Thriller

The numbers first

Thriller came out on November 30, 1982, produced by Quincy Jones. It's the album most often called the best-selling album of all time, with estimates around 70 million copies worldwide.

• It spent 37 weeks at No. 1 in the US.
• Seven of its nine songs became top-10 hits, a record at the time.
• At the 1984 Grammys, Michael won eight awards in one night, another record.

It broke MTV open

When MTV launched in 1981 it barely played Black artists. "Billie Jean" became one of the first videos by a Black artist in heavy rotation there, and after that nobody could pretend the channel was only for rock.

The moonwalk

In 1983, on a TV special called Motown 25, Michael performed "Billie Jean", slid backwards across the stage, and the moonwalk became the most famous dance move on earth overnight.

The video that became a movie

"Thriller" got a 14-minute short film directed by John Landis: zombies, a werewolf and choreography that still shows up at every Halloween party. In 2009 it became the first music video added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry.

Genre didn't matter

Thriller mixed pop, funk, R&B and rock. On "Beat It", the guitar solo is by Eddie Van Halen, a rock god on a pop record, which was a big deal for radio at the time.