A duet with Paul McCartney or the hard rock guitar of Eddie Van Halen appear on the album “Thriller”. With this record, the best-selling of all time, Michael Jackson sculpted forty years ago a hybrid pop that has since become the norm. An album enriched with new releases celebrates this anniversary.
Sold to “more than 100 million” copies according to the Sony record company and the legatees of the artist who died in 2009, “Thriller” was released on November 30, 1982. And consecrated Michael Jackson as the “King of pop”. The image of the megastar is no longer the same forty years later, except for his fans. A recent documentary, disputed by his heirs, relaunched the accusations of pedocrime, denied during his lifetime by the singer, who was never convicted for such facts.
“Thriller” is nonetheless a marker of musical history. “Dawn FM”, album by hit machine The Weeknd, released in early 2022, is clearly inspired by it. “Michael is someone I admire. He’s not a real person, you see? When I started music, that’s what I aspired to,” the Canadian told the GQ review.
The sound layered side of “Thriller” owes a lot to the association between Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones, legendary producer recruited on his previous album (“Off The Wall”, 1979).
>> To see: the music video for “Beat It”
Enclosures on fire
The singer initially calls Quincy Jones for his address book to find a producer. But “Q”, as Frank Sinatra nicknames him, offers himself. “Quincy, who the record company didn’t want for ‘Off The Wall’, who took a dim view of this producer coming from jazz, this music ‘which doesn’t sell a peanut’, as they say at the time in the music industry”, tells AFP the French Olivier Cachin, author of the books “Michael Jackson, Pop Life” and “Michael Jackson, musical metamorphoses”.
The collaboration between Jones and Jackson, both co-producers of “Thriller”, will however make sparks. Literally as well as figuratively. For the title “Beat It”, “we worked five days and nights in a row without sleeping. So much so that at one point, the studio speakers overheated and caught fire”, recalls Quincy Jones in Rolling magazine Stone. On this track, there is the guitarist of Toto, Steve Lukather, crushed by Eddie Van Halen’s solo. We therefore find a pinch of hard rock on “Thriller”, but also Paul McCartney in duet for the bluette “The Girl Is Mine”.
A photo from 1983 showing Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson. [AFP]
We also hear a rap rhythm on “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'”. Not to mention the sample – without authorization – on this same piece of “Soul Makossa”. Its creator, saxophonist Manu Dibango, figure of Afro-jazz, will file a series of lawsuits for plagiarism, resulting in a financial settlement.
Undead
The disc, originally nine titles, is extended by clips in 1983. But the new music channel MTV, which programs rock played by white artists, refuses to broadcast that of “Billie Jean”. The boss of Jackson’s label, Walter Yetnikoff, “then threatens MTV to publicly denounce them as big racists and to block their access to the clips of rock artists in its catalog”, recalls Olivier Cachin. The battle is won.
Yetnikoff then takes aim when Jackson proposes for the end of 1983 a clip of nearly 14 minutes for the track “Thriller”, directed by John Landis, the director of the “Blues Brothers”, whose film “The Werewolf of London” he likes. . “Yetnikoff doesn’t see why spending almost a million dollars – unheard of for a music video – when the album is already No. 1 (on the charts), but Michael has a vision, is stubborn”, rewinds the journalist Olivier Cachin.
>> To see: the clip of “Thriller”
The mini-film is presented in preview in a cinema of Los Angeles in front of an audience of stars. In it, Jackson is seen transforming into a werewolf in a four-minute prologue before the song begins. Then the living dead come out of their graves, on a voice-over by Vincent Price, a cult actor in horror cinema from the 1950s and 60s. “Thriller” has just given birth to another revolution between pop music and horror film.
ats/ld