Steve Stevens' Guitar Solo Should Probably Be Illegal.

In 1987 the most famous man alive hired Billy Idol's hair-metal guitarist and cut the meanest, sweatiest record of his career. People remember Bad for the singles. They should remember it for this.

The King of Pop hired a hair-metal guitarist

In 1987 the most famous man on earth made a deliberate, slightly insane decision: to cut the meanest, sweatiest rock song of his life, and to do it with Billy Idol's guitarist holding the knife. People remember Bad for the singles you'd expect. They should remember it for this.

Steve Stevens doesn't decorate 'Dirty Diana.' He mugs it. The solo arrives like a weather event and refuses to behave, all whammy-bar screams and arena swagger that has no business being this loud on a Michael Jackson record. That tension — pop perfectionist versus chaos guitar — is the entire engine.

“Bad has the hits. 'Dirty Diana' has the teeth.”

A whisper that turns into a scream

Jackson's vocal does the same trick the song does: it starts coiled and controlled and ends somewhere feral. The groupie-melodrama lyric is almost beside the point. What you remember is the texture — the way a man famous for precision lets himself sound, for four minutes, genuinely out of control.

Forty years on it still sounds dangerous in a way almost nothing on pop radio dares to. That's not nostalgia talking. That's the guitar.