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发表于 2008-2-10 18:48:48
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The return of Michael Jackson's Thriller
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/302097
If superstar has one achievement that should be able to withstand even a thousand tabloid assaults, it’s the biggest-selling album of all-time
Feb 10, 2008 04:30 AM
As the folks at The Guinness Book of World Records remind us each year, that album – getting an expanded, all-star-assisted re-release this week – remains the biggest-selling of all-time, with some 52 million copies moved worldwide since its release on Dec. 1, 1982.
But Thriller and its trailblazing early-MTV video clips for "Beat It," "Billie Jean" and the title track also established a then only slightly wacko Jacko as an all-pervasive pop-culture presence. For a couple of years, he was simply everywhere.
He's remained everywhere for most of the 25 years since, of course, although for someone who has always so clearly relished the spark of flashbulbs and the spotlight's glare, Jackson has spent the past three of them skulking about places like Dubai and Las Vegas in relative obscurity.
Who can blame him, really? His public appearances are merely cues for renewed, horrified discussion of his mutilated facial features. And regardless of the "not guilty" verdict at his 2005 child-molestation trial, there's a huge segment of the public that views Jackson as a freak with a penchant for young boys. Let's not forget the baby-dangling faux pas in Berlin in 2002, either. Not the sort of attention you want.
The present-day consensus finds Jackson "a creepy symbol of the afflictive nature of fame," as Newsweek put it last December. Thus, either of his own volition or at the behest of Sony Music – which didn't quite see the returns it had expected after spending an estimated $55 million (U.S.) to make and market Jackson's underperforming 2001 CD, Invincible – Jackson has now turned to the one truly indelible artifact from his past as the linchpin for another comeback attempt.
This Tuesday sees the release of Thriller 25, an expanded CD/DVD package that pads the original, nine-track album with some leftovers from those 1982 sessions; new versions of tunes like "P.Y.T.," "The Girl is Mine" and "Billie Jean" cooked up by will.i.am, Akon and Kanye West; and the truly awesome "Beat It," "Billie Jean" and "Thriller" videos. Oh, and a "personal greeting" to Jackson's fans "penned exclusively for this special release."
To hype the re-release, someone's been seeding the rumour mill with speculation that Jackson will turn up at tonight's Grammy Awards ceremony – the album's being inducted into the Hall of Fame – although early whisperings that he would be performing on the show have been cautiously downgraded to the threat of a simple appearance, maybe even a speaking one.
Likewise, while another rumoured appearance at last Sunday's Super Bowl never materialized, the broadcast did premiere a commercial for Pepsi's SoBe Life Water featuring Naomi Campbell and a troupe of agile, animated lizards getting down to "Thriller." Brother Jermaine Jackson also dropped hints late last year of a possible Jackson 5 reunion tour to go down this summer.
Something's brewing, then. But if Jackson is gunning to get back his self-anointed King of Pop title, he's doing it by invoking the days when he actually was.
"Why not use Thriller?" says Toronto R&B songstress Jully Black. "That's how big Thriller was and is, still. It's something that was big enough that it can be used as a relaunch today. Why not take advantage of that?"
As the youngest of nine children, Black remembers that album as a "family thing," having a profound effect on all of her siblings. The spooky, 13-minute video for "Thriller" was particularly captivating, too, and Black quite rightly credits Jackson's rubbery dance moves in that video and its companions with setting the standard for nearly all MTV choreography to follow.
"I think it was ahead of its time. Musically, you hear so much stuff today that, on a production level, is just missing that `it' factor. I mean, Thriller, that was it," she says, hopeful that the record's renewed celebration will at least rehabilitate Jackson's musical record.
"It's something that can bridge the gap between generations. It's like having Prince at the Super Bowl last year or Tom Petty this year – you just realize the greats are always gonna be great."
The embarrassing Paul McCartney duet "The Girl is Mine" notwithstanding, it's true that the sleek, danceable R&B jams and drippy ballads consciously cooked up as ideal pop-crossover material by Jackson and producer Quincy Jones – in a mere eight weeks of sessions stolen after Jones finished up a Donna Summer album – have lost little of their sparkle after a quarter-century.
Admittedly, it's a little more calculated than Jackson's previous album, 1979's seven-million-selling Off the Wall, but Jackson's thirst for hits is still tempered with a pop innocence and an ear for almost subliminally effective dance beats that would begin to go missing on 1987's Bad and were completely bled dry from the commercial-R&B robotics of Invincible.
"Thriller is the best pop R&B album ever. Easily," says London, Ont.-bred rapper Shad. "It's the most danceable album ever, the best video ever. I can tell you at least four conversations I've had in the last month that were basically laughing at how huge that album is.
"The amount of times new R&B artists like Justin Timberlake, Chris Brown and Usher reference `Billie Jean' in their own performances just shows that it's still the standard ... Especially with the way the music industry is going now, I don't think there will ever be an album that just takes over the world to that extent, it's pretty safe to say. Pop perfection."
And Thriller did indeed take over the world in a manner few albums do; by 1984 Time magazine was filling its cover with a portrait of Jacko, by Andy Warhol, no less. The disc appealed to audiences all across the Western world, Asia and Africa; growing up in the West African city of Accra, Ghana, for instance, Hamilton-based rapper, poet and songwriter Kae Sun remembers seeing many of his peers dressing like Michael Jackson and "trying to dance like him.
"The production was really cutting edge and it breaks a lot of rules," muses Kae Sun. "You can't really put it into one genre, and that's one thing I do admire about Michael Jackson. He's taking from all over the musical spectrum."
By hitching his latest comeback bid to Thriller, Jackson is perhaps finally conceding that he'll never come up with anything to top it, creatively or financially.
This might actually be healthy, since there's a common school of thought that blames Thriller's mega-success and Jackson's subsequent, almost pathological need to top it with not just the overly laboured musical output that would follow, but also the singer's dubious psychological state. He would do well, in fact, to heed the words of Quincy Jones in a recent Billboard:
"I don't think anything like Thriller will ever happen again. Being involved in a record like that is a major, major gift from God."
See Ben Rayner's full review of Thriller 25 in Tuesday's Star.
It's too high to get over
Five disciplines Thriller left forever changed:
Music video. The gang-dance throwdown in "Beat It," those glowing sidewalks in "Billie Jean" and, most of all, the 13-minute werewolf-and-zombie creep-out that was the "Thriller" mini-movie were all iconic realizations of the MTV era's potential. Suddenly, everyone else had to aim higher with their clips. As rapper Shad notes (quoting his sister's fiancée): "I don't know how you could make a list of videos and not put `Thriller' at No. 1. It just means you don't know what you're talking about."
Dance. Jackson's sinewy, street-conscious hot stepping redefined the relationship between pop music and choreography. Sister Janet took up the cause, but the likes of Justin Timberlake and Usher wouldn't move quite so smoothly today without Jacko's kinetic template.
Fashion. Somehow, the man inspired otherwise right-thinking people to sport single, sequined white gloves, ill-fitting suits that exposed white socks and those dreadful, red-and-black leather "V" jackets that briefly became the rage (the latter now being lampooned in a Diet Pepsi commercial). Timberlake still digs Michael's natty hats, too.
R&B production. The state-of-the-art, dance-conscious sheen Quincy Jones brought to Thriller set the tone for every technologically astute slab of high-end modern R&B we hear today, from Timbaland and the Neptunes on down. Everything since sounds a lot more expensive.
Tabloid exposure. Insiders such as former Sony president Walter Yetnikoff have long claimed Jackson cultivated his "weirdo" image. The hyperbaric chamber, Bubbles the Chimp and the Elephant Man's bones were all part of a grand plan, it seems. Although, as Britney Spears has taught us, you can only play the tab-freak game for so long before life starts imitating art.
- Ben Rayner |
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狗仔卡
发表于 2008-2-9 16:44:55
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显身卡
发表于 2008-2-9 16:56:32
Thank you !
发表于 2008-2-9 17:05:39
