Was Michael a trend follower or trendsetter, musically?

Michael was dubbed the King of Pop, and I couldn’t agree more, when considering ‘Pop’ an umbrella term for the musical that is popular at a specific moment in time.

I’ve been recently thinking about how Michael always followed the genre that was in vogue at the moment of his releases; for example, he went disco for Off the Wall, post-disco for Thriller, new jack swing with Dangerous, and so forth…

A partial explanation is that he would always go work with whatever producer was the hottest at the moment, and he would always chase the ‘newest’ sounds. But he never married to a specific genre in his efforts to be ever succesful.

His most authentic, eclectic albums imo are History and Bad; Bad kinda held on to an electronic funk that wasn’t that mainstream when it was released, and History is just it’s own little universe (for what is worth, only ‘You are not alone’ sounds to me like a slow jam typical of that era).

So I’m wondering what your thoughts on this are; was Michael just composing to the rhythms that were popular or was he setting new ground with each release? I know most artists do this and switch genres all the time, but for Michael this is somehow more evident for me.

Also, for some reason the genre that sounds the most Michael-escque to me is New Jack Swing (Dangerous) since NJS wasn’t so explored outside the US., and died down rather quickly. I also love Dangerous, if for whatever reason he would have chosen to stick with NJS for the rest of his career, I wouldn’t have minded lol.

Every time I hear some new jack swing-inspired song, I go ‘oh, that sounds like Michael’. I guess another question would be, what genre sounds the most like Michael to you?