The 1980s File Feature
Can You Feel It
Can You Feel It: The Jacksons' Anthem of Brotherhood and Ascension The Jacksons released "Can You Feel It" in 1981 as a single from their album Triumph, whic…
01 The Story
Can You Feel It: The Jacksons' Anthem of Brotherhood and Ascension
The Jacksons released "Can You Feel It" in 1981 as a single from their album Triumph, which had been released on Epic Records in 1980. The song was co-written by Jackie Jackson and Michael Jackson, representing the collaborative songwriting approach that had characterized the group's work on their Epic Records albums following their departure from Motown. The Jacksons had signed with Epic in 1975 after years at Motown's Tamla subsidiary, where they had recorded as the Jackson 5, and the move had given them greater creative control over their recordings and public presentation.
Triumph was produced by the group in collaboration with engineer and production partner Greg Phillinganes, among others, and represented one of the most ambitious recordings of their Epic-era output. The album was conceived as a concert and concept project that pushed the boundaries of what an R&B-pop album could attempt in terms of scale and sonic ambition. "Can You Feel It" was one of the album's signature tracks, designed as an opening anthem that established the album's themes of universal brotherhood, human ascension, and collective joy.
The song is notable for the scale of its production ambition. The arrangement features sweeping orchestral elements, a gospel choir, powerful bass lines, and the kind of layered sonic architecture that suggests cinematic scope rather than conventional pop-song structure. This approach was consistent with the broader ambitions of the Triumph album and reflected the creative space the group had developed for themselves at Epic after years of operating within Motown's more tightly controlled system.
Accompanying "Can You Feel It" was a short film produced by Robert Abel and Associates, one of the most ambitious music videos of the pre-MTV era. The film depicted the Jacksons as giant mythological figures striding through the cosmos and pouring golden light over the earth, imagery that aligned with the song's themes of transcendence and universal blessing. The video was screened in theaters and at the 1981 Triumph tour before the widespread adoption of music video television, making it an early example of the kind of visual ambition that would define the video era beginning with MTV's launch in August 1981.
On the Billboard Hot 100, "Can You Feel It" debuted at number 89 on the chart dated May 2, 1981. The single climbed to number 79 the following week before reaching its peak of number 77 during the week of May 16, 1981. It spent five weeks on the Hot 100, including an appearance at number 99 during its final chart week in late May. The chart performance on the Hot 100 was relatively modest, reflecting both the competitive environment of the early-1981 pop market and the song's thematic ambition, which made it somewhat atypical for top-40 radio formats that preferred more immediately accessible material.
The Triumph album and its touring campaign coincided with a pivotal period for both The Jacksons and for Michael Jackson specifically. Michael's solo career, which had begun with the release of Off the Wall in 1979, was already generating enormous commercial momentum, and the Triumph tour in 1981 demonstrated both the continued viability of the group format and the increasing scale of Michael's individual stardom. The visual and conceptual ambitions of "Can You Feel It" and its accompanying short film were consistent with the expanded visual and theatrical vocabulary that Michael was simultaneously developing for his solo work.
The song's impact extended well beyond its initial chart performance. "Can You Feel It" became a recurring cultural presence through its use in film soundtracks, sporting event broadcasts, and various forms of mass media throughout the following decades. Its combination of euphoric energy, gospel-influenced vocal performance, and genuinely anthemic structure made it effective in contexts where collective emotional uplift was the goal, and it has been used in exactly those contexts repeatedly since its initial release.
The Triumph tour supporting the album was one of the most successful concert tours of 1981, grossing millions of dollars and demonstrating the continued drawing power of The Jacksons as a live act even as their individual members, particularly Michael, were simultaneously developing major solo careers. "Can You Feel It" functioned as a natural concert opener and became one of the most electrifying moments of those live performances, its scale and ambition translating effectively to the arena context in which The Jacksons typically performed. The song has retained its reputation as one of the more underappreciated gems in the Jacksons' Epic-era catalog.
02 Song Meaning
Universal Brotherhood and Transcendence in Can You Feel It
"Can You Feel It" is one of the most explicitly utopian recordings in the pop music catalog. Jackie Jackson and Michael Jackson wrote a song that did not concern itself with individual romantic relationships, personal achievement, or social commentary in any conventional sense. Instead, the song addressed itself to humanity as a whole, proposing a vision of universal connection, shared joy, and collective transcendence that drew heavily on gospel and spiritual traditions while expressing itself in the vocabulary of disco-influenced R&B.
The central question of the title is both an invitation and a declaration. To ask "can you feel it?" is to propose that something is already happening, that a force or a feeling is present and available to anyone who opens themselves to it. The song positions collective joy and brotherhood not as aspirations to be achieved through effort but as realities to be recognized and inhabited. This distinction is significant: the song is not calling people to struggle toward something but inviting them to notice something that already exists.
The gospel tradition from which the Jacksons drew their earliest musical education is deeply present in the song's emotional and rhetorical structure. The call-and-response elements, the building of emotional intensity through repetition and escalation, and the invitation to collective participation in a transcendent experience are all recognizable features of gospel performance practice transposed into a pop-R&B context. The Jacksons had been performing gospel-influenced music since childhood, and "Can You Feel It" represents one of the most explicit expressions of that influence in their commercial catalog.
The short film produced to accompany the song amplified its thematic content by representing the Jacksons as cosmic, mythological figures literally pouring light and abundance over the earth. This imagery was not subtle, but its scale matched the scale of the song's emotional and conceptual ambitions. The visual language of the film drew on science fiction, religious iconography, and the superhero mythology that was increasingly present in popular culture at the beginning of the 1980s, combining them into a personal mythology appropriate to the song's subject.
In the context of the early 1980s, "Can You Feel It" also carried cultural weight beyond its immediate musical content. The year 1981 was a period of significant political and social change in the United States, with economic anxiety, racial tension, and the beginning of the AIDS crisis all contributing to a difficult cultural moment. A song that proposed universal brotherhood and collective transcendence as immediate and available realities offered a powerful counternarrative to the prevailing sense of fragmentation and conflict.
Michael Jackson's subsequent work on Thriller (1982) and beyond would pursue similar themes of universal connection and transcendence alongside more personal and socially specific subject matter. "Can You Feel It" can be read as an early expression of what would become one of the central themes of his solo career: the idea that music itself was a vehicle for collective transformation and connection, capable of dissolving the barriers that separated people from one another and from their own deepest capacities for joy. The song's enduring presence as a cultural artifact owes much to the sincerity and scale with which it pursued that vision.
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