Tom Dunne: Forty years on, and Thriller still hits the spot
Michael Jackson in the video for Thriller.
Michael Jackson's Thriller album celebrates its 40th anniversary this week. It gave Jackson a cultural significance never before attained by a black American. The biggest selling album of both 1983 and 1984, 32 times Platinum and eight Grammys. it was, they said, the “beating pulse” of 1980s America.
It gets its re-issue as further stories of another singer’s bad behaviour continue to surface in the music press. The ‘can you separate the art from the artist?’ debate continues unabated. So much has happened in music in those forty years, and so much of that concerned Jackson himself.
