The Michael Jackson lyric Kanye West was confused by: “I never quite understood”
Kanye West is a big Michael Jackson fan, but one of MJ’s most popular songs has always confused him, and that’s ‘Smooth Criminal.’
Appearing as a talking head on Spike Lee’s Jackson-focused documentary Bad 25, which was released in 2012, Ye, who was visibly in good form at the time, spoke about how he just couldn’t figure out who Annie was or what was wrong with her; he just struggled to get it.
Produced by Quincy Jones and Jackson himself, ‘Smooth Criminal’ features on Bad, Jackson’s seventh album released in 1987. It had been used as the seventh single, so it was hardly expected to be the album’s biggest hit, and, indeed, it never reached number one in the charts; but, over time, the song did settle to become one of Jackson’s signature songs, which was perhaps helped by the famous “anti-gravity lean” that he performed in its music video. In any case, people came to adore ‘Smooth Criminal’, but some, Kanye paramount among them, never managed to figure out what was going on in the track.
“I never quite understood who Annie was,” Kanye laughed, “and why did it matter if she was OK or not?” He wondered if, perhaps, the narrator of the song was trying to perform CPR on this Annie person: “‘Are you OK? Are you OK? Are you OK?’ I don’t think she’s OK”.
To be fair to Ye, he was pretty much on the money. Annie, as a matter of fact, is in trouble, and she does need CPR, wherein the song begins with a woman being attacked inside her home, which, given the upbeat nature of the music, isn’t immediately obvious unless you really listen to the words.
“As he came into the window / Was a sound of a crescendo / He came into her apartment / He left the bloodstains on the carpet / She ran underneath the table / He could see she was unable / So she ran into the bedroom / She was struck down, it was her doom”.
That’s when the famous “Annie, are you OK?” line comes in, repeatedly, and Annie’s name isn’t random in this instance, and the reason it was selected shows how accurate Kanye’s instinct about the song really was. There is a type of doll used to teach people how to do CPR, and it’s variously called Resusci Annie, Resusci Anne, Rescue Anne, CPR Annie, Resuscitation Annie and Little Annie. Trainees practising with such a doll are also encouraged to use the phrase, “Are you OK?”; hence, we have, “Annie, are you OK?”
The kicker in the song’s lyrics is that Annie was hit by a “smooth criminal”, as in, this person was so smooth that they got in and out of her house without a trace, with the beats reinforcing the fact along with the lines, “You’ve been hit by / You’ve been struck by a smooth criminal”.
The second verse explicitly describes CPR, after Annie has been discovered, “Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation / Sounding heartbeats, intimidations”, but she had already met her “doom”, implying that she died, and the person who did it gets away with the crime. It’s all very dramatic, as was Jackson’s wont during his 1980s height of fame, but even in this Kanye was right to note, “I don’t think she’s OK”, proving that he rather actually gets it.