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Classic Recordings” “Thriller” by Michael Jackson

Nine songs. The best-selling album ever made. And, more than forty years on, still the most instructive forty-two minutes in pop music.

Thriller, and what it actually did

Released 30 November 1982, Thriller is the record against which commercial success is still measured — sales figures in the region of seventy million, eight Grammys in a single night, and a run of seven hit singles from nine tracks.

But the sales are the least interesting thing about it. What Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones did was solve a problem: how to make a record that no radio format could refuse. Off the Wall had been a magnificent disco-soul album that Black radio embraced and rock radio ignored. Thriller was engineered to be undeniable everywhere, and the tools were deliberate — a hard rock guitar solo, a Beatle, a horror-film narration, a bassline built for the dancefloor and a ballad built for the adult-contemporary chart.

It also broke MTV's effective colour bar. The channel's resistance to playing Black artists collapsed under the weight of "Billie Jean," and the short film for "Thriller" permanently changed what a music video could cost and attempt.

What to listen for

"Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" opens with six minutes of pure rhythm and ends on a chant borrowed from Cameroonian musician Manu Dibango — a debt eventually acknowledged in court, and a reminder that this record's roots run further than Los Angeles.

"Billie Jean" is the masterpiece: that bassline, the drum sound Bruce Swedien built by constructing a custom drum platform, and a vocal that gets more paranoid each verse. "Beat It" put Eddie Van Halen on a soul record for free.

"Human Nature" — written by Toto's Steve Porcaro and John Bettis, and nearly left off — is the one musicians tend to name as their favourite, and it has been sampled and covered endlessly since.

"The Lady in My Life," the closer, is the underrated one: Rod Temperton's finest ballad and the best pure singing on the album.

Go deeper

Off the Wall (1979) is the better album by many people's reckoning, and the one to hear next. Rod Temperton — the Englishman from Cleethorpes who wrote "Thriller," "Rock with You" and "Off the Wall" — is one of pop's great invisible figures and worth reading about.

For Quincy Jones, go back to his arranging work for Dinah Washington and Count Basie, then forward to The Dude. The man's career is a history of American popular music in one CV.

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