‘This Place Hotel’ was a watershed track for Jackson. Written, arranged, and composed entirely by Michael, it revealed his rapidly emerging talent as a songwriter. In contrast to the mostly celebratory tone of Off the Wall, 'This Place Hotel’ is a dark, psychological song about regret, revenge, and fear that anticipated later classics like Billie Jean and Dirty Diana. The number opens with a foreboding instrumental prelude, before a piercing scream unleashes the song’s menacing Gothic funk. “The scream was the kind that normally shatters a bad dream,” Jackson later wrote, “but our intention was to have the dream only begin, to make the listener wonder whether it was a dream or a reality.” In the song’s narrative, Jackson’s pained voice sings of “faces staring, glaring, tearing through me.” he speaks of “yearning,” of “sin” and “concealing gloom”. The song also experiments with new sounds. “This is the first example,” observes Nelson George, “of a cinematic use of sound effects, horror film motifs, and vocal trickery to convey a sense of danger in his work.” Jackson was justifiably proud of the song’s depth and scope. “[This place Hotel] was the most ambitious song I had composed,” he wrote in his 1988 autobiography. Many listeners and critics took note.
