40 years ago | Thriller, album of a pop revolution

(Paris) A duet with Paul McCartney, the hard rock guitar of Eddie Van Halen…: the album Thriller by Michael Jackson, the best-selling record of all time, sculpted hybrid pop 40 years ago that has since become the norm.

Sold to “more than 100 million” copies according to the Sony record company and the legatees of the artist who died in 2009, Thriller released on November 30, 1982.

And consecrates 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 nevertheless remains a marker of musical history. Dawn FM, album by hit machine The Weeknd, released in early 2022, is obviously inspired by it. “Michael is someone I look up to. He’s not a real person, you know? When I started music, that’s what I aspired to, “says the Canadian to the magazine QG.

The sound mille-feuille side of Thriller owes a lot to the association between Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones, legendary producer recruited on his previous record (off the wall1979).

Enclosures on fire

The singer initially calls Quincy Jones for his address book to find a producer. But “Q”, as Frank Sinatra calls him, offers himself.

“Quincy, which the record company didn’t want for off the wallwho takes a dim view of this producer from jazz, this music “which does not sell a peanut” as they say at the time in the music industry”, tells AFP Frenchman Olivier Cachin, author of books Michael Jackson, Pop Life and Michael Jackson, musical metamorphoses.

The collaboration between Jones and Jackson, both co-producers of Thriller, will nevertheless 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,” Jones recalled in the magazine. RollingStone.

On this track, there is the guitarist of Toto, Steve Lukather, crushed by Eddie Van Halen’s solo. So we find a pinch of hard rock on Thrillerbut also Paul McCartney in duet for the bluette The Girl Is Mine.

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 Afrojazz, will file a series of lawsuits for plagiarism, resulting in a financial settlement.

Undead

The disc — 9 tracks originally, the anniversary album Thriller 40 which comes out this Friday is enriched with new releases – continues with clips in 1983.

But the new music channel MTV, which programs rock played by white artists, refuses to broadcast that of Billie John.

The boss of Jackson’s record company, 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 braces himself when Jackson proposes for the end of 1983 a clip of nearly 14 minutes for the piece Thrillerdirected by John Landis, the director of Blues Brotherswhose film he likes The Werewolf of London.

“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.

The mini-film is presented in preview in a cinema of Los Angeles in front of an audience of stars. We see Jackson transforming into a werewolf in a 4-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.