More thrills
Thriller, the best-selling album of all time, is currently sitting in 5th position on the Billboard 200, the main US albums chart. A full 44 years after its original release. You read that right: the album that broke all kinds of records in the 80’s — and set the benchmark for all of pop music since — is back. With good reason: Michael, the biopic about the late originator of this monumental piece of work, is currently in cinemas and making quite a name for itself: it could beat Bohemian Rhapsody as the biggest music biopic of all time… Surprising?
Not really. Michael Jackson was a generational talent, who managed to reinvent the entire genre of pop, coming from the then-subgenre of soul music. After having led Motown to the top of the charts as a mere child with his siblings, he then went on to fend for himself in the most brilliant way possible, building a solo career that eventually shook the entire industry. With the help of superproducer Quincy Jones, he released a series of 3 albums over the course of 8 years — Off the Wall, Thriller, Bad — that sparked the beginning of modern pop music, all the while remaining unequaled since. On top of that came the incredible live performances the man gave, with his stellar dancing and otherworldly sense of showmanship. A Super Bowl halftime show which he started by standing in silence for nearly 2 minutes, something no one had dared do before him — or since. A ridiculous number of records broken in the process, biggest selling albums and tours alike, all thanks to an absolutely relentless sense of artistic ambition.
But there also lays the dark side. First, Jackson’s insane level of perfectionism reportedly made him very hard to deal with. Always reworking everything, never satisfied, driving collaborators to the very extremes of what they were able to withstand. But the same could be said of many artists at that level of the game: think Madonna, the Beatles, more recently Bruno Mars (a direct musical descendant of Jackson’s)… But there are other, well-documented issues with the man, that became more evident with time. We now live in a post-MeToo era, where artists’ personal misconducts are increasingly publicized. Which is obviously a great thing, for many powerful people historically took — and still take — advantage of said fame. While Jackson was cleared of all wrongdoing while he was alive, there are many problematic claims, complaints and elements surrounding his personal behavior — towards children. The comedian Jim Jefferies had a great bit on this, which he called the fame-to-blame ratio: the bigger the star, the more failings it takes to affect them.
And so Michael Jackson still stands atop music’s Mount Rushmore, thanks to his incredible artistic output. Despite the fact that his personal behavior was — most likely — criminal. A fact that was interestingly left out of his biopic. Tricky…