Composition
"Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" was viewed as being a freewheeling, cross-cultural disco song, that shows similarities to Jackson's material on his previous studio album, Off the Wall in 1979. The song's rhythm arrangement (which was arranged by Jackson himself) is a complex interweaving of drum-machine patterns and work by percussionist Paulinho da Costa, while the horn arrangement, by Jerry Hey, is brassy and precise. Slant Magazine commented that the song was a "complicated tapestry of colliding hooks and pop references." The song's lyrics, "Too high to get over, too low to get under", has strong similarities to Funkadelic's opening salvo for "One Nation Under a Groove".
The song's lyrics pertain to the media and press, as well as gossip and people trying to start arguments or problems for no reason, which he states in the lyrics, "Someone's always tryin' to start my baby crying," and then goes to a more "quasi paranoia" yield in the "near-bitterness" chorus, 'You're a vegetable, you're a vegetable/ You're just a buffet, you're a vegetable/ They'll eat off you, you're a vegetable.'" In "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'", Jackson's vocal range spans from G#3 to E5. The song is played in the key of E Major. The song is moderately bright, and its metronome is 122 beats per minute. The song has a basic sequence of D/E–E–D/E–E as its chord progression. The coda at the end of the song comes directly from Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango's 1972 disco song "Soul Makossa". The coda is "Mama-say mama-sah ma-ma-coo-sah". Makossa is a Cameroonian music genre and dance. Dibango sued Jackson and settled out of court for one million French francs, agreeing thereby to waive future rights to this recording but not future use of the material.
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