A Peerless Genius: Thriller @ 25
by Mark Anthony Neal
Michael Jackson was fifteen years into a professional singing career when Thriller was released 25 years ago on November 30, 1982, but nearly a decade past his peak years as the boy lead singer of his family group, The Jackson Five. Not yet aged 25, Jackson could have easily become another child-star as cultural footnote—much like his temporal peer Donny Osmond was at the time. And indeed in the years between Jackson's star-turn as the Scarecrow in The Wiz (1978)—a Soulful adaptation of The Wizard of Oz—and the release of Thriller, Jackson worked hard to craft an image of an independently minded adult who, removed from the comforts of his family clan, the assembly-line logic of the Motown label and the overbearing influence of family patriarch Joe Jackson, was now in control of his life and, more importantly, his music. What may have begun as simply a stab at independence, eventually became a stab at history; Thriller remains the biggest selling recording in the history of the music industry.
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