Thriller (album)

• 1. Introduction

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  Thriller, the sixth studio album by Michael Jackson, arrived on the 29th of November 1982, and within months it was selling one million copies worldwide every week. Recorded at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles with a budget of $750,000, it was the product of a young man who had hired a manager when he turned 21 and told him plainly that he wanted to be the biggest and wealthiest star in showbusiness. Jackson had set himself one governing rule for the project: every song had to be a killer. No filler, no B-sides disguised as album tracks. Only hits. What followed was an album that would top the charts in countries from Australia to Japan, win a record-breaking eight Grammy Awards in a single night, and become the best-selling album in recorded history. The questions worth sitting with are not simply how it sold so many copies, but what drove a lonely 21-year-old to demand that standard of himself, how a recording made in under eight months reshaped a struggling music industry, and why, more than four decades later, Thriller still refuses to fade.

• 2. The Man Behind the Ambition

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  Jackson's previous album, Off the Wall from 1979, had sold seven million copies and received strong critical praise, yet Jackson considered it a failure. He believed it deserved the Grammy Award for Album of the Year and was furious it had not received a nomination. In 1980, when Rolling Stone declined to put him on its cover, he responded: "I've been told over and over that black people on the cover of magazines doesn't sell copies. Just wait. Some day those magazines are going to be begging me for an interview. Maybe I'll give them one, and maybe I won't." The years between Off the Wall and Thriller were, by his own account, deeply unhappy. He described walking around his neighborhood at night just hoping to find someone to talk to and returning home alone. Out of that isolation came an almost ferocious creative ambition. He told people he was frustrated by albums that offered one strong track and a collection of filler, and he asked why every song on an album could not function as a potential single. That question became the architecture of Thriller. Jackson's attorney John Branca later revealed that Jackson had secured the highest royalty rate in the music industry at that time, approximately two dollars per album sold, meaning every copy of the record that left a store was also a statement about his place in the industry.

• 3. Building the Album

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  The first official recording session took place on the 14th of April 1982, at noon, when Jackson and Paul McCartney laid down "The Girl Is Mine" together, making McCartney the first credited featured artist on a Jackson album. Producer Quincy Jones had to complete Donna Summer's self-titled album before the rest of Thriller could be finished; the bulk of the work was compressed into the period between August and the 8th of November 1982. Jackson and Jones collaborated on 30 songs and selected nine for the final record. Jackson wrote four of them himself, dictating the compositions into a sound recorder rather than writing them down on paper, singing from memory during the actual sessions. The relationship between the two men grew strained during the process, and when they finished they were both dissatisfied enough to remix every song, spending a week on each. For "Beat It", Jones and Jackson spent weeks searching for the right guitarist. They found Steve Lukather of Toto for the rhythm parts and Eddie Van Halen for the guitar solo. Rod Temperton, who wrote the title track, originally wanted to call it "Starlight" or "Midnight Man"; he chose "Thriller" because the name struck him as having merchandising potential. Temperton wrote the spoken portion for actor Vincent Price in a taxi on the way to the recording studio. Price, an acquaintance of Jones's wife, completed his part in two takes. A planned cover of "Behind the Mask" by the Japanese band Yellow Magic Orchestra was dropped after the parties could not agree on royalties.

• 4. Sound and Lyrics

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  "Billie Jean" was personal to Jackson. It drew on his experience of obsessive fans and told the story of a woman who claimed he had fathered her child. Jones wanted to shorten the long bass-and-drums introduction; Jackson refused, saying it made him want to dance. To record Jackson's vocals for the track, Jones had him sing overdubs through a six-foot cardboard tube and brought in jazz saxophonist Tom Scott to play the lyricon, a wind-controlled synthesizer. Bassist Louis Johnson played his part on a Yamaha bass guitar. "Beat It", written as a statement against gang violence, became a homage to West Side Story. Jackson later described its message directly: "the point is no one has to be the tough guy, you can walk away from a fight and still be a man." "Human Nature", co-written by Steve Porcaro of Toto, carried lyrics such as "Looking out, across the morning, the City's heart begins to beat, reaching out, I touch her shoulder, I'm dreaming of the street." "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" climaxes in a chant drawn from Duala, an African language often misidentified as Swahili. The title track features creaking doors, thunder, footsteps, wind, and howling dogs. Songs on the album range in tempo from 80 beats per minute on "The Girl Is Mine" to 138 on "Beat It". Rolling Stone critic Christopher Connelly, writing at the time, described Jackson as now singing in a "fully adult voice" that was "tinged by sadness".

• 5. The Singles and the Charts

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  Seven singles came from Thriller, a strategy that raised the bar for what a "hit-laden" album could mean. "The Girl Is Mine" was criticized on release as a poor choice, with some critics predicting the album would disappoint. It still topped the Billboard Hot Black Singles chart and reached number two on the Hot 100. "Billie Jean", released in January 1983, spent seven weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and nine weeks at number one on the Black Singles chart. Billboard ranked it the number two song of 1983, and it topped charts in nine countries. The third single, "Beat It", reached number one in Spain and the Netherlands and was ranked number five for the year by Billboard. "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'", "Human Nature", and "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)" followed, all reaching the Billboard Hot 100 top ten. The final single, "Thriller", almost did not come out. Epic Records executive Walter Yetnikoff initially responded, "Who wants a single about monsters?" By mid-1983, when overall album sales began to soften, Jackson persuaded Epic to release it alongside a new music video. It reached number four on the Hot 100. The result was a record for the most top-ten hits from a single album. Thriller reached number one on the Billboard Top LPs and Tape chart on the 26th of February 1983, and held that position for a record 37 non-consecutive weeks.

• 6. Music Videos and MTV

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  The "Billie Jean" video debuted on MTV on the 10th of March 1983. MTV was, at that point, a fairly new and little-known channel; its executives had hesitated to air music by black artists, arguing that black music was not "rock" enough. CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff confronted the channel directly, telling them he would go public with the allegation that they refused to play music by a black artist if they did not broadcast the video. The "Billie Jean" clip brought MTV to mainstream attention. On the 31st of March 1983, the "Beat It" video premiered on MTV during primetime. Jackson cast members of the Crips and the Bloods, rival Los Angeles street gangs, with around 80 genuine gang members appearing. The production introduced what would become a hallmark of Jackson's videos: large-scale synchronized choreography. The "Thriller" video premiered on MTV on the 2nd of December 1983. Fourteen minutes long, it depicted Jackson and his girlfriend, played by Ola Ray, confronted by zombies; Jackson transforms and leads the undead in a full dance routine. When it aired, MTV ran it twice an hour to meet demand. The video was named the greatest of all time by MTV in 1999, by VH1 in 2001, and by Time in 2011. In 2009, it became the first music video selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, which described it as "the most famous music video of all time." The zombie dance and Jackson's red jacket, designed by director John Landis's wife Deborah Nadoolman, became lasting elements of global popular culture.

• 7. Awards and Records

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  At the 26th Grammy Awards, Jackson was nominated for a record 12 Grammys and won eight, including Album of the Year. Seven of the eight awards went directly to Jackson; the eighth went to engineer Bruce Swedien. Richard Harrington of The Washington Post described the ceremony as "The Michael Jackson Show." In winning Album of the Year, Jackson became the third-youngest recipient of that award after Barbra Streisand, who won it at 22, and Stevie Wonder, who won it at 23. At the American Music Awards, Jackson won a record-breaking eight awards, including both Favorite Pop/Rock Album and Favorite Soul/R&B Album, along with a special Merit award. At the inaugural MTV Video Music Awards, he won three awards for the "Thriller" video alone: Best Overall Performance, Best Choreography, and Viewer's Choice. Thriller was recognized as the best-selling album of all time on the 7th of February 1984, when it entered the Guinness Book of World Records. By early 1984 it had sold over 30 million copies. It was the first album to top the US best-selling charts for two consecutive years. In 2008, a quarter-century after its release, the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry as a culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant recording.

• 8. Legacy

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  Thriller's impact on the music industry went well beyond sales numbers. CBS/Epic Records president Gil Friesen said at the album's release, "The whole industry has a stake in this success." Time magazine later speculated that the album's fallout gave the music business its best years since 1978, when domestic revenue had reached an estimated $4.1 billion. Ethnomusicologist Miles White wrote that the album completely defined the sound of post-disco contemporary R&B and updated a crossover approach that traced back to Louis Jordan in the 1940s. Jackson's success as a black artist had no precedent at the commercial scale Thriller achieved. Time wrote in 1984: "Jackson is the biggest thing since the Beatles. He is the hottest single phenomenon since Elvis Presley." According to The Washington Post, the album paved the way for African-American artists including Prince to achieve mainstream recognition. Author and critic Nelson George wrote in 2004 that Jackson educated artists including R. Kelly, Usher, and Justin Timberlake, with Thriller as a textbook. The documentary film The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller, produced by Jackson and John Landis and funded by MTV, sold over 350,000 copies in its first few months. The album still sells an estimated 130,000 copies in the US per year, has been certified 34 times platinum in the United States, and as of the 40th anniversary reissue in November 2022 has accumulated worldwide sales estimated at over 70 million copies, a figure that continues to grow.