Dangerous was released on November 26, 1991. It is the first Michael Jackson album since 1978 not produced by Quincy Jones, and the break is audible within the first ten seconds. Jam opens with the sound of breaking glass and drops straight into a new jack swing rhythm — snapping, mechanical, deliberately unpretty.
Teddy Riley, then in his early twenties, had invented new jack swing with Guy and had produced hits for Bobby Brown and Keith Sweat. Bringing him in was a calculated risk: Michael was 33 and competing for radio space with a younger generation of R&B artists whose records were built on hard programmed drums rather than live session players.
Riley co-produced seven tracks. Remember the Time is the most successful of them — a mid-tempo groove with a swung snare and a vocal Michael delivers almost conversationally. In the Closet, built on a heavily compressed drum loop, is the most rhythmically minimal track he ever released. Both sound closer to early nineties R&B radio than to anything on Bad.
The album's other half is entirely different in character. Black or White, produced by Bill Bottrell, is a rock-pop crossover with a guitar riff and a rap verse. Heal the World and Will You Be There are large, choral, socially framed ballads. Who Is It is a paranoid, string-driven mid-tempo piece with a beatboxed rhythm bed Michael performed himself.
Give In to Me, with Slash on lead guitar, is the heaviest rock recording in the catalogue. Gone Too Soon, a tribute to Ryan White, closes the album on a spare orchestral ballad — a deliberately quiet ending after 76 minutes of some of the loudest production Michael ever put his name to.
At 14 tracks and over an hour and a quarter, Dangerous is long. That length is the most common fan criticism, and it is a reasonable one: the record does not have the sequencing discipline of Thriller. But it also has more ideas per square inch than any other album he made.
Commercially it was enormous. Dangerous sold over 30 million copies worldwide and topped charts in more than a dozen countries. The Black or White video premiere on November 14, 1991 was carried simultaneously in 27 countries to an estimated audience of 500 million people.
Thirty years on, Dangerous is the album whose production has aged into relevance rather than out of it. Contemporary R&B and pop both live in the space between programmed rhythm and live texture that this record spent 77 minutes mapping out.