You Love To Love Me", but Jackson rejected it, so it was instead given to Taja Sevelle. In Jackson's 1988 autobiography Moonwalk, Jackson wrote: In a 1988 interview with Ebony and Jet magazines, Jackson said he was inspired by a true story that he had read about in either Time or Newsweek. Jackson stated that the story was about a student who went to school in upstate New York, who was "from the ghetto", had tried to make something of his life and planned to leave all of his friends behind when he returned from Thanksgiving break. He added that the student's friends' jealousy resulted in them killing the student; Jackson stated that the student's death was not included in the music video. Various Jackson biographers have concluded that the story he was referring was that of Edmund Perry. However, Perry was not killed by kids in his neighborhood; he was killed by a plainclothes police officer when Perry and his brother allegedly attacked and badly beat the officer in a mugging attempt. Composition The song is written in the key of A minor with a time signature in common time. The pitch is raised almost a quarter of a whole tone from standard pitch, A440 Hz, up to circa A454 Hz. Jackson's vocal range spans from G3 to A5. The track has a tempo of 114 beats per minute. The main bassline is based in the pentatonic blues scale. "Bad" was viewed as a revived "Hit the Road Jack" progression. Davitt Sigerson wrote in Rolling Stone magazine, "When Jackson declares that 'the whole world has to answer right now,' he is not boasting but making a statement of fact regarding his extraordinary stardom. If anything, he is scorning the self-coronation of lesser funk royals and inviting his fickle public to spurn him if it dare." Sigerson compared the track to material by James Brown, whose "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" is openly referenced by the four chromatic note brass introduction to the song. Lyrically, "Bad" pertains to proving to people that you are tough by boasting, with Jackson asking "who's bad?" Chart performance "Bad" charted within the top ten, at number eight, on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 10, 1987 and peaked at number one on October 24, 1987. "Bad" stayed at the top position for two consecutive weeks. "Bad" was Jackson's Bad album's second number one