Michael Jackson - Thriller (1982)

It doesn't make sense.

Michael Jackson's 1982 album Thriller isn't a bad record, it's just a standard, lightweight pop album.  There's nothing on this record that Jackson and producer Quincy Jones didn't already do better on Off The Wall.  The album is permeated by the same mix of jazzy brass, swooping strings, and rhythmic guitars, with the occasional soft-focus synthesizer backdrop.  The songs are mostly okay, nothing special.  Jackson wrote only four of the nine songs on Thriller, and most of the others were written by Heatwave alumnus Rod Temperton, who used up his best ideas on Off The Wall.  Jackson and Jones went through thirty songs before they settled on these nine tunes, many of the others popping up as B-sides.  This was the best they could come up with?

So here's the thing: Why is Thriller the best-selling studio album in pop history?

Thriller was more of a phenomenon than a work on par with R&B masterpieces such as Marvin Gaye's What's Going On or Stevie Wonder's Innervisions.  It didn't establish Jackson as a serious musical artist; Off The Wall had already done that.  What Thriller did was solidify him as a black pop star who could appeal to white Middle America as much as to black America, making him sort of a Barack Obama of popular music.  Some of the music on Thriller was cutting enough to get Jackson on album-oriented rock (AOR) radio, and his commercial clout allowed him to break the color barrier on MTV with his promotional videos.   Long before President Obama suggested a post-racial America, Michael Jackson represented a post-racial popular culture.  A hopeful nation responded by buying millions of copies of this LP, and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences gave Jackson eight Grammys, including Album of the Year.

But dig beneath the surface.  Thriller doesn't thrill so much.  People say it's great for playing at a party, which seems to suggest that it's good background music to dance to but not necessarily something to listen to consciously.  That indeed is mostly what it is.  "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," the opening cut, is a lyrical mishmash that finds Jackson throwing out words like a improvising rapper while making less sense.  "Billie Jean," a song about a delusional groupie who claims to be the mother of his child, is a little unfocused lyrically (it swings from broken hearts to paternity claims for no apparent reason), redeemed by its bass line and shuffling groove. "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)" is an off-the-shelf sticky Valentine.  And the title song - again, supplied by Temperton -  is a Halloween novelty record that typecasts Vincent Price far more embarrassingly than his movies or his guest appearance on "The Brady Bunch."

Looking back, it's safe to say that the millions of Americans who bought Thriller bought into a moment.  They embraced the idea of Jackson being a unifying cultural force and rejuvenating what was then a moribund pop scene, then represented by faceless, bland studio bands such as Toto.  So what if members of Toto - David Paich, Jeff Porcaro, Steve Porcaro - played on this very record? Heck, so what if Steve Porcaro co-wrote "Human Nature" with . . . John Bettis - Richard Carpenter's songwriting partner?  (This is actually one of the LP's better tunes.)  So what if the overall vibe was mostly homogenized and led to a decade of overproduced pop records with even less substance than anything associated with anyone named Porcaro? Jackson was the King of Pop - everyone loved him! But the selling of Michael Jackson in the aftermath of Thriller's release seemed rather cynical, from the unnecessary fourteen-minute musical short based on the title song to the issuing of all but two of its songs as singles.  If the Beatles had demonstrated that every album track should be as good as a single, Thriller demonstrated that every album track should be a single, disposing of the idea of the long player as a coherent, thematic work.  Now an album was just a collection of songs for Top Forty stations (Top Forty FM was replacing its AM counterpart at the time of this album's release), and multi-single albums became a mainstay of the eighties as a result. And it freed the recording industry from investing in more musically groundbreaking fare - why bother when you can sell radio fodder that appeals to everyone?  No wonder Annie Lennox said of Jackson, upon his receipt of all those Grammys, that he had become "too much of a commodity at the moment."

Commodities don't bridge racial divides.  Commodities are products ready to be consumed, and sadly, Thriller's success consumed Michael Jackson himself.  He would go on to trivialize his talent in the quarter century and change left to him, devolving into self-parody.  This is a shame, because "Beat It" - the album's sharpest, gutsiest track - showed that black pop on white rock radio was plausible, thanks to Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo.  But if Jackson broke a color line for other black artists to cross, not too many of them bothered to, and AOR went back to business as usual.  (As it turned out, rock station WPLJ-FM in New York, which played "Beat It," was on its way to gradually changing its format to Top Forty. So much for a breakthrough.)  And if there's still any doubt that a good deal of Thriller was lightweight pop, consider Jackson's duet with Paul McCartney, the soporific "The Girl Is Mine."  Too many listeners tried to find something profound in a soft-headed ballad about a rivalry over a woman - the idea of of a white man and a black man fighting over a woman of an indeterminate race, the idea of two men born sixteen years apart fighting over a woman of an indeterminate age - when all it was, folks, was two overexposed pop legends making a record that would find an audience on the strength of their names alone.  When they've argued in "The Girl Is Mine" - "the dosh garn girl is mine" ;-) - for the umpteenth time, you wonder when the girl is going to announce she doesn't want anything to do with either of them.  So why should I want to have anything to do with this song? Or the rest of Thriller?