Jeff Ellis, Grammy-winning mixer known for Doja Cat and Frank Ocean, uses a close listen to Billie Jean to make the case that great mixing is built on deliberate imbalance. The shaker sits roughly 5 dB louder than everything else, and the lead vocal is tucked well below the drums. From a technical standpoint that looks wrong, but from a dance floor standpoint it's the only choice that makes sense.
In a dance record, the shaker's job is to move bodies, not to sit politely in the pocket. Pushing it loud enough to physically trigger a response is a feeling-based decision, not a level-matching one. The same logic applies to the tucked vocal: pulling Michael Jackson's voice down creates the headroom the drums need to push the groove, and in a song built for dancing, the groove wins.
The background vocals flip the strategy for a moment. When they burst out wide in stereo, louder than the rest of the vocal, it's a deliberate break in the pattern, a way to surface personality and highlight a phrase before the drums reclaim the mix. That contrast is the point.
Ellis frames all of this as a mixing philosophy: your strategy for a song determines what gets loud and what gets buried. Balance is a starting point, not a goal. Knowing when to lean into asymmetry comes from tracking what your body does while you listen, not from what you were taught the genre is supposed to sound like.