THE BEAT GOES ON: Michael Jackson

 

It’s easy to forget that when Michael Jackson’s Thriller album was originally released in 1983, there had not as of yet been a black pop star of his magnitude. Jackson was soon launched into a stratosphere where only Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and, later, Madonna, would reign supreme. At the time, the world was still marveling over the novelty of Michael Jackson as a grown-up solo artist, following the success of his previous album, Off the Wall, which while it spawned three pop hits, had yet to erase people’s primary notion of the singer as a novelty act, the child-star lead singer of the Jackson 5.

 

Thriller, however, marked a break with the past, and established Jackson as a phenomenon who would go on to become the biggest-selling solo artist of all time and a cultural force who played no small role in the superstar effort to aid famine victims in Africa with the “We Are the World” charity single.

 

Timing is everything, and Thriller was perfectly timed to take full advantage of changes in pop culture, as well as exert its own influence on it, irrevocably changing the playing field. The album, for one, was chock full of hits in a variety of styles: the Latin-infused disco of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” the hard-funk of “Billie Jean,” the easygoing pop of the Paul McCartney duet, “The Girl Is Mine,” the R&B-metal fusion of “Beat It,” and the novelty-disco of the title track. America and the world were ready for this musical miscegenation, disco having paved the way for black music to take firm hold of the pop charts. Jackson’s album built on that solid foundation while expanding the possibilities of what people would accept from a so-called black artist.

 

But even more than Jackson’s move into hybrid territory, it was the synchronicity of the release of Thriller with the technology and medium of music video that made Thriller and its singles—seven in all—such huge hits, while at the same time changing the very landscape of the form. For one, hardly a black face had been seen on MTV, which wasn’t even two years old and was devoted almost entirely to playing lip-synced performance videos of rock bands, when Jackson’s “Billie Jean” broke the color barrier on the station at the same time it introduced the concept of video as narrative.

 

 

The West Side Story-styled “Beat It” followed “Billie Jean,” further pushing the narrative form as well as emphasizing Jackson’s abilities as dancer and choreographer. And, of course, the video for the title track represented a great leap in how music videos were viewed; directed by Hollywood filmmaker John Landis (Animal House, The Blues Brothers), it is a full-fledged, thirteen-minute short horror film that cost $500,000 to produce—five times that of its counterparts at the time—and replete with special effects, powerful choreography, and the introduction of Michael Jackson as a whole new character.

 

“I’m not like other boys,” Jackson says to his girlfriend in the video, and indeed, reviewing the film on the occasion of the release of Thriller (25th Anniversary Edition) (Epic/Legacy)—composed of the original nine-song album and six previously unreleased bonus tracks, including new remixes, plus a DVD of videos and Jackson’s groundbreaking performance from the Motown 25 TV special of 1983—one can’t help but reflect on how Jackson’s greatest triumph also marked the beginning of his tragic fall. He would never again achieve the commercial or creative success of Thriller; remarkably, over the course of the next half-century, he would only produce three instantly forgettable follow-up solo albums (1987’s Bad, 1991’s Dangerous, and 2001’s Invincible, only the last of which he proved not to be), as his reputation nosedived amidst allegations of cosmetic surgeries, erratic behavior, and child molestation.

 

In the video for “Thriller,” Landis has Jackson metamorphose into a werewolf (borrowing techniques from Landis’s oft-overlooked film, An American Werewolf in London) and then into a Night of the Living Dead-style zombie. It’s hard not to view it today without seeing it as some sort of freakish prophecy of what lay ahead—Jackson changing into something or someone not-quite human. Somehow, the paradigm-busting achievement that was Thriller destroyed its creator, turning him into a caricature of himself and apparently feeding the delusions of grandeur that would have him declaring himself the “King of Pop” late in the decade after everyone had stopped paying any attention to him.

 

As such, the new edition of Thriller serves as much as a cultural document, a piece of evidence for the case one might make for the greatest rise and fall of a pop star in history, as it does a re-packaging of the most popular album of all time. The remixes by contemporary figures including Kanye West, Fergie, and Akon are irrelevant and won’t do anything to revive interest in Jackson or sell him to a new generation.

 

And they don’t need to. The original music stands on its own. It’s not exactly music for the ages; it doesn’t hold up in the same way, for example, that the Jackson 5’s classic Motown hits do. It’s definitely music of a very specific time period, but even more than that, it’s sui generis—it’s Michael Jackson music, period. And it still has the power to thrill. [OCTOBER 2008]

 

[Photos courtesy Epic/Legacy, © MJJ Productions]

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s editor-in-chief and award-winning critic-at-large.