Just under 38 years ago, on July 12, 1972, 14-year old Michael Jackson released a little song from a bad movie about a rat.
“Ben” would be the first of Michael's 18 solo number-one singles, finally topping the Billboard Hot 100 chart for a week on Oct. 14. The single would win the young singer a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song.
“Ben” was what got Michael Jackson to the top of the music business, but it was just the start. With the release of “Thriller,” a decade later, Jackson would become a force of almost interplanetary power up in the stratosphere of Elvis Presley and the Beatles -- and not just because of his much copied moonwalk. “Thriller” spent 37 consecutive weeks at number one after it was released in 1982.
Besides those sales, breaking the MTV color barrier with the rock oriented “Beat It,” and creating the measure by which music videos are still judged with “Thriller,” Jackson had a profound effect on modern music. Jackson’s legacy is as wide and broad as Elvis and the Beatles in crossing boundaries of style, fans and even nations.
Before “Thriller,” with the exception of the short-lived multiracial Sly and the Family Stone, radio formats throughout most of the country were, like MTV, rigid -- and the barriers between genres were strict. Rock didn’t mingle deeply with funk and white didn’t really dance with black.
The unprecedented transcending synthesis of R&B, funk, rock and almost -Broadway ballads that make up the songs on “Thriller” are the core of Jackson’s musical endurance.
After “Thriller,” hip-hop pioneers Run DMC would duet with rehab rockers Aerosmith; Boy George, a gay white British dance clubber who dressed like Mama Cass and sang like Aretha Franklin, found millions of fans in the UK and the USA; and a prodigy called Prince gained a mainstream following from the beat and guitar heavy “Purple Rain.”
No wonder Recording Academy President Neil Portnow praised Jackson¹s
"stunning musical versatility" in his statement on the singer¹s death. At
the after-party for Thursday night's L.A. premiere of the Sacha Baron Cohen
mockumentary "Bruno," which urgently cut a scene with Jackson's sister LaToya,
the DJ played Michael Jackson "all night," in the words of one guest. Over
two and a half decades after it first came out, "Thriller" remains a
post-modern masterpiece.
It has sold over 100 million copies worldwide and is, at double what AC/DC’s second-place holder “Back in Black have shipped, the best-selling record of all time. “Anybody and everybody bought his stuff from DJs to people who just like pop music,” Rick Sanchez, manager at L.A.’s Amoeba Records told TheWrap on Thursday evening.
Jackson’s record, as his career begins the inevitable posthumous Elvis and Beatle resurrection and re-releases, is already growing larger just one day after his death. “His albums, from the Jackson 5 stuff to “Thriller” and his solo stuff, has always sold,” Sanchez said. “Since the news has become official today, we’re sold out of everything we have.”
