Is “Thriller” the best album ever? No. But one thing it did do is come along at exactly the right time with exactly the right artist and exactly the right product.
If I recall correctly, the music business was suffereing at the time, due to tepid album sales by artists putting out crappy albums with one or maybe two possible hits and a whole bunch of filler. “Thriller’s” sales were certainly bolstered the the impact of the three videos, but the record produced seven hit singles on a nine-song album. Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones raised the bar dramatically for what a solid album looks and sounds like.
There were more than a few innovations here as well. Billie Jean has a great groove that sounded completely unique in the musical landscape, along with it’s “racy” lyrics. Billie Jean’s inclusion of a guitar god on a single by an R & B artist was virtually unprecedented. The title tracks’s Vncent Price rap was over-the-top, but also dropped a bit of rap into a song at a time when rap was far from commonplace on pop radio, not to mention that the song as a whole was just plain fun.
Call the record middle-of-the-raod if you want; it was still several grades better than what generally passed for acceptable in 1982 and made the entire industry sit up and realize that a solid record would sell. “Thriller” changed the way the music industry does business and should get some props on that basis alone, IMO.
“The Girl Is Mine” got to number two on Billboards Hot 100, number one on both the Hot Soul Singles *and *Adult Contemporary charts. Apparently there was an audience for this single, in spite of its blandness. MOR was neither edgier nor faster at that point, based on the sales numbers.
Amazing. Chalk that up to selective memory, I guess, especially on the part of retro stations. (It’s amazing how little the charts have to do with ‘only the hits’ oldies stations. We don’t want to remember what we really liked back then.)
I find that as well. One of my fave artists of the 80s, and one of the bigger sellers, was Sheena Easton. Her music was not particularly great, by any stretch, but the girl could sing and she was cute as a button to boot. She produced three or four gold albums in the 80s and a fist full of charting singles, but you’d be very hard pressed to catch one of her tunes on any retro station.
That’s a key point - what was popular then is unlikely to be the stuff that endures. Sure, you have artists like The Beatles and Fleetwood Mac who have super-popular albums that also endure critically, but bands like the Velvet Underground or the Ramones - hugely, enduringly popular and influential now - barely hit the radar back in the day. By the same token, Terry Jacks’ Seasons in the Sun was a #1 song of the year - but should be used as part of any soul-destroying brain-washing being perpetrated by bad guys. Not a song that has endured; thank Og.
The question is: will Thriller be an enduring work, or more of a nostalgia / reference work that should be used to give folks a sense of the context of the time, but not as part of the “canon” of popular music?? At this point, given the skill with which it was constructed, its HUGE impact at the time on a cultural level, and the strength of a couple of songs - it could make the cut. But, IMHO, it isn’t as good as other stuff out there at the time, and except for BJ and Beat it, doesn’t get the same level of retro play (I think) as, say, Def Leppard’s Pyromania, which was the #2 CD right behind Thriller and has endured as a lock on popular rock radio - Photograph, Foolin’ and a few others get regular play…
I mostly agree with the OP. I think the album will be remembered more for what it accomplished, and what it meant to people at the time (it was my first album… er… cassette, at the tender age of three) than the actual content. And honestly? 7 out of the 9 songs being hit singles is nothing to sneeze at.
That said, I always found The Girl is Mine to be really creepy and The Lady in My Life makes me snicker because it sounds like Michael is singing “I love you, Morris Day”
Not anymore, at least. A station in the Boston area has a Friday night 80’s nostalgia show, and when it first started in the late 90’s I used to hear, for example, Strut and Sugar Walls (yuck) all the frickin’ time. Now they play the 80’s songs that are “cool”… so more Depeche Mode than Bananarama.
The thing was at the time MTV was accused of not playing black (R&B) music.
At the same time white people like Hall & Oates, and George Michael, Sheena Easton, Madonna were crossing over to the R&B charts. This was a huge flack.
So MTV picked the most commerical black man there was which was Jackson.
Now that the Rock Era is over and we’re into R&B / Hip Hop/ Rap, most of the black artists like “The Pointer Sisters,” and “Whitney Houston” were accused of sounding “too white,” (Notice the difference between Houston’s first two albums and her third)
Eventually the rock music era that topped the charts since 1955 lost all it’s ground and MTV adapted to this.
Outside of “Beat It” none of the songs were really praised. 80s were an era of transition out of rock/pop music that had been around since 1955
For instance singles took the lead, it was nearly impossible to get three single of an album into the Hot 100’s Top Ten, now it was commonplace.
So Thriller marks the first change in a direction of music. Just like the previous record holder “Saturday Night Fever,” marked a change into disco (which didn’t take but came back in various forms under different names)
The songs from Thriller might not get the play now, but how much of that is the due to the songs and how much due to the ickiness many people feel over Jackson?
I was born 1981. A LOT of people my age and younger now claim that Thriller was an essential album when we were kids but that’s not what I remember from the time. Even before all the official accusations I remember kids my age making jokes about MJ being creepy/gay/perverted. A popular joke when I was 5 was, “if you were in a tree with Michael Jackson, what would you do?” Your immediate reaction would be to say “get down”, to which everyone would reply, EWWWWWWW!!! No one I knew would be caught dead admitting they liked his music at the time. The first person I knew who openly liked him was a friend of my brother’s - 4 years older than me - who bought Thriller sometime around the mid-90s and liked the title song and Billie Jean. Early this decade when 80s nostalgia began to set in, everyone suddenly started saying what a huge fan they’ve always been.
I never bought Thriller, and looking at the tracklist, I’ve heard maybe half the songs on it. I will acknowledge that Billie Jean is a pretty good song, and I like some of the Jackson 5 stuff I’ve heard. The guy has always given me the heebie jeebies, though. I feel bad for him and wouldn’t want to be anywhere near him at the same time.
I was born in 1976, which makes me 8 when it came out. It was everywhere, in the same way Avril Lavenge was everywhere for my daughter when she was that age. When you’re young and trying to figure out the real world, you take most of your cues from pop culture.
I actually don’t think I’ve ever listened to Thriller from start to finish, but “Billie Jean” is one of those songs I file away as a Perfect Pop Song. I was never a huge fan of the most of the singles on that album, but “Billie Jean” is pure pop perfection.
It makes sense for you. What I’m saying is that people my age and younger are too young to have ever seen MJ as “cool”. He was already being made fun of by the time we were getting our early memories and exposure to pop culture ('85/'86ish.) Our cue was to think he sucked.
I must agree as well. Billie Jean found a way to wrap loops of hooks around themselves and the video was brilliantly simple. Jackson could move .
Quincy Jones really outdid himself and the album had vast cross-over appeal while at the same time it was “family friendly”. It’s kind of like the way the movie Titanic did so well because generations of people could enjoy the movie, from 8-year-olds to grandmothers. I was young enough when Thriller came out that some of my friends had the Beat It jacket with all the zippers. My teachers also listened to it and my friend’s grandmother had been seen tapping her foot to Billie Jean.
The video for Thriller also redefined music videos and turned them into lavish high-budget mini-musicals. Overall, the album was a “phenomenon” backed by a powerful marketing machine.
I was born in 1974 and my best friend Tammy and I were obsessed with MJ when Thriller came out. We used to roller skate to Billie Jean in the driveway. We didn’t think any better music or more awesome music videos could ever be produced. When he did his tour and had a show in DC we were nearly in tears… Michael Jackson… was coming to DC? OUR TOWN? OMG we were going to breathe the same AIR as him? He’d be drinking water out of the same water supply? It took our breath away.
