Thriller - Michael Jackson (1983)

I had a couple different 80s R&B and soul records stubbed in here when I started, but let’s be serious. You can’t really get a feel for early 80s pop music without Michael Jackson in general and Thriller in particular.

Michael Jackson was one of the biggest names in pop and had been for some time. He’d quickly become the face of the first family of R&B music as a child star. Since going solo, he’d already had some major hits.

Nothing would compare to the phenomenon of this record, one of the biggest sellers in history and a cultural touchpoint the world over.

There’s enough speculation about Jackson’s inner workings to fill a library. Without weighing in on it too much, you can start to see the cracks appearing from all the pressure and scrutiny. The songs he wrote trend to the paranoid and edgy, and he’d only get more eccentric as he went.

Producer Quincy Jones (O_o) gets great mileage out of a plethora of studio musicians, including multiple members of Toto and some guy named Eddie Van Halen.

A personal aside: There was a big bin of vinyl in my house but it was all older stuff and only the Christmas ones ever got played. I knew there was such a thing as pop music on the radio, but we didn’t really listen to it. My neighbor and friend Richard bought Thriller (or his parents probably did) on vinyl, and it was the first time that I really made the connection that you could also seek out and buy the music you wanted and just listen to it whenever you like. I would have been nine years old at the time. Is that weird? I suppose.