How Hall and Oates Saved Pop

Of course, in the end, “Thriller” had several money tracks. There were four solid cornerposts: a blistering rock song (“Beat It”); a sublime ballad (“Human Nature”); an R&B dance sizzler (“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ”); and a video-friendly story song (“Thriller”). And at the center of it all, connecting the entire work and providing access routes to its outer regions, was a song whose musical basis came from the lone bastion of hope on pop radio in those dark days, Daryl Hall and John Oates. Their solid amalgams of pop, soul, rock and even light electronica had been breaking through the dross for a few years. In January, their “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” logged a week at No. 1 between Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” and “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band. Jackson liked “I Can’t Go for That” and heard in it the basis for his own album’s elusive unifier. He lifted its bass line for a song that made him want to dance. (And no wonder; that bass line was itself an echo of ’60s soul.) He could hear it. He could see it. That track was “Billie Jean.” It was one of the last songs completed for “Thriller” — it was reportedly mixed 91 times — and even though Quincy Jones fought Jackson about its inclusion, Jackson insisted. By early November, he was finally satisfied, and the album was rush-released into stores at the end of the month.

Not My Lover

Few blockbusters are sleeper hits. They usually start strong and then keep lapping the pack — think Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” or U2’s “Joshua Tree.” But “Thriller” didn’t get out of the gate as fast as everyone expected. The first single, a pallid duet with Paul McCartney called “The Girl Is Mine,” was a hit but failed to ignite a frenzy for the album, which had only nine tracks. More than two months after its release, “Thriller” still hadn’t reached No. 1. I was a D.J. at the time at a small rock-oriented bar on Long Island, and I started playing “Beat It,” with its surprising guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen, but at that early point the song was less a phenomenon than a curiosity. It wasn’t until “Billie Jean” was released as a single in early 1983 that “Thriller” really took off. It had that long, sinuous bass-line intro, paranoiac synth warnings, a hiccupping vocal; it was the ultimate crossover dream, a song both timely and out of its time. And it had a first-rate video in which Jackson came off like a musical James Bond, sexy, sly and licensed to dance. The song climbed to No. 1, stormed the ramparts at MTV and, buoyed even further by Jackson’s dazzling performance on the “Motown 25” TV special that May, led the way for the album’s other hits and for other black artists. By the end of 1983, “Thriller” had become a nine-track stimulus package for the entire music business.

And yet: just nine songs, four of which don’t merit any substantial discussion now. So what made “Thriller” such a big hit? Some schools of thought contend that it wasn’t even the best album of Jackson’s career. “Off the Wall” was, in many ways, more sophisticated musically, and almost all of its songs are still memorable. A conductor/arranger friend of mine, who is classically trained but appreciates a good pop tune, says he never cared much about “Thriller” but still perks up whenever he hears the upper-level harmony on “Rock With You,” the biggest hit from “Off the Wall.” I like “Off the Wall” more than “Thriller,” too, maybe because it’s a happier and a sweatier album, the last blast of the smiley-face pop-and-soul ’60s and ’70s.

And maybe “Thriller” wasn’t even the best album of 1982. A good number of critics would probably tell you that Prince’s “1999,” a double album released a few weeks before “Thriller,” was much more ambitious and that its pioneering electro-sex-funk was what kept the music business churning through the mid- and late ’80s. A similar dynamic existed between Carole King’s “Tapestry” and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” bellwethers of the singer-songwriter era that were released within a few months of each other in 1971. King’s album sold millions and is generally considered the first true blockbuster of the rock era; Mitchell’s sold about a tenth as much but has aged better critically and is regarded the more erudite and influential album (though part of that could be because rock critics still seem to relate best to lyrics, Mitchell’s greatest strength, while King’s poetry has always been in her melodies).

And yet while King/Jackson may have been relatively prosaic compared with Mitchell/Prince, you can feel in their multiplatinum opuses a conscious effort to raise craft to art, to regain the multipartisan musical platforms that had slipped away in their respective eras (for King, post-Beatles; for Jackson, post-disco), to be both smart and simple enough to reach the greatest common denominator. They were musical populists and were building from the bottom up. What you can hear in their landmark albums most of all is the need to be heard.