Michael Jackson ‎- Thriller - 1982 Epic Records Vinyl LP

$

30

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Thriller Studio album by Michael Jackson Released November 29, 1982 Recorded April 14 – November 8, 1982 Studio Westlake, Los Angeles, California Genre

• Pop
• post-disco
• R&B
• funk
• rock

• Quincy Jones
• Michael Jackson

1. "The Girl Is Mine"
   Released: October 18, 1982
2. "Billie Jean"
   Released: January 3, 1983
3. "Beat It"
   Released: February 21, 1983
4. "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'"
   Released: May 9, 1983
5. "Human Nature"
   Released: July 4, 1983
6. "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)"
   Released: September 19, 1983
7. "Thriller"
   Released: November 11, 1983

Thriller is the sixth studio album by the American singer and songwriter Michael Jackson. It was released on November 29, 1982, through Epic Records. It was produced by Quincy Jones, who previously worked with Jackson on his album Off the Wall (1979). Recording took place from April to November 1982 at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles, California, with a budget of $750,000 (equivalent to $2,502,155 in 2025). With the ongoing backlash against disco music, Jackson transitioned his sound, with Thriller featuring pop, post-disco, and R&B, while its themes include paranoia, romance, and social consciousness. Paul McCartney appears as the first credited featured artist on a Jackson album.

Thriller was Jackson's first number-one album on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart, and stood atop for a record 37 non-consecutive weeks. The album's second and third singles, "Billie Jean" and "Beat It", topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart, while "The Girl Is Mine", "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'", "Human Nature", "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)", and "Thriller" were Top 10 hits, setting a record for the most Top 10 hits from one album. Sales of Thriller surged after Jackson debuted his signature moonwalk dance in Motown 25 and the "Thriller" music video premiered on MTV, and by early 1984 it became the best-selling album of all time, with sales of over 30 million copies.

Thriller was praised by critics and soon attracted greater acclaim. It won a record-breaking eight Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year for "Beat It", and earned Jackson a record-breaking eight American Music Awards. It was the best-selling album of 1983 worldwide, and in 1984 it became the first album to be the best-selling in the United States for two years. It had an enormous impact on the music industry; in particular, the several music videos from the album are credited with transforming music videos into a serious art form.

Thriller remains the best-selling album of all time, having sold an estimated 70 million copies worldwide, and is certified 34× platinum in the US, making it the second best-selling album in the US. It is often recognized as a landmark in American culture; the success gave Jackson an unprecedented level of cultural significance for a black American, breaking racial barriers in popular music and causing an intense fan frenzy dubbed "Michaelmania". It is frequently recognized as one of the greatest and most influential albums of all time. In 2008, it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and added to the National Recording Registry of "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant recordings" by the Library of Congress.

Critical reception

Despite receiving positive reviews, some critics initially felt that Thriller was inferior to Off the Wall. Mike Gardner of Record Mirror gave Thriller a positive review, though noted that the album "aims for cosy comfort" instead of the 'state of the art' technicality present in Off the Wall. Gavin Martin of NME gave an underwhelming review of Thriller, claiming that it sounds like it was released before Off the Wall. Martin was particularly critical of Jackson's songwriting: "the overall feeling that comes from Thriller is that of barely developed artist being given too much artistic control". Writing for Smash Hits, Bev Hillier noted that while Thriller is not as "instant" as Off the Wall, it is still a "first class product". In another NME review, Paolo Hewitt wrote, "this is not a good LP", described the album as "bland", and opionated that it contains "lyrical cliches". Hewitt highlights "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" and "Billie Jean" as the only songs "worthy of mention".

In Musician, J. D. Considine wrote that Thriller "sounds every bit like a winner" and that Jackson and Jones did a "magnificent job of recreating the lithe grooves and carefully manicured arrangements" that defined the sound of Off the Wall. John Rockwell wrote in The New York Times that Thriller is "a wonderful pop record, the latest statement by one of the great singers in popular music today" and that there are "hits here, too, lots of them". Rockwell believed it helped breach "the destructive barriers that spring up regularly between white and black music", especially as "white publications and radio stations that normally avoid black music seem willing to pretend he isn't black after all". In a review for Rolling Stone, Christopher Connelly called Thriller "zesty" with a "harrowing, dark message". Connelly emphasized Jackson's musical progression from Off the Wall, writing, "Jackson's new attitude gives Thriller a deeper, if less visceral, emotional urgency than any of his previous work, and marks another watershed in the creative development of this prodigiously talented performer." In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau said "this is virtually a hits-plus-filler job, but at such a high level it's almost classic anyway".

Thriller soon garnered greater acclaim than it initially did upon release. In The New York Times, Holden highlighted the album's significance: "Pop music will never be quite the same in the wake of Michael Jackson's ''Thriller,'' [...] Today echoes of Michael Jackson's quavering, exhilarated tenor resound across the pop spectrum, especially in the records of youthful pop- soul singers coming up the ladder." Jay Cocks of Time summed up the three main singles from the album, saying, "The pulse of America and much of the rest of the world moves irregularly, beating in time to the tough strut of 'Billie Jean', the asphalt aria of 'Beat It', the supremely cool chills of 'Thriller'." Cocks also praised Thriller for being "a thorough restoration of confidence, a rejuvenation" and "bringing black music back to mainstream radio".

In 1989, Toronto Star music critics reflected on the albums they had reviewed in the past ten years in order to create a list judging them on the basis of "commercial impact to social import, to strictly musical merit." Thriller was placed at number one on the list, where it was referred to as his "master work" and that "commercial success has since overshadowed Jackson's artistic accomplishments on Thriller, and that's a pity. It was a record for the times, brimming with breathless anticipation and a dread fear of the adult world, a brilliant fantasy that pumped with sexual heat, yet made room for serious reflection". Christgau wrote in Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s (1990), "what we couldn't know is how brilliantly every hit but 'P.Y.T.' would thrive on mass exposure and public pleasure."

Rankings

In 2000, Thriller was voted number 64 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums. It was also ranked number two in the Soul/R&B – All Time Top 50 albums. The book states; it is the finest example of perfect disco-pop, and a record that should be prescribed to musical snobs and manic depressives. In 2003, it was ranked at number 20 on the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list, maintaining the ranking in a 2012 revised list — it's the highest ranked pop album on both lists. In a 2020 updated list by Rolling Stone, Thriller was ranked number 12. It was ranked by the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM), in conjunction with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, at number three on its list of the Definitive 200 Albums of All Time. "Beat It" and "Billie Jean" were both included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. In 2006, Time included Thriller in its list of the All-TIME 100 Albums. In 2009, music critics for MTV Base and VH1 both listed Thriller as the best album released since 1981. Thriller, along with other critic favorites, were then polled by the public. 40,000 people found Thriller to be the Best Album of all time by MTV Generation, gaining a third of all votes. In 2012, Slant Magazine ranked Thriller as the best album of the 1980s. Thriller was ranked third on the Greatest of All Time Billboard 200 Albums. Billboard also ranked the album fourth on its list of All 92 Diamond-Certified Albums Ranked from Worst to Best: Critic's Take. In 2018, The Independent named Thriller the "most inspiring album of all time".

Legacy and influence

Music industry

Thriller's success gave Jackson cultural significance never before attained by an African American in the entertainment industry. Blender described Jackson as the "late 20th century's preeminent pop icon", while The New York Times wrote that he was a "musical phenomenon" and that "in the world of pop music, there is Michael Jackson and there is everybody else". Richard Corliss of Time hailed Thriller as "the greatest pop album of all time". The Times asserted that it is "still the best pop album" following the release of Thriller 40, a 40th-anniversary reissue of the album.

Jackson changed the way the industry functioned, both as an artistic persona and as a financial, profitable entity. Thriller was released around the peak of the album era, which had positioned full-length records ahead of singles as the dominant form of recorded-music consumption and artistic expression in the industry. The success of Thriller's singles marked a brief resurgence in the sales of the format, and changed notions about the number of singles that could be successfully released from an album.

His attorney John Branca said that Jackson had achieved the highest royalty rate in the music industry to that point: about $2 (US$6.2 in 2025 dollars) for each album sold. As a result, Jackson earned record-breaking profits from compact disc sales and from the sale of copies of the documentary, The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller, produced by Jackson and John Landis. Funded by MTV, the film sold over 350,000 copies in its first few months. More profits came from novelties such as the Michael Jackson doll, which appeared in stores in May 1984 at a price of $12 (US$37 in 2025 dollars). Thriller's position in American culture was described by biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli: "At some point, Thriller stopped selling like a leisure item—like a magazine, a toy, tickets to a hit movie—and started selling like a household staple".

In a statement at the album's release, Gil Friesen, then-president of A&M Records, said, "The whole industry has a stake in this success". Others later agreed. Time magazine speculated that "the fallout from Thriller has given the [music] business its best years since the heady days of 1978, when it had an estimated total domestic revenue of $4.1 billion". Time summed up Thriller's impact as a "restoration of confidence" for an industry bordering on "the ruins of punk and the chic regions of synthesizer pop". The publication described Jackson's influence at that point as, "Star of records, radio, rock video. A one-man rescue team for the music business. A songwriter who sets the beat for a decade. A dancer with the fanciest feet on the street. A singer who cuts across all boundaries of taste and style and color too".

The '80s were when stars replaced artists as bearers of significance... When art is intellectual property, image and aura subsume aesthetic substance, whatever exactly that is. When art is capital, sales interface with aesthetic quality—Thriller's numbers are part of its experience.

As Thriller and "Billie Jean" sought to reach their market demographic, MTV and cable TV had a much smaller market share than broadcast television stations in the United States. CBS/Epic Records sought to promote Thriller with a national broadcast TV audience on ABC, NBC and CBS affiliate stations, as well as major independent TV stations. The national broadcast TV premiere of the Thriller album's first video, "Billie Jean", was during the week of Halloween in October 1984 and was the idea of Video Concert Hall executive producers Charles Henderson and Jerry Crowe. Video Concert Hall, the first nationwide music video TV network, taped the one-hour special in Hollywood and Atlanta, where the TV studios of Video Concert Hall were located. The Thriller TV special was hosted by Thriller video co-star Vincent Price, distributed by Henderson-Crowe Syndications, Inc. and aired in the top 20 TV markets and much of the United States, including TV stations WNEW (New York), WFLD (Chicago), KTTV (Los Angeles), WPLG (Miami), WQTV (Boston) and WXIA (Atlanta), for a total of 150 TV stations.

Thriller had a pioneering impact on black-music genres and crossover. According to ethnomusicologist Miles White, the album completely defined the "sound of post-disco contemporary R&B" and "updated the crossover aesthetic that had been the holy grail of black popular music since Louis Jordan in the 1940s". Noting its unprecedented dominance of mainstream pop music by an African-American artist, White goes on to write that "the record's song selection and sound aesthetics played to soul and pop sensibilities alike, appealing to a broad audience and selling across lines of race, gender, class and generation", while demonstrating Jackson's emergence from Motown as "the king of pop-soul crossover". Entertainment Weekly writer Simon Vozick-Levinson praised it as "the greatest pop-soul album". Included in their list of The 40 Most Groundbreaking Albums of All Time, Rolling Stone wrote:

It's hard to imagine the present-day musical landscape without Thriller, which changed the game both sonically and marketwise. The album's nervy, outsized blend of pop, rock and soul would send seismic waves throughout radio, inviting both marquee crossovers (like Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo on "Beat It") and sneakier attempts at genre-meshing. The album's splashy, cinematic videos — from the John Landis-directed short film that promoted "Thriller" to the West Side Story homage accompanying "Beat It" — legitimized the still-nascent form and forced MTV to incorporate black artists into its playlists. Its promotional strategy, which led to seven of its nine tracks being released as singles, raised the bar for what, exactly, constituted a "hit-laden" LP. Beyond breaking ground, it broke records, showing just how far pop could reach: the biggest selling album of all time, the first album to win eight Grammys in a single night and the first album to stay in the Top 10 charts for a year.

Epic Records also reflected on the importance of the album: "More than just an album, Thriller has remained a global cultural multi-media phenomenon for both the 20th and the 21st centuries, smashing musical barriers and changing the frontiers of pop forever. The music on Thriller is so dynamic and singular that it defied any definition of rock, pop or soul that had gone before. Alan Light writing in Rolling Stone explained the historic significance of the album: "In today's world of declining sales and fragmented audiences, it is almost impossible to imagine how much this one album dominated and united the culture."

From the moment Thriller was released, it set the standard for the music industry: artists, record labels, producers, marketers and even choreographers. The music video was ahead of its time and it is considered a monumental one—not only in Jackson's career, but also in the history of pop music. Epic Records' approach to creating a song and video that would appeal to the mass market ended up influencing the way that professionals now market and release their songs. John Landis' production of a mini-movie, rather than the usual short music video, would raise the bar for other directors and producers.

Track listing

All tracks are produced by Quincy Jones, except where noted.

• Jones
• Jackson

• Jones
• Jackson

• Jones
• Jackson

• Jones
• Jackson

• Steve Porcaro
• John Bettis

• James Ingram
• Jones