Thriller
Missy | February 11, 2008
I tore my apartment upside down looking for this. I have no way of listening to it.
Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary re-issue of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. For a long time, my favorite song was “Beat It”. It mostly had to do with the video. There’s Michael, waking up from a nap or something? Just missing those dudes at the diner and the pool hall, hoping to catch up with them and stop the rumble, but not before dancing and singing at the camera. Nowadays, I prefer “Billie Jean”.
That album was ubiquitous for its entire first year–consequently, most of my memories from that time are linked to this record. For example, I remember going to a sixth-grade dance in my pastel-striped Izod sweater (I almost typed that as ‘iZod’–thanks Apple!), permed mullet haircut, and grey leather jazz shoes (which I tend to see in the morning on local high school girls as they walk to school–thanks Mary-Kate Olsen!) anxiously awaiting the secret performance that my fellow sixers Tim Koehl, Jay Spivey, Davey Reed and others had planned. (I already knew what the secret was because Tim let the cat out of the bag in CCD class.) It involved “Billie Jean” and a carefully rehearsed break-dancing routine and a single white glove on Tim’s hand, little white boy from rural Ohio that he was. Among us girls hanging off to the side, Kristin Barrett was embarrassed to demonstrate how far she’d come in mastering the moonwalk, which she (and, c’mon, all of us) had practiced in her socks on the linoleum kitchen floor.
There was the time several of us raced from school to Sharma Billups’ house to watch the world premiere of the video for “Thriller”. “World Premiere” in those days meant showing a video about 8 times an hour all day long. We would later memorize the zombie dance. In the summer, at a cheerleading day camp for girls held at the local armory/YMCA by the high school cheerleaders, I learned a pom pom routine to “P.Y.T.” Now that I think about it, that last bit is kind of creepy.
I have no interest in the re-imagined re-issue, which features the likes of Kanye–whom I maintain, correctly or incorrectly, is a flash in the pan–and Fergie–Fergie? Really? It’s probably better to keep “Thriller” tucked away in my memory. I’m sorry, children of today, that you have no comparable blockbuster megalith like “Thriller” or that you cannot possibly comprehend the magnitude of Michael Jackson’s impact on popular culture such that a significant piece of one’s childhood is defined right along side it, unapologetically cheesy as it now seems. You’ll just have to take my word for it.
