Once MTV found success with Michael Jackson, videos by other black performers quickly appeared on the playlist. This development single-handedly forced pop radio to reintroduce black music into its mix: After all, pop fans, now accustomed to seeing black artists and white artists on the same video channel, came to expect the same mix of music on pop radio. It was impossible to keep the various fragments of the audience isolated from one another any longer.
Mass-appeal Top 40 radio itself made a big comeback due to this seismic shift. Beginning in early in Philadelphia, and rapidly spreading through the country, one or more FM stations in every city switched to Top 40 and many rose to the top of the ratings playing the mix of music made popular by MTV-young rock and urban hits. In the age of "Thriller," black music made a resounding comeback on the pop charts. If was the genre's low point in terms of pop success, by more than one third of all the hits on the Billboard Hot were of urban radio origin.
Even Prince's "" single, shut out of pop radio upon its initial release in , was re-launched in mid and off the back of its belated MTV exposure became a huge pop radio success the second time around. Black music was back at the center at the mainstream, and to this day it has never again been pushed from the spotlight. As an aside, the rise of MTV conversely spelled doom for country music's fortunes in the pop world. Prior to MTV, country music had, since the early 70's, become increasingly strong at pop radio, with its popularity culminating in the summer of , during the "Urban Cowboy" craze, just as MTV was being launched.
That summer, there were an average of 11 country records on the Billboard Hot in any given week. But MTV decided from day-one that country music would not be part of its programming and country's performance at pop radio steadily nosedived from that point onward. Soon, country records were completely shut out of the Hot , something that had never happened before.
For all its record-setting accomplishments, the thing which never ceases to amaze me is that Michael Jackson pulled off what is perhaps the rarest trick in any field: After more than a decade of being an absolutely huge superstar, top of his field, sure-thing Hall of Famer, etc. Try imagining J. Rowling suddenly coming out with a series of books that were so much better and more popular than the Harry Potter books that they rendered them a mere footnote to her career and you'll get the idea of what Michael Jackson accomplished with "Thriller.
Newsweek's prediction just six month earlier that no new mass-appeal superstar would ever again emerge had proven spectacularly wrong, and for the time being, rock's doldrums had been cured. Robert Christgau proclaimed that was the greatest year for pop singles since the height of Beatlemania, crediting the revival of Top 40 radio and the integration of MTV for this development. And lest there be any doubt that "Thriller" truly did unify all corners of the pop audience, it's worth noting that it won the hipper-than-thou Village Voice critics' poll for album of the year in addition to all those Grammys.
Predictably, the death of Michael Jackson caused a lamentation about the impossibility of anyone ever doing it again. Jackson has achieved is all but impossible for pop culture heroes today, and quite likely it will never be possible again. The notion that never again will the conditions be right for a truly mass, sustainable musical moment is myopic, to say the least. Despite a succession of on-line platforms that assume ever more fragmented audience niches, one would be foolish to bet against the potential for one to arise that encourages audience behavior which favors a vast coalition of sub-groups uniting behind something new and fantastic.
Besides, pop music has always thrived on mass excitement; the yearning for shared cultural touchpoints seems to be hardwired into us. What "Thriller" taught us was that the right star, with the right product and the right technological environment, always has the ability to move us and to unite us all.
Steve Greenberg steviegpro is the founder of S-Curve Records and a Grammy winning record producer who had an integral role in developing the careers of Hanson, Joss Stone and the Jonas Brothers, among many others. Find more of his writing here. Search term. Billboard Pro Subscribe Sign In. Top Artists. Top Charts. Hot Songs. Cookies You can set your cookie preferences using the toggles below. Create your free account today and explore our weekly auctions curated by our team of experts.
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Create account. It really opened our eyes to music videos as a creative form of film-making, and a potential career. Her year-old son recently learned the routines at a holiday kids' club in Turkey, reminding her of the huge impact it had on kids in the s. One such kid was Spike Jonze , who was 14 in When I started directing videos myself a few years later, it was like a touchpoint. I didn't have this thought intellectually at the time, but when I watch it now I realise that there's no reason for a lot of it; it's so free and loose.
There's the car running out of gas and it's like a movie, then it just keeps going, as if they're saying: 'That'd be cool, let's do that. It has that spirit to it that must have been contagious; it spoke to other kids.
Jonze took the freedom he sensed in Thriller — and also its eccentricity and humour — and ran with it, creating some of the 90s' most famous music videos, including the Beastie Boys' Sabotage and Praise You by Fatboy Slim, which also get continually spoofed. I just wanted to create something that would do justice to the song and I was excited about making, and I think Thriller was the same way. Perhaps that's Thriller's ultimate legacy, and it's also why Jonze has become a key influence on film-makers creating videos for YouTube.
As Psy's Gangnam Style proved, films shot relatively cheaply and quickly, and which don't require pluggers, or for the artist to necessarily have an existing profile, can have a global impact comparable to Thriller. All of the above, of course, and also some indefinable sum of all these parts, a perfect combination of cinematic depth and shiny pop culture surfaces that set the benchmark for the format for three-and-a-half decades.
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at jdmagness. We accept Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! To donate, click here. We thank you! Name required. Email required. Click here to cancel reply. Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
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