Thriller: The Album That Ate the World

On November 30, 1982, Epic Records released the sixth studio album by a 24-year-old Michael Jackson. It was called Thriller, and nothing in pop music would ever be quite the same.

Jackson had reunited with Quincy Jones, the producer behind his hit Off the Wall (1979). Recording at Westlake Studios in Los Angeles on a $750,000 budget, they set out to make an album with no filler — Jackson wrote four of its nine tracks himself, blending pop, rock, funk, and R&B into something darker and more ambitious than disco-era pop.

The singles did the rest. The first single, "The Girl Is Mine," left some observers predicting only a modest hit — then the second single, "Billie Jean," arrived, and the album exploded in country after country. Seven of the album's nine songs were released as singles, and all seven reached the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 — "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" both hit No. 1, and the Paul McCartney duet "The Girl Is Mine" peaked at No. 2. At its peak the record was selling a million copies a week worldwide. The album became the first to reach No. 1 in the United States and the United Kingdom simultaneously, spent a record 37 weeks atop the American chart, was the world's best-selling album of 1983, and within just over a year became the best-selling album of all time — a title it still holds globally, with more than 65 million copies sold by most estimates. It held the U.S. sales record until 2018, when the Eagles' greatest-hits album edged past it, and in 2017 the RIAA certified Thriller 33-times platinum.

Thriller's impact went far beyond sales. Its videos — especially the nearly 14-minute, John Landis-directed "Thriller" short film that premiered on MTV in December 1983 — turned the music video into an art form and helped Jackson smash the racial barriers of early MTV; the "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" videos went into heavy rotation too. At the 1984 Grammys the album won eight awards, including Album of the Year. In 2009, the "Thriller" video became the first music video inducted into the National Film Registry.

Four decades on, its basslines, dance moves, and red jacket remain instantly recognizable everywhere on Earth. It started on a November day in 1982, when the best-selling album in history quietly arrived in record stores.

Photo: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).