Thriller is surrounded by a cloud of statistics—the biggest album in history, it sold more than 40 million copies on its first release; it shifted a million copies a month in the first half of 1983; of its nine tracks, seven were hit singles.
It does not stand up as well as Off The Wall overall, but some of its meticulous fusions of pop, rock, and R&B manage to improve on even that template. Ignore the ridiculously camp title track—a song that drains the life out of the record at the end of side one—and concentrate on the undisputed masterpieces.
The funk opener "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" serves the same function as Off The Wall's "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough"—a minimal, riff-based framework for Jacko's hyperkinetic hiccups. It also "borrows" rather heavily from Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa" (Jacko's lawyers made a large out-of-court settlement).
Elsewhere
you will thrill to the airbrushed funk-rock of "Beat It" (Eddie Van
Halen's guitar solo was cut and spliced from 50 different takes); while "Human
Nature" is a digital ballad so beautiful that Miles Davis covered it.
But the star turn is "Billie Jean", on which a creepy, electronic bassline gets under your skin while the dubious lyric asks you to side with the paranoid millionaire superstar rather than the impoverished single mother.
Like
the rest of Thriller, it is machine-tooled pop that has been
painstakingly crafted by state-of-the-art session men for months, but there is
not a note out of place.
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