Thriller Review im Rolling Stone

    (ich hoffe, wir ham das noch net - wenn doch dann sorry :ehre)




    Michael Jackson


    Thriller 25 Deluxe Edition


    RS: 5 of 5 Stars Average User Rating: 4.5 of 5 Stars


    2008


    Thriller is the sound of Michael Jackson in 1982, when he was the coolest, slinkiest, prettiest pop star alive. He was Boy George times Rick James and beat both of them at their games, although he did nothing but make the competition sound even better. He taught Boy George fans and Rick James fans to hear each other's music, just as he taught Van Halen, Lionel Richie, ZZ Top, Stevie Nicks and Bruce Springsteen to play to this grand new pop-thrills audience he'd called to the floor. After this, nobody claimed disco sucked again. "Billie Jean" was the hit, with MJ's voice aching with erotic longing and dread, and nearly five minutes of creepy strings and seductive bass and breathy gasps, though there wasn't a station on the dial that faded the song out early. "Beat It" was the one designed to get on rock radio — but "Billie Jean" got there first, since the rock stations played it, along with the rest of the world. They couldn't resist that bass. Who could?
    Thriller has been the world's favorite pop album ever since, and this deluxe expanded edition shows why, even with six lame new remixes from artists like Fergie, Akon and Kanye West, as well as the mediocre ballad "For All Time," a rerecorded outtake from the original sessions, tacked on. The twenty-fifth-anniversary edition is like the I'm Not There soundtrack: All the new artists sound cowed by the originals, and they know nobody will ever play their versions twice. Even Kanye can tell he's in over his head, so he sends "Billie Jean" out there without the bass line, which is like putting Bobby Orr on the ice without a hockey stick. And in an early fast-track contender for the year's most pointless musical moment, there's Fergie's "Beat It 2008." How funky and strong is her fight?
    Akon's "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" is actually kind of great — he slows it down into a piano ballad, lingering over the easily obscured lyrics. Paul McCartney doesn't show for "The Girl Is Mine 2008," but that would be a sore subject anyway. (What can it mean that the music on "The Girl Is Mine" was played by the guys from Toto, who had that song about Rosanna Arquette — who has recently been linked to McCartney?) Instead we get Will.i.am, whose idea of production is dumb-thug bluster and trying to hide the goofy "doggone" hook, which is the whole point of the song, dude. "The Girl Is Mine" without "doggone" is like "Same Girl" without the Waffle House. Note: Though MJ's original vocals are on here, Jackson himself doesn't participate much in the new versions, showing previously well-hidden instincts of self-preservation.
    So that leaves the original Thriller, which hasn't lost any of its fizz. One of the funny things about the album is that even though it's as close as you can get to timeless, it really only could have happened in 1982. That was a watershed year for pop music, with New Wave synth pop and disco feeding into each other, the year of Madonna's "Everybody" and George Clinton's "Atomic Dog" and the Human League's "Don't You Want Me" and Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing." Jackson got this whole era grooving a few years earlier with Off the Wall, but at the end of 1982, right when everybody was still reeling from Prince's 1999, he dropped Thriller and shocked everyone. Madonna made her own version of "Billie Jean," retitled "Like a Virgin." Stevie Nicks called her version "Stand Back," Pat Benatar called hers "Love Is a Battlefield." Bob Dylan called his "Tight Connection to My Heart." Yet none of them could touch the original.
    Thriller has MJ at his breathiest and most salacious ("PYT"), and his most beautifully fragile ("Human Nature," so open and brave it makes "She's Out of My Life" seem phony). The one hit that sounds tired now is "Thriller," killed off by the video, with its bid for middlebrow respectability. ("Billie Jean" and "Beat It" are great videos — "Thriller" is just a crap John Landis movie.) But the wiggly bass that kicks off the album in "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' " feels like the sound of MJ's soul, and you can hear it all over his voice. (A big hand for bassist Louis Johnson, please, who also played on "Billie Jean.") By the time he came back with Bad, the wiggle was gone from his bass and his voice. Yet the weirdest thing about Michael Jackson will always be that he gave the world this work of genius.



    ROB SHEFFIELD
    (Posted: Feb 21, 2008)

    Thriller 25 Deluxe Edition : Michael Jackson : Review : Rolling Stone

    hehe es gibt nur die 2001er Review online....da sinds schon 4 Sterne...früher waren es aber mal drei! Trotzdem:


    In the three years since Michael Jackson's first solo album, Off the Wall, sold 7 million copies and spawned four hit singles, black music has veered away from the danceable but ultraslick style that Off the Wall epitomized. From Prince to Marvin Gave, from rap to Rick James, black artists have incorporated increasingly mature and adventurous themes–culture, sex, politics–into grittier, gutsier music. So when Jackson's first solo single since 1979 turned out to be a wimpoid MOR ballad with the refrain "the doggone girl is mine," sung with a tame Paul McCartney, it looked like the train had left the station without him.


    But the superficiality of that damnably catchy hit belies the surprising substance of Thriller. Rather than reheating Off the Wall's agreeably mindless funk, Jackson has cooked up a zesty LP whose uptempo workouts don't obscure its harrowing, dark messages. Particularly on Jackson's own compositions, Thriller's tense, nearly obsessive sound complements lyrics that delineate a world that has put the twenty-four-year-old on the defensive. "They're out to get you, better leave while you can Don't wanna be a boy, you wanna be a man." It's been a challenging time for Jackson – his parents may separate, he's been involved in a paternity claim – and he's responded to those challenges head-on. He's dropped the boyish falsetto that sparked his hits from "I Want You Back" to "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" and chosen to address his tormentors in a full, adult voice with a feisty determination that is tinged by sadness. Jackson's new attitude gives Thriller a deeper, if less visceral, emotional urgency than any of his previous work, and marks another watershed in the creative development of this prodigiously talented performer.


    Take "Billie Jean," a lean, insistent funk number whose message couldn't be more blunt: "She says I am the one/But the kid is not my son." The party spirit that suffused Off the Wall has landed him in trouble, and he tempers that exuberance with suspicion. "What do you mean I am the one," he quizzically asks his femme fatale, "who will dance on the floor?" It's a sad, almost mournful song, but a thumping resolve underlies his feelings: "Billie Jean is not my lover" is incessantly repeated as the song fades out.


    Billie Jean is mentioned in passing in Thriller's most combative track, the hyperactive "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," wherein Jackson also takes on the press, gossips of all kinds and other grief-givers. Here the emotions are so raw that the song nearly goes out of control. "Somebody's always tryin' to start my baby crying," he laments, and that sense of quasi paranoia yields to near-bitterness in the chorus: "You're a vegetable, you're a vegetable/They'll eat off you, you're a vegetable." It's a tune that's almost as exciting as seeing Jackson motivate himself across a concert stage – and a lot more unpredictable. These lyrics won't keep Elvis Costello awake nights, but they do show that Jackson has progressed past the hey-let's-hustle sentiments that dominated Off the Wall.


    The sheer vitality of the musical setting obviates any sense of self-pity. Quincy Jones' production – Jackson coproduced his own compositions–is sparer than usual, and refreshingly free of schmaltz. Then again, he's working with what might be pop music's most spectacular instrument: Michael Jackson's voice. Where lesser artists need a string section or a lusty blast from a synthesizer, Jackson need only sing to convey deep, heartfelt emotion. His raw ability and conviction make material like "Baby Be Mine" and "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" into first-class cuts and even salvage "The Girl Is Mine." Well, almost.


    Maybe the best song here is "Beat It," a this-ain't-no-disco AOR track if ever I heard one. Jackson's voice soars all over the melody, Eddie Van Halen checks in with a blistering guitar solo, you could build a convention center on the backbeat, and the result is one nifty dance song. Programmers, take note.


    Jackson's greatest failing has been a tendency to go for the glitz, and while he's curbed the urge on Thriller, he hasn't obliterated it entirely. The end of side two, especially "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)," isn't up to the spunky character of the other tracks. And the title song, which at first sounds like a metaphoric examination of the same under-siege mentality that marks the LP's best moments, instead degenerates into silly camp, with a rap by Vincent Price. (Couldn't they get Count Floyd?)


    Jackson has made no secret of his affection for traditional showbiz and the glamour that goes with it. His talents, not just singing but dancing and acting, could make him a perfect mainstream performer. Perish the thought. The fiery conviction of Thriller offers hope that Michael is still a long way away from succumbing to the lures of Vegas. Thriller may not be Michael Jackson's 1999, but it's a gorgeous, snappy step in the right direction. (RS 387)

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