Sony announced this Monday, August 29: a new edition of Thriller, the centerpiece of the work of Michael Jackson, is available for pre-order on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the release of this monument of pop music. In addition to the disc itself, which is the best-selling album of all time, a second CD including 15 additional titles is part of the lot. These are models and some rarities. Announced release date: November 18.
The music video revolution
Thriller, it’s an extraordinary album. It spent over 500 weeks on Billboard and sold over 100 million copies. He has also been crowned with 8 Grammys. A record still relevant today, four decades later.
Thriller and its cohort of hits are part of history, the one with a capital H. The album has been incorporated into the collections of the prestigious Library of Congress in Washington for its cultural, historical or aesthetic significance. It was in 2007. It also made history because it was the first record to have used the clip as a promotional tool designed for it. The release of the “Thriller” video was an event in itself. At the time, no one had yet dared to offer a format of more than 13 minutes written like a short film. But also unlock the sum of 900,000 dollars to shoot it. A colossal sum at the beginning of the 80s. To finance the thing, it was suggested to film a making-of of the shooting in order to be able to propose a complete program which could be sold to televisions.
Sold nearly 10 million copies, it is said that the clip of “Thriller” also contributed to the rise of VHS, the famous video cassettes on tape, ancestor of Blu-ray DVDs, etc.
Since 2009, this clip has been included in the collections of the National Film Registry because of its significant cultural, historical or aesthetic value. Previously, it has been repeatedly awarded and often named as the most important or famous music video production of all time.
Hits that broke racial silos
Probably more important than the numbers, the clips taken from Thriller – there were 7 in total! (“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'”, “The Girl Is Mine”, “Thriller”, “Beat It”, “Billie Jean”, “Human Nature” and “PYT (Pretty Young Thing)”), helped make skip racial locks. The very young MTV created in 1981 was then an exclusively musical television channel which did not program any black artists. With its slew of singles, each more “tubesque” than the other, Thriller opened the channel’s doors to Michael Jackson and many other black artists in the process. Admittedly, it took threats of boycotts and withdrawals from artists like Pink Floyd and Billy Joel to get MTV management to relent, but the successes of “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” showed how much the audience of the channel was open to a genre hitherto banned from the air.
For the little story, Thriller was recorded between April 14 and November 8, 1982. And released on November 30, less than a month later. When we see today how much time passes between the recordings of many albums and their release to the public, with a lot of marketing, we say to ourselves that nothing replaces good, well-produced songs…