Forty-two years after its release, Michael Jackson’s Thriller is a towering pillar of American culture: the best-selling album of all time, and the gold standard to which all pop artists aspire in its beloved omnipresence. Thriller spent 37 non-consecutive weeks at No. 1, and set the record for most top 10 singles from an album, with seven. It has since sold over 60 million copies around the world.
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But its success was far from inevitable: the project faced many barriers to its astonishing rise, most centrally related to lingering doubts from executives about how widely a Black R&B artist could resonate.
Those barriers were overcome by the insatiable drive and genius of two men: Jackson and Quincy Jones. Jones, who died on Sunday night at 91 in Los Angeles, had already been a formidable impresario in music and TV for decades before pairing up with Jackson, a former child prodigy struggling with his pivot into adulthood. Thriller cemented Jackson’s stardom as a solo artist while serving as the culmination of Jones’ vast talents: together, they created a blockbuster forged by a maniacal competitiveness, a deep love for decades of global pop culture, and a fascination with new technologies and multimedia modes of stardom.
Building a new pop sound
Jones started producing for Jackson on his 1979 album, Off the Wall, his fifth solo release outside of his work with the Jackson 5. Jackson’s previous solo albums had failed to cross over to diverse audiences, so he and Jones hoped to win over the mainstream through a fresh reimagining of disco as it exited its era of dominance, imbuing the genre with a new frontier of synthesizers and electronic drum grooves.
Off the Wall was a massive hit. But its critical acclaim was capped due to the music industry’s rigid conceptions of race and genre. The Grammys pigeonholed it into its R&B genres, failing to nominate any of its megahits—including “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” or “Rock With You”—for Record of the Year or Song of the Year. And Jackson complained about Rolling Stone passing him over for a cover story in 1980: “I’ve been told over and over that black people on the cover of magazines doesn’t sell copies … Just wait,” he said.
Jones and Jackson wanted their follow-up to be bigger: for every song on the album to be an undeniable smash. “To penetrate, you have to go for the throat in four, five, six different areas: rock, AC [adult contemporary], R&B, soul,” Jones told Rolling Stone in 2009.
In their gamesmanship, Jones and Jackson first turned to a hitmaker who they presumed white radio wouldn’t dare snub: Paul McCartney. Jones and Jackson wanted to create an easy-listening pop hit replicating the success of McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory” in a way that might expand Jackson’s global appeal to Beatles-level heights. The resulting single, “The Girl Is Mine,” wasn’t well-received by critics. McCartney himself called it shallow. But while some radio DJs declined to play the song because of its implications of interracial romance, the gambit worked: the song hit No. 2 on the pop chart, priming the world for the album’s crossover ambitions.
The rest of Thriller would possess a similar, clearly-defined sonic aura: sleek, glittery, tightly-wound. To create this specificity, Jones pulled from his voracious and encyclopedic knowledge of music theory and music history. As a teenager, he cut his teeth as a jazz trumpeter in Seattle alongside Ray Charles. Jones soon became a fixture in the New York jazz scene, arranging songs for Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, and Count Basie. One of Jones’ priorities was to imbue Jackson’s music with jazz language and sensibilities, even while aiming for the top of the charts. “Baby Be Mine,” for instance, was a clear homage to John Coltrane, Jones told Vulture in 2018. “Getting the young kids to hear bebop is what I’m talking about,” he said. “Jazz is at the top of the hierarchy of music because the musicians learned everything they could about music.”
In addition to jazz, Jones wanted to borrow from “bar mitzvah music, Sousa marches, strip-club music, jazz, pop,” he said in the same interview. As a result, the musical inspirations on Thriller span decades and countries. “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin,’” for example, interpolates Cameroonian musician Manu Dibango’s 1972 single “Soul Makossa.” (Dibango was unhappy that he was not credited, but they worked out a financial agreement.)
As Jones pulled from music history, he also lived on the cutting edge of pop music. He brought the vanguard of 1980s musicians into the studio, including Toto—whose song “Africa” was just making its way up the charts—for “Human Nature”; and the ‘80s rock god Eddie Van Halen, who respected Jones so much that he refused payment for his legendary guitar solo on “Beat It.”
Jones was also influenced by a brand new album from a young rising star: Prince’s 1999. Thriller synthesizer player Brian Banks later reminisced about how Jones played the title song for them upon its release, and told them he wanted its “big, bitey chord sound,” but “bigger.” That sound ended up kicking off the album’s title track, “Thriller”—and preceded a decades-long rivalry between the two icons.
The sonic adventures on Thriller were hypercharged by Jones’ embrace of the newest music technology, including synthesizers and drum machines. “We had so much gear that we couldn’t even put the trunks, all the boxes, in the hallways,” Anthony Marinelli, a keyboardist, told the BBC. “Michael just wanted to hear the same sound with different instruments…I used this drum machine on a lot of the tracks, and Quincy would cast the perfect sideman or background vocals. There was a lot of evolution.”
All in all, Jones used some 62 musicians and 22 singers on Thriller. He and Jackson worked relentlessly to make the album perfect, staying up for days and nights. “They would carry the second engineers out on stretchers. And the musicians too,” Jones told the BBC.
I want my MTV
But the duo was also aware that music was only one component of making Thriller a mega-smash. Jones had long been a part of the TV and film world, scoring soundtracks for many films and TV shows in the ‘60s and ‘70s. In 1968, he became the first African American to be nominated for best original song at the Oscars.
As a result, he had an innate understanding of how music and visuals could coalesce into major cultural moments. For the title track of Thriller, he facilitated the recording of a spooky spoken-word sequence by the horror actor Vincent Price, imbuing the song with narrative tension.
Meanwhile, a new force was rising rapidly in the music industry: MTV. But the television channel was still heavily segregated, and rarely played any Black musicians at all. When the channel opted to pass on airing Rick James’ “Super Freak,” MTV founder Bob Pittman tried to explain the choice by saying, “It has nothing to do with race, but with sound.”
Despite this resistance, Jackson and Jones were hellbent on getting on the channel, and allocated an enormous amount of money to create distinctive, movie-quality music videos that would show off Jackson’s charisma. Jackson paid $150,000 for the “Beat It” music video out of his own pocket. Eventually, and thanks in part to threats from Jackson’s studio executives to MTV, the channel put “Billie Jean” into heavy rotation. The 14-minute “Thriller” video, directed by John Landis (National Lampoon’s Animal House), followed, giving MTV 10 times their usual ratings.
By this point, MTV was forced to acknowledge that Black artists would resonate with their so-called audience, and began playing other Black stars, like Lionel Richie and Prince. “MTV’s playlist was 99% white until Michael Jackson forced his way on the air by making the best music videos anyone had ever seen,” Rob Tannenbaum, co-author of I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, told The Root in 2013.
This change was crucial to MTV’s own success: the channel scored its first quarterly profit in 1984, right when “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and “Thriller” were cresting. After that, big-budget music videos became a central way for musicians to showcase their art to the public, ushering in a new era of visual-first music stardom. “Michael and MTV rode each other to glory,” Jones said in 2022. “The video standard has not changed since then.”
Ultimately, Thriller was just one small part of Quincy Jones’ astonishing career, which also included Ella Fitzgerald collaborations, the soundtrack to The Color Purple, and “We Are the World.” (The 2018 documentary Quincy, co-directed by his daughter Rashida Jones, covers all of this and more.) He ranks third on the list of most Grammys won of all time, and belongs to the elite group of EGOT winners, people who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony (in his case an honorary one, thanks to two honorary Oscars). But Thriller’s audacity, quality, and universal appeal revealed the height of Jones’ powers. Thanks to his belief in Jackson and his exhaustive artistic rigor, the pair broke all sorts of records and set new templates for pop stardom.
“Thriller was a combination of all my experience as an orchestrator and picking the songs and Michael’s—all the talents he ha[d] as a dancer, as a singer, as an amazing entertainer,” Jones told Fresh Air in 2013. “It was like us throwing everything we’d accumulated as experience and putting it all together.”