Long Live the 80's!!

There was a time when Michael Jackson wasn't merely the self-described King of Pop but the king of the world, in the James Cameron sense of the term. He had artistic acclaim and monumental commercial success, and nothing seemed beyond his reach: music, videos, live performances, movies. THRILLER is his "Titanic": a big, bold, glossy, and gripping tour de force that consumed the pop world. It never failed to make you move, from the opening challenge of "Wanna Be Startin' Something," with its "Soul Makossa" groove, to the sleek beats of "Billy Jean" to the funked-up rock of "Beat It" (with a guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen, no less). More than a cavalcade of justly deserved hits, 1982's THRILLER suggested that Jackson was only beginning to tap into his massive talent, and that was perhaps the most, well, thrilling aspect of it. Here was an album that, in an increasingly fractured culture, almost everyone could favorably agree on; it had a luxurious production sheen, courtesy of Quincy Jones, and the most expensive studio talent that money could buy, yet it never sounded manufactured or contrived. Michael Jackson really meant it, and THRILLER remains both his masterwork and a decade-defining album of the '80s. It's a testimony to Jackson's incredible gifts, to what he was, and to what we hoped he could always be.