackson’s sister LaToya.
“The Way You Make Me Feel” reached No. 1 on Billboard in January 1988, thanks in no small part to the attention from the video.
Nesmith, who died in 20 once spoke about Jackson’s talent—and the loneliness of being a genius.
“Great artists live in a world in which their own excellence does not exist,” he wrote in Infinite Tuesday: An Autobiographical Riff, according to The New York Times. “They are shut out, uniquely, from their defining achievements. In the same way that an apple can’t eat an apple and a sunset can’t admire a sunset and the Matterhorn can’t ski its own slopes, Michael Jackson could never watch himself dance, at least not the way everyone else on Earth did.”
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Nesmith also looked back on his involvement in the music video genre long before he worked with Jackson.
In a 1985 interview with The Morning Call, he noted that he “recognized in the video form, in the coming together of music and silent films, a real revolution in cinema, a kind of movement from Realism into Impressionism.”
“Without being locked into acts one, two and three, as in a plot, I could see the video form had everything one needed to convey a feeling … an emotion deep and rich with information that was very clear and concise,” The Monkees legend added. “That was what I thought we were coming to.”
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