Rockwell records the Eighties’ most paranoid hit with ‘Somebody’s Watching Me’

By Jon Moskowitz

“Somebody’s Watching Me” is NOT a Michael Jackson song. Michael Jackson’s voice is the most interesting thing about it, but the single is by a completely different artist: a guy named Rockwell. It’s important to keep this in mind, despite what your ears tell you every time you hear “Somebody’s Watching Me.” The history of the song’s creation is a tale of nepotism, the attempt to escape it, and of a career based on a forgettable novelty track with an unforgettable backup vocal hook.

Rockwell was the stage name of Kennedy William Gordy, the fifth son of Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. In 1983, 19-year old Kennedy wanted to be a pop star, and he was determined to make it without trading on the Gordy family name, both out of pride in his own talent and the fact that his father wasn’t particularly interested in helping him out. (“He said something like, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s alright. That’s OK,'” Rockwell later told Rolling Stone about showing his dad the song’s demo. “‘Don’t give up your day job, young man.’ I was devastated.”)

Rockwell’s solution to this setback was to play the demo for his childhood friends Michael and Jermaine Jackson. He convinced them to add backup vocals, and submitted the revised track to Motown — under his stage name, so his father wouldn’t know. This was, on the face of it, a brilliant strategy: Motown signed him (to Berry Gordy Jr.s evident surprise), and the single was released in January of 1984. It spent 19 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number two, and Rockwell’s career was launched. But, in the long run, Rockwell had inadvertently sowed the seeds of his own downfall.

Michael Jackson had left Motown eight years earlier, and was still a decade from dubbing himself “The King of Pop,” but there was a sort of noblesse oblige in his agreeing to sing on “Somebody’s Watching Me.” By late 1983, he had achieved the self-actualization that Rockwell was looking for. Jackson’s 1982 album for Epic Records, Thriller, was well on its way to becoming the biggest selling album of all time, in March of 1984 taking that honor away from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. He had appeared on Motown’s 25th anniversary TV special earlier in 1983, reuniting with his brothers to perform a medley of Jackson 5 classics before burning through a loose-limbed solo performance of the decidedly non-Motown hit “Billie Jean.”

Jackson’s performance was a career and cultural milestone, featuring many of the elements that would become indelibly associated with him — the sequined jacket, the single bejeweled glove, the moonwalk — and it transcended the event at which it took place, paradoxically moving Jackson finally and decisively beyond his Motown past. He had been a huge star before this moment, but after it he was something more, a kind of living pop culture myth.

Yet, in keeping with his desire to establish his independence, Rockwell didn’t publicize Jackson’s contribution to “Somebody’s Watching Me” or even acknowledge it to the press, whom he addressed in a fake British accent, telling them that he was from Portsmouth, in the U.K. “I didn’t want anybody to know or people to take the credit away from me and say, ‘If it wasn’t because of Berry Gordy or Michael Jackson, you’d be nothing,’” he told Rolling Stone.

No use. All it took was seven words, and the song was forever associated with Michael Jackson.

Breaking down the “Somebody’s Watching Me” stems in KORD, it’s tempting to mute everything but Jackson’s vocal. But like a lot of great pop hooks, it needs the context provided by the rest of the parts. The song is a true home studio production — Rockwell put it together in his small apartment, using nothing but synths and a programmable drum machine. The result evokes not Jackson’s Quincy Jones-produced funk, but the electronic boogie of another 1983 hit, Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit.”

Opening with similar stuttering snare hits and robotic, vocoder-treated vocal stabs, “Somebody’s Watching Me” soon settles into a mid-tempo groove, augmented by swirly haunted-house synths. When Rockwell comes in on lead vocal, he does so in his campy (and not particularly authentic) British accent, which adds to the cheap Sixties-horror-movie effect. There’s something almost defensive in this choice: as if he knew that his voice wasn’t particularly strong, so he’s hiding it with an accent, hedging his bets with comedy, not a sincere, heartfelt attempt at art.

When Jackson comes in, there is none of this self-consciousness or jokey humor: it’s as if he is incapable of conveying anything but the highest level of pop music professionalism. His part is brief, and for the first half of the phrase, it could be almost anyone singing. But the way he hits the words “watching me” removes any doubt as to his identity. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say those two words are the heart of “Somebody’s Watching Me,” and the reason we’re still listening to it decades later. Jackson’s part also works so well because it anticipates a technique that would soon become commonplace in hip-hop and eventually every corner of pop music: it sounds like a sample from a completely different song. A 21st century audience, inured to this kind of call-back hook by everything from Eminem’s “Stan” to Beyoncé’s “Summer Renaissance,” might well assume that Rockwell had borrowed a snippet of some other, purely Jacksonian masterpiece for his quirky little novelty tune.

To Rockwell’s credit, the lyric’s simplicity adds to the power of Jackson’s line. Kennedy Gordy grew up around some of the greatest pop songwriters of the 20th century (his middle name was William, after William “Smokey” Robinson) and he knew that the most effective choruses are plainspoken, with the kind of phrases anyone might use. In the verses, Rockwell portrays a guy who is almost comically paranoid, too jumpy to answer his phone or even wash his hair. But the refrain “I always feel like somebody’s watching me” is universal: it can be sung, and deeply felt, by almost every human who’s ever lived, from a self-conscious teenager walking into a high school cafeteria to the most famous and celebrated pop star in the world.

What was Michael Jackson thinking when he sang those words? He clearly identified with the lyric — you can hear it in his voice. Perhaps at this high point in his career, there was something joyful in it: he had finally, definitively set himself apart as a successful artist outside of the influence of Motown and his own family. Everybody was watching him. But there’s also a deep unease, which had become obvious in songs like “Billie Jean” and would become more pronounced as his career progressed. It’s hard to hear Jackson sing about being watched, and not think of the increasing dread and paranoia that feeling must have evoked for him, as his fame kept growing until it became suffocating, his paranoia distorting him mentally and physically. When you consider the arc of Michael Jackson’s public persona and reputation, the implications of “I feel like someone’s watching me” get more terrifying with each passing year.

Rockwell followed up “Somebody’s Watching Me” with a full album. Also called Somebody’s Watching Me, it included a second single, “Obscene Phone Caller,” in which the fake British accent got even more extreme, as well as some straight-ahead R&B tracks, including a cover of the Beatles’ “Taxman.” (Rockwell did seem to have a thing about the IRS.) In 1985, he released his sophomore album, Captured, and a single called “Peeping Tom,” neither of which made much of an impression. A third album, The Genie, came out in 1986, to equally disappointing reception. After three years, Rockwell’s career was essentially finished.

But “Somebody’s Watching Me” has stuck around. Everyone kind of knows it, and many just assume it’s by Michael Jackson. Its aural DNA pops up every now and then in the charts — for instance, in the songs of electronic dance-pop duo LMFAO, the former members of whom, perhaps uncoincidentally, are also part of the Gordy family (Redfoo is Rockwell’s half-brother, and Sky Blu is his half-nephew).

In the end, there’s a poignance to Rockwell’s career, which owes its whole existence to his achievement in getting Michael Jackson to sing on “Somebody’s Watching Me.” Kennedy Gordy got the hit song he wanted. He got the pop star fame. But if his ultimate goal was to establish himself as an artist in his own right, separate from his father’s patronage and the Motown legacy, his intention was ultimately overwhelmed by the incandescent cultural power of his backup singer.