Earth Song and the HIStory World Tour

Jackson said the idea for Earth Song came to him in Austria during the Bad World Tour in the late 1980s. Early work on the song dates from around the Dangerous sessions, but it was not completed until HIStory, the 1995 double album that combined a greatest-hits disc with fifteen new recordings. Bill Bottrell and David Foster are among those credited on the final production, alongside Jackson.

The song is structured like a slow build. It starts quietly with piano and a soft vocal, adds a gospel choir, and ends in a call-and-response between Jackson and the choir with Jackson almost shouting the lines. It is one of his longest and most dramatic recordings.

Released as a single in the UK in late 1995, Earth Song reached number one and stayed there for six weeks, making it the Christmas number one that year. It also topped the charts in several other European countries. It is often noted that it kept the Beatles' Free as a Bird from reaching number one.

In the United States it was not released as a commercial single, so it did not chart on the Hot 100. That is one reason American and European fans often rank the HIStory era very differently.

The video, directed by Nicholas Brandt, was filmed in several locations, including the Amazon rainforest, Tanzania, Croatia and the New York area. It shows environmental damage, poaching and war, and in its final section the damage is reversed, with trees returning and animals coming back to life.

Earth Song is one of the most direct protest songs in Jackson's catalogue. It asks questions rather than offering answers, which is part of why it has held up. Its themes of climate, deforestation and the cost of conflict feel more current now than in 1995.

The HIStory World Tour opened in Prague in September 1996 and closed in Durban, South Africa, in October 1997. By commonly cited counts it played 82 concerts in 58 cities across 35 countries, to an audience of about 4.5 million people. It was his last full world tour.

Earth Song was the dramatic high point of the show. Jackson sang from a crane that lifted him over the audience, and the staging included a tank rolling onto the stage and a soldier whom Jackson confronts and who lowers his weapon. The number turned the song into theatre, with a clear anti-war message.

The song also led to one of the stranger moments in British television history. At the 1996 Brit Awards, the singer Jarvis Cocker of Pulp ran onto the stage during Jackson's performance in protest at what he saw as its messianic staging. The incident became famous in the UK and is part of the song's story there.

HIStory is sometimes described as Jackson's angriest album, and much of it is. Earth Song is the counterweight: anger directed outward at the state of the world rather than at the press. For fans who match the HIStory era in our quiz, it is the key track because it shows the era's defining trait, a willingness to say uncomfortable things loudly.