Songoftheday 6/18/13 - It's close to midnight and something evil's lurking in the dark...

Michael Jackson - "Thriller"
from the album Thriller (1982)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #4 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9

Today's Song of the Day is the title track to probably the most famous album of the rock era, Michael Jackson's Thriller. After spinning off six top-10 hits with the treacly ballad "The Girl Is Mine", the iconic paranoid fan-fiction of "Billie Jean", the rock edge of "Beat It", the frenetic dance groove of "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'", the wide-eyed innocence of "Human Nature", and the nimble lite-funk of "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)", there was pretty much something in there for everyone. Except a bombastic dramatic all-gears jam, and that's where "Thriller" comes in. Written by Rod Temperton of the disc group Heatwave (originally titled "Starlight"), "Thriller" is a tsunami of sound from the opening power chords, with a bassline that takes center stage in the instrumentation, with horns a-rockin' like a Chicago record, and of course the classic break with Vincent Price's spoken-word cameo, a template for every rap record with "guest" performers in the last 20 years. And with such a giant sound you need a giant video, and the John Landis-directed 15-minute epic was something everybody in my generation had to make sure they caught on MTV when it aired....

"Thriller" leaped on to the pop chart all the way at #20, then leaped to the top-10, then the top-5, which is huge for any record, let alone the seventh single off an album from a year and a half ago. It also reached #3 on the R&B chart, while a little lower (given the "hard" edge of Quincy Jones' production) at #24. On the dance chart, the entire Thriller album topped the chart in 1983. It topped the singles charts in France, Spain, and Belgium, while going top 10 pretty much everywhere else. After Jackson's death in 2009, the single returned to #3 in Australia and #12 in the UK, and probably is the first song someone would name if asked for a Michael Jackson song.

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Here's a shortened "single" edit of the video...

The rave group the Prodigy sampled "Thriller" in 2004 for their track "The Way It Is"...

Ian Brown of the Stone Roses took the song in a whole different direction in 2007...

The German a cappella group Wise Guys converted the song to "Schiller" (after the German poet quoted in their version)....(the song starts about 2 minutes in)...