I’ve been meaning to post an “Is ‘Thriller’ a Massively Overrated Album?” thread for a while. Even if you make the Herculean effort to forget everything Michael Jackson has done since, it’s hard to remember what all the fuss was about: two admittedly great songs, a pretty good ballad and a whooole lot o’ filler, including the title track.
The video was pretty cool though.
Nah. They’d back away and the rope would cause their left arms to fall off. They can still hold your head in their right, though.
I think it was just the right time and right place. I agree that both Thriller and Jackson are vastly overrated. It’s been propped up by a massive media and marketing machine that benefits from keeping Jackson in the limelight. There are a number of other artists (Madonna) who benefit from this sort of cynical wankery.
Thriller was, however, sort of a perfect storm of an album. The video hit just as MTV was starting to go mainstream. It was a good vidoe as was the video to ‘beat it’ which made it perfect for the developing MTV generation. He was a likeable popstrel who was attractive and mostly harmless.
To be sure it’s been vastly overhyped and it just isn’t that good but, for its time, it was a great album/video.
Of course, that can never excuse the Jackson Five’s “Victory Tour”.
That would have probably been more helpful than “The Gonk” used in the original Dawn of the Dead. But I really liked the effect of wandering zombies with mall music playing. The next zombie invasion, I’m going to try to find copies of both types of music to play and see what happens.