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Akon may burn remaining Jacko tapes
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 24 November 2010
Having firmly defended his posthumous Michael Jackson collaboration last week, after Will.i.am dubbed the whole new Jacko album “disrespectful”, Akon has now announced that he may destroy remaining unfinished songs he recorded with the late king of pop.
Countering Will.i.am’s claims that Jackson would not have been happy about people completing work on his songs without his final approval, Akon also insists that ‘Hold My Hand’ – his recently released Jacko collaboration – was complete before the singer died.
Akon told MTV News: “I’m definitely excited about our single, because that was finished, complete, and I’m happy with the outcome. And I know [Jackson] was [happy] cause we were there finishing the song together, so I’m really happy about what we accomplished on that record ‘Hold My Hand'”.
He continued: “It was a song I was previously working on that I eventually let [Jackson] hear, and when he heard it, he fell in love with it. We clicked instantly when it came to it. That was the main concept: let’s figure out something we can leave behind [and] 20,000 years later it can still be relevant”.
As previously reported, Will.i.am, who worked with Jackson on unreleased tracks in 2006, recently told Entertainment Weekly: “Michael Jackson songs are finished when Michael says they’re finished. Maybe if I never worked with him I wouldn’t have this perspective. [But] he was very particular about how he wanted his vocals, the reverb he used … He was that hands-on”.
Now echoing this sentiment, Akon said of the possibility of more of his collaborations with Jackson seeing the light of day: “Me and Mike worked on a lot of concepts before he passed. ‘Hold My Hand’ was one of the records that was actually fully complete – the rest of the records are incomplete. They’re just ideas, concepts, harmonies and stuff like that which the world will probably never see because I wouldn’t want to put it out unfinished – so I might just burn it after this interview, cos I might just get tempted to do a remix! I know at the end of the day if it wasn’t fully complete, I don’t think he would [have wanted to] see it released that way. I probably wouldn’t ever put myself in a position to make that choice”.
‘Michael’ is released on 13 Dec.
