I was late to Thriller. It was a time in my life when I was in a regularly gigging band myself and not listening to a lot of other music except local Boston albums featuring various friends.
It is unusual that it took me a long time to like the record because I had been full of anticipation for Thriller because I had loved Off The Wall. The band I was in at that time was full of guys who hated pop music in general and thought of MJ as a lightweight who hadn’t made a good record since I Want You Back. I think the bass player had some appreciation for Off The Wall, but he kept it to himself, and did not defend me when I was laughed at for putting Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough or Rock With Me on the jukebox in the clubs we played.
Off the Wall was and is a masterpiece—the first album featuring the ground-breaking collaboration between Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones as producer. No one had ever heard arrangements like that. No one had ever heard MJ sing like that. When news of a second album featuring that pairing hit the scene, I was eager to hear it.
But bizarrely, the first single released from Thriller was the “Easy Listening” staple, The Girl Is Mine, a duet with Paul McCartney. Words do not express how much I hated The Girl is Mine at the time, although I eventually grew to like the “middle 8” (which is really ten bars long), and the implied interracial romance was kind of cool. Still, as a song, it was as bad as Ebony and Ivory, McCartney’s duet with Stevie Wonder, that had been released a few months earlier (which I also hated).
So I did not rush right out to buy Thriller, or ask anyone to give it to me for Christmas, or pay any attention to it; after I heard the first single I was so disappointed I put the whole album out of my mind. I found out later that MJ himself thought it was best to release that song first, capitalizing on the success of Ebony and Ivory and the strength of McCartney’s fan base. And since holiday season is a busy time for working bands, I never heard the rest of the record at anyone’s house or at any parties.
But in early January, the world changed with the release of Billie Jean.
sadly there are no HQ versions of Billie Jean on YouTube—here is the Spotify link PLEASE ASK ADMINS TO WHITELIST SPOTIFY!
Billie Jean knocked everyone’s socks off. The single hit Number One in the US and the UK and several other countries and made the top ten in a bunch of other countries. After that second single was released, everyone was talking about Billie Jean and everyone was talking about Thriller. A few weeks after it came out I mentioned that I hadn’t heard it yet and my friend’s jaw dropped open. You? *You* haven’t heard Billie Jean? You need to hear that TODAY. You need to buy that whole album TODAY!
Seriously? I said, amazed at the intensity of his response. But the first song off that album was terrible!
I know, I know, he continued, but Billie Jean, you have to hear it! He then went on about how upset he was, as a drummer, that so many hit records used drum machines, but that Billie Jean had a drum machine AND a live drummer and that made all the difference. And he went on to say that there were lots of other good tracks, as good as anything on Off the Wall, or better!
With that recommendation, I bought it. Back then, young’uns, we listened to albums in the order the tracks were presented, especially a long-anticipated record that everyone said was great.
So I lay down on my bed with my head between my stereo speakers (good headphones were an expensive professional item back then) and listened to Thriller. From the first moment of Wanna Be Starting Something I was enraptured. Thrilled, even. The pop/funk/R&B grooves! The horn arrangements! The layers of syncopated percussion! The VOCALS! MJ was fusing R&B with funk and technopop and jazz and WorldBeat and everything else including the kitchen sink. I danced around singing the borrowed/altered afro-pop phrase mama say mama sah ma-MA coo-sah with the best of them.
Lift your head up high, and scream out to the world: I know I am someone! And let the truth unfurl… (hee hee hee, ha ha ha!)
Listening between the lines in the lyrics of the opening track, and the other songs on Thriller featuring MJ’s lyrics, I heard him revealing his feelings about growing into adulthood, or rather about not wanting to grow to adulthood. The world is scary. Folks are treacherous, cunning, declining. People always wanna be startin’ somethin’. You’re just a buffet. People eat off of you. He’s stuck in the middle and the pain is thunder. Everybody hustling, stealing, lying. Making bad decisions, including showing poor judgment about sex.
The idea that he was not enjoying his genius and fame never occurred to me before then, because I didn’t follow celebrity news. But it was all there in the lyrics.
Before we could even catch our breath from the excitement of Billie Jean, Beat it was released on Valentine’s Day and roared up the charts and onto dance floors. There were several weeks when Billie Jean and Beat It were in the top ten at the same time.
Eddie Van Halen played that monster guitar solo for free. It supposedly only took him half an hour (!) and he didn’t even tell his bandmates he did it. He had no idea it was going to turn into what it turned into, didn’t ask for a line in the album credits, and even after it took the world by storm he still didn’t ask for royalties. It was another example of “no one has ever done this before” that just happened to work like a charm and make Thriller unique among albums of its time. That solo, combined with the rhythm guitar work by Steve Lukather of Toto, made Beat It more of a rock song. It got played on black stations just the same.
But the most exciting thing about Beat It was its music video—an unsubtle morality play about gang violence that had to have been a creative risk, since who would have thought the kind of group choreography from Broadway and big screen musicals would appeal to the demographic that loved the small screen music video. Beat It was the right thing at the right time and became one of the iconic videos of that era. It was the second coming of West Side Story, the Jets and Sharks moved ahead a generation. The dancing was unlike anything any other video acts were doing. The ending with the arms waving and the big circular leg sweeping just freaked. people. out.
showin’ how funky and strong is your fight
I am also really fond of Human Nature and P.Y.T. , the other two singles from the album. Human Nature was written in part by Steve Porcaro of Toto, with additional lyrics by the great John Bettis, certainly one of the few songwriters in the Nashville (country music) Songwriters Hall of Fame who also wrote big hits for black R&B artists. And as tame as PYT sounds now, it didn’t crossover to pop stations as well as the other singles (it was “too black”—pretty much the last time MJ would be accused of that).
every now and then an “easy listening” record rises above the level of pablum, as this one does
“tenderoni”? seriously?
Surprisingly, Thriller was never officially released as a single, although it got a lot of airplay anyway, and of course is a Halloween staple now. It was brilliant to have Vincent Price do his pseudo-rap at the end.
I’ll let someone else write about how the MJ videos are so closely associated with the songs—I’ve always been more auditory than visual and when I finally saw the 12 minute epic Thriller video I was upset that it was arranged differently than the album version I had grown to love. Plus I was never into the zombie thing anyway. I do like the remix version where the video was edited to fit the arrangement of the song as it appears on the album.
There was a period when the Thriller video was so popular they played it every hour. A 12 minute video played once an hour was one quarter of MTV’s daily programming! VCRs were relatively rare and expensive in 1983, although the price was starting to come down, and music videos weren’t available on videotape anyway, so the only way the vast majority of people could see this music video/movie musical short was when someone called and told you it was coming on. Or by watching MTV all day hoping it would come on, which was the point of putting hot videos in heavy rotation. And this was before “everyone” had cable. Sometimes late at night local commercial TV stations would show a half hour of the week’s top videos. That’s how I finally saw it.
i can thrill you more than any ghoul would ever dare try
Thriller is still the best selling album of all time, having sold so many copies that people cannot even agree on an official number. Estimates of sales range from 60 million copies to over 100 million copies, inflated by the fact that it is the kind of classic that people used to buy again every time a new level of music technology got popular. I definitely purchased it multiple times, and I believe I have owned five copies of Thriller—two albums (wore the first one out—which means I played certain tracks so much that the grooves developed skips), two cassettes (played the first one so much the tape wore thin and snapped), and one CD (which is still in my house someplace right now although I haven’t seen it for years… I pretty much listen to music only on Spotify these days).
I’ll have to let someone else write about how some black folks were upset about MJ collaborating with so many white artists on Thriller. Several people in the on-going Twitter conversation all day, about whether Off The Wall or Thriller is the better album, mentioned that Off The Wall was closer to the black/R&B sensibility and Thriller was “too mainstream”. But the flip side of that criticism of MJ is that back then MTV was avoiding playing videos by black artists, thinking that white America didn’t want to see them (!!!). A good music video had the ability to boost record sales tremendously back in the Stone Age when artists made money by selling physical copies of albums and singles, so this discrimination was a financial handicap to black recording artists. MJ’s success with Thriller forced their hand. In spite of all the people who said he wasn’t black enough, his foot in the door allowed other less mainstream black artists to follow and as a result benefited the black music community as a whole.
Looks like I’m just going to barely manage to get this published while it is still November 30th. I didn’t see anyone else with a diary on this, and I wondered for a while if maybe it was in bad taste since MJ was accused of sexual misconduct with children and that topic is at the forefront of the news. Even though I usually can’t separate an artist from his misdeeds (I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been boycotting Woody Allen), I admit I still love Thriller. While writing this I listened to the entire album all the way through twice (I didn’t even skip The Girl Is Mine or Lady in my Life!). But I also respect the decision of anyone who was soured on MJ’s work because of the accusations against him and doesn’t listen to MJ any more for that reason.
I just figured that sometimes a music diary cuts the tension when multiple political events are balancing on the razor’s edge, as we are facing tonight.