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Flashmag! Issue 174 July 2026
A worried Swedien found him at four in the morning, sitting at a table buried under mountains of handwritten sheet music, perfectly calm.“ Don’ t worry about it,” Jones reportedly told him— and, against all odds, delivered on time one of the mostlistened-to works in the history of recorded music. The title track itself had its own battle to fight. Songwriter Rod Temperton is said to have written the spoken-word Vincent Price introduction— that now-iconic gothic narration— in the car on the way from the airport to the studio. As for Billie Jean, its unusual tempo and famous twenty-nine-second instrumental intro before the vocals kick in nearly tested Quincy Jones’ s patience to its limit. In a confession that stayed“ off the record” for years before becoming public, the producer admitted that when he first heard the demo, his reaction wasn’ t“ this is a number-one hit”— he thought Michael had“ completely lost his mind.” Jackson, for his part, held his ground: that intro, he said, was“ the jelly”— the extra something that made you want to dance. History, as we know, proved him right.
Thriller has sold, to date, more than sixty-six million copies worldwide— a record still listed in the Guinness Book of World Records more than forty years on. The music video for the title track, fourteen minutes of choreographed horror-movie cinema, single-handedly changed the grammar of the music video and more or less invented what MTV would become.
The moonwalk, and the moment the world held its breath
Every legendary artist’ s career holds one instant you can replay in slow motion in your memory without ever growing tired of it. For Michael Jackson, that instant has a name: March 25, 1983, during the Motown 25 television special. Dressed in a sequined jacket and a single white glove, he performed Billie Jean and, at one precise moment, slid backward in a way that created the uncanny illusion of moving forward. The moonwalk was born, live, in front of thirty-three million American viewers.
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