Marking 40 years of Michael Jackson’s pop studio album “Thriller”
Wednesday marked the 40th anniversary of Michael Jackson’s sixth studio album ‘Thriller’, which was released on 30th November 1982 by Epic Records and remains unchallenged as the best-selling record of all time.
Thriller which became Jackson’s first number-one album on the US Billboard Top LPs & Tapes chart, where it spent a record 37 non-consecutive weeks at number one, from February 26, 1983, to April 14, 1984, was produced by Quincy Jones, who had previously worked with Jackson on his 1979 album ‘Off the Wall’.
The iconic album features songs like “The Girl Is Mine”, “Billie Jean”, “Beat It”, “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ”, “Human Nature”, “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)”, and “Thriller”.
Following the ongoing backlash against disco music at the time, Jackson wanted to create an album where “every song was a killer”, resulting in a new musical direction, a mix of pop, post-disco, rock, funk, and R&B sounds.
The recording took place from April to November 1982 at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles, California, with a budget of $750,000.
By the end of 1983, Thriller became the best-selling album of all time with 32 million copies sold worldwide and in 1984 it became the first album to become the best-selling in the United States for two years.
The success gave Jackson an unprecedented level of cultural significance for a black American, breaking racial barriers in music.
Thriller remains the best-selling album of all time, with sales of 70 million copies worldwide. It is the best-selling non-compilation album and the second-best-selling album overall in the United States and was certified 34× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 2021.
It won a record-breaking eight Grammy Awards at the 1984 Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, while “Beat It” won Record of the Year. Jackson also won a record-breaking eight American Music Awards at the 1984 American Music Awards. The album has been a frequent inclusion in lists of the greatest albums of all time.
In 2008, it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In the same year, the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant recordings”.
