100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’

02 Baby Be Mine

03 The Girl Is Mine

04 Thriller

05 Beat It

06 Billie Jean

07 Human Nature

08 P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)

09 The Lady in My Life

At the close of 1982 when Thriller was released, Michael Jackson was 24. He still had the instincts of a musical prodigy, but they were now presented to the world by a young African-American man. He was private, but not inaccessible, and nearly everything that would come to drag down his legacy hadn’t yet occurred. The glow surrounding Jackson on the album’s cover was deserved. Thriller is often referred to as the highest selling album of all time, but it exists outside that label. It’s a dazzling record, melding flashes of inspiration with consummate professionalism, and it had an aura and energy that would help it break the colour barriers that still remained in pop music.

It starts with a statement of intent: the intricate, intoxicating ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’, which combines overlapping drum patterns with the work of percussionist Paulinho da Costa and sets the trend for an album where the traditional and the modern are just two tools to be used as required by Jackson and producer Quincy Jones. The song is a come on, part challenge and part promise, and Jackson’s vocal performance revels in the spotlight, recreating the joyous ‘Ma Ma Se/Ma Ma Sa, Ma Ma Coo Sa’ hook from Manu Dibango’s 1972 disco hit ‘Soul Makossa’ (a lift that Jackson would ultimately settle with Dibango after the latter sued) as a celebratory conclusion.

If the song’s imagery was all over the place – Jackson had reportedly written it for his sister La Toya, who had a contentious relationship with her then husband’s family – the sentiment kept bringing it back to music. It signals that Jackson himself is starting something on Thriller, aiming to establish himself as the centre of pop music and eclipse race as a distinguishing factor. Sometimes he did it with blunt intent, such as the soulful ballad with Paul McCartney, ‘The Girl Is Mine’, where the former Jackson 5 and Beatles members don’t so much argue as agree to disagree.

‘Beat It’ was incisive; one of several tracks that demonstrated how far Jackson had moved past his previous album, 1979’s excellent funk experience Off the Wall. The opening rhythm, which became a template for modern R&B, is sparked by a guitar line that’s nearly as threatening as the lyric. ‘They’re out to get you, better leave while you can,’ sings Jackson, dispensing with his boyish falsetto, and it’s offset by a shredding guitar solo from Eddie Van Halen that pushes the song into tormented pleasure.

Jackson’s life could still be clearly identified in his music, and it made for pop songs, at once joyous in their openness and tortured in how they hold secrets close to the surface of scrutiny. That notion reached its apotheosis in ‘Billie Jean’, a defiant response by Jackson to being named in a paternity suit. The song is emphatic – ‘the kid is not my son,’ Jackson repeatedly declares – but it can’t help creating an environment where Jackson is so compelling that he could bend anyone to his will. There are flashes of paranoia but, as on much of Thriller, it humanises Jackson; whereas on subsequent albums he would disappear into a carefully designed illusion.

The title track, ‘Thriller’, gave disco a dose of Hammer Horror melodrama and the song’s obvious delight proves transformative, while ‘Human Nature’ keeps Jackson’s populism on an intimate scale. The record took approximately seven months to make from start to finish, and it’s as focused and expressive as subsequent Michael Jackson albums would be stultifying and ornate. Michael Jackson never again got everything right like he did on Thriller. On these songs he really was the king of pop.