The music video for “Hold My Hand,†the Akon duet that’s serving as the lead single from Michael Jackson’s Michael, was premiered with a bit of anticipatory flair on Vevo at 12:01 this morning, making sure hordes of diehards stayed up late (on the East Coast, at least) refreshing their computer screens with one hand and squeezing their stress-ball-with-MJ’s-face-printed-on-it in the other. The big reveal probably didn’t disappoint them: The clip runs through your standard posthumous-video techniques, cutting quickly through a montage of doting fans, vintage Jackson footage, and generic scenes depicting various emotional states tangentially related to the lyrics in the song. (Also: loads of Akon.) But Vulture was kind of hoping that MJ’s posthumous run would give us something different. Maybe a bunch of Jackson footage spliced together from old videos into one coherent story line? Or a fully CGI-d but believably so Michael Jackson, going around holding people’s hands? Was James Cameron even consulted?
