On Monday, May 16, 1983, at 9:00 P.M. Eastern Time, NBC broadcast Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, a two-hour television special celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Berry Gordy’s Motown Records. The special had been filmed at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium on Friday, March 25, 1983, before a live audience of approximately three thousand. Approximately seventy minutes into the broadcast, Michael Jackson, then twenty-four, walked to center stage in a black sequined jacket, a single rhinestone glove, white socks, cropped black trousers, and a black fedora. He had appeared earlier with his brothers as the Jackson 5. He was about to perform alone.
The song was “Billie Jean,” the second single from his solo album Thriller, which had been released by Epic Records six months earlier on November 30, 1982. Jackson performed to a pre-recorded vocal track. Approximately one minute and fifty seconds into the performance, he executed a horizontal backward glide across the stage that lasted approximately one and a half seconds. The move would become known as the moonwalk. The audience at the Pasadena Civic stood. The performance was broadcast nine weeks later. According to Nielsen, approximately forty-seven million Americans watched it.
The Motown 25 performance transformed Jackson from a successful pop singer into a global phenomenon. Within seventy-two hours of the broadcast, U.S. sales of Thriller tripled. By Christmas 1983 the album had sold approximately twenty million copies worldwide. By Christmas 1984 it had sold thirty million. By 2025 it had sold approximately seventy million. It is the bestselling album in the history of recorded music. It spent thirty-seven non-consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard 200.
Motown 25, May 16, 1983
The Motown 25 broadcast was the single most important television performance of Michael Jackson’s career and one of the most cited musical moments of the 1980s. Jackson had initially refused the booking. Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, had personally approached Jackson at his Encino home to ask him to participate. Jackson agreed on the condition that he could perform a solo, post-Motown song after the Jackson 5 reunion segment. The song he chose was “Billie Jean,” then in the middle of a seven-week run at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It was the only non-Motown song performed in the entire two-hour broadcast.
Jackson choreographed the performance himself with reference to Bob Fosse’s 1974 routine in the musical film The Little Prince, which contained an early version of the backward-glide step that would become known as the moonwalk. Jackson had been studying Fosse’s choreography for years and had assembled a home video collection of Fosse’s film and television work. The black sequined jacket and the rhinestone glove were Jackson’s own. The white socks were a styling choice that made his footwork visible from the back of the auditorium. The fedora was used as a choreographic prop: Jackson tipped it dramatically in the opening pose, then discarded it during the bridge.
The performance lasted approximately five minutes. The moonwalk itself lasted approximately a second and a half. The audience at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium stood through the bridge. The performance was filmed on March 25, 1983, broadcast on NBC on May 16, 1983, and watched by an estimated forty-seven million Americans. It received an Emmy nomination. Jackson would later say he was disappointed in his performance; he had wanted to remain on his toes longer than he had managed.
The cultural transmission was immediate. Within three days of the May 16 broadcast, weekly sales of Thriller in American record stores tripled. The album, which had been declining slightly in sales for several weeks, returned to its number-one position on the Billboard 200 and remained there for most of the next year. The performance became the most-cited live music moment of the decade.
Westlake Studios, 1982
The album that Motown 25 transformed into a phenomenon had been recorded over eight months at Westlake Recording Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. The producer was Quincy Jones, who had produced Jackson’s previous album, Off the Wall (1979). The recording budget was seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, approximately three times the budget of Off the Wall. The first recording session took place on Wednesday, April 14, 1982, at noon. Jackson and Paul McCartney recorded “The Girl Is Mine,” the album’s first single. The final mixing day was Monday, November 8, 1982. The album shipped twenty-two days later.
The recording personnel included songwriter Rod Temperton, formerly of the British funk band Heatwave, who wrote “Thriller,” “Baby Be Mine,” and “The Lady in My Life”; engineer Bruce Swedien, who had previously worked with Jones on Off the Wall; Eddie Van Halen, who recorded the uncredited guitar solo on “Beat It” in approximately thirty minutes as a favor to Jones for no fee; members of the band Toto (drummer Jeff Porcaro, keyboardist Steve Porcaro, guitarist Steve Lukather, keyboardist David Paich) playing the rhythm section on multiple tracks; James Ingram, who co-wrote “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)”; and Vincent Price, the horror actor, who recorded the spoken-word rap that closes “Thriller” in three takes. Temperton wrote Price’s rap on a taxi to the studio on the morning of the session.
The engineering was specifically advanced. Swedien recorded on Studer A800 24-track tape machines running at 30 inches per second, with two machines synchronized via SMPTE timecode to allow up to forty-eight tracks per song. The snare drum on “Billie Jean” was recorded in a custom-built tile-floored room Swedien called “the drum closet” with multiple microphone placements to capture the room’s acoustic reflection. By the final mixing session on November 8, Jones, Jackson, and Swedien had decided the original mix was too long for vinyl. They cut a verse from “The Lady in My Life,” shortened the “Billie Jean” introduction, and re-mixed the entire album over eight days, one track per day. The album was released on November 30, 1982.
MTV and the Color Barrier
Thriller arrived in record stores in late 1982 into a music-industry environment that had been radically restructured by the August 1, 1981 launch of MTV. The cable music-video channel had grown from approximately 800,000 American households at launch to over 17 million by mid-1983, and its programming decisions had become the most important promotional variable in the American music industry. MTV’s programming in late 1982 was almost entirely rock-oriented and almost entirely white. The channel had a stated policy that it played the music its audience wanted to hear, and its audience, according to its own demographic surveys, was suburban white teenagers.
The “Billie Jean” video, directed by Steve Barron and filmed in Los Angeles in early 1983, was submitted to MTV in February 1983. MTV declined to add it to rotation. According to multiple subsequent accounts, including those of Walter Yetnikoff, then president of CBS Records (the parent of Epic Records), Yetnikoff threatened in late February or early March 1983 to pull all Columbia Records and Epic Records videos from MTV unless the channel added “Billie Jean” to rotation. Yetnikoff has been quoted as telling MTV: “I’m pulling everything we have off the air, all our product. I’m not going to give you any more videos. And I’m going to go public and tell them about the fact you don’t want to play music by a black guy.” MTV added “Billie Jean” to rotation on Thursday, March 10, 1983.
The “Billie Jean” video became the first music video by a Black solo artist to receive heavy rotation on MTV. It was followed three weeks later by the “Beat It” video, directed by Bob Giraldi and choreographed by Michael Peters, which featured an extended West Side Story-influenced gang choreography sequence and the Eddie Van Halen guitar solo. By April 1983, both videos were in MTV’s heavy rotation. The structural change was permanent. MTV programming opened to Black artists from 1983 onwards. Prince, Lionel Richie, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, Donna Summer, and the rest of the post-Thriller generation of Black pop and R&B artists received MTV airplay that had been functionally unavailable two years earlier.
Whether the Yetnikoff threat was as decisive as Yetnikoff later claimed has been debated by music historians. What is uncontested is that “Billie Jean” entered MTV’s heavy rotation on March 10, 1983, and that the channel’s programming opened to Black artists from that moment forward.
Thriller, December 2, 1983
In July 1983, Thriller lost the number-one position on the Billboard 200 to The Police’s Synchronicity. Epic Records considered the album’s commercial run essentially complete. Jackson disagreed. He decided to release “Thriller,” the album’s title track, as a seventh single, with an accompanying music video that would be unlike anything that had previously been made. Epic Records had little interest. They considered the song a Halloween novelty. They agreed to contribute only one hundred thousand dollars to the video budget.
Jackson called John Landis, the director of An American Werewolf in London (1981) and The Blues Brothers (1980), in August 1983. Jackson had seen An American Werewolf in London and asked Landis a specific question: “Can I turn into a monster?” Landis agreed to direct. He brought in his Werewolf in London collaborator Rick Baker for prosthetic makeup, choreographer Michael Peters (who had also choreographed “Beat It”), and a film crew accustomed to feature-film production rather than music video. The budget grew to approximately five hundred thousand dollars, four times the cost of “Beat It” and roughly ten times the typical American music video budget of 1983. To finance the project, Landis’s producer George Folsey Jr. proposed an accompanying forty-five-minute documentary called Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller. MTV paid two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for exclusive video rights. Showtime paid two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for cable rights. Jackson covered the remainder.
The video was shot in Los Angeles in October 1983 at downtown locations including the Palace Theater. The final cut ran thirteen minutes and forty-one seconds. It featured a horror-film narrative in which Jackson, on a date with model Ola Ray, transformed first into a werewolf and then, in a separate sequence, into a zombie leading a graveyard dance number. Vincent Price’s spoken-word rap closed the video. The zombie dance sequence, choreographed by Peters, became one of the most-imitated choreography routines in popular culture and would be reproduced at school dances, weddings, flash mobs, and Halloween parties for the next forty years.
The video premiered on MTV at midnight Eastern on Friday, December 2, 1983. MTV played it on repeat through the night and at announced intervals across the following weeks. Audience numbers were approximately ten times the normal MTV rotation rate. The Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller documentary was released on VHS by Vestron in December 1983 and sold approximately ten million copies, the bestselling videocassette release in history at that point. The “Thriller” video doubled weekly sales of the album. By the spring of 1984, Thriller was selling approximately one million copies per week. In 2009 the Library of Congress added the video to the National Film Registry, the first music video so honored.
After Thriller
The four years between Thriller‘s November 1982 release and the recording sessions for its follow-up are commonly described as the most commercially successful period in the history of recorded music. Jackson won eight Grammy Awards at the 26th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony on February 28, 1984, the most ever won by a single artist in a single ceremony. He went on the Victory Tour with his brothers in the summer of 1984. His hair caught fire during the January 27, 1984 filming of a Pepsi commercial at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, an incident that produced second-degree burns to his scalp and would later be cited as the start of his prescription painkiller dependency.
Bad, the follow-up to Thriller, was released on Monday, August 31, 1987. It sold approximately thirty million copies. Five of its singles reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The accompanying Bad world tour, which ran from September 1987 to January 1989, was the highest-grossing concert tour in history at that point. Dangerous (November 26, 1991), the follow-up to Bad, sold approximately thirty-two million copies. By the end of 1991 Jackson had sold over a hundred and fifty million records. He was, by most measures, the most commercially successful musical performer alive.
In August 1993, the Los Angeles Police Department opened a criminal investigation into Jackson based on a complaint by Evan Chandler, the father of a thirteen-year-old boy named Jordan Chandler, who had been a frequent visitor to Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. The criminal investigation was settled in November 1993 when the Chandler family received approximately twenty million dollars in a civil settlement and the boy declined to testify. A second criminal case (the Gavin Arvizo case) resulted in a four-month criminal trial at the Santa Maria Superior Court in 2005. Jackson was acquitted on all fourteen charges on June 13, 2005. He died of acute propofol intoxication at his rented home in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles, on Thursday, June 25, 2009, at fifty. The 2019 HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, by British filmmaker Dan Reed, in which Wade Robson and James Safechuck described the alleged abuse in detail, profoundly complicated Jackson’s posthumous cultural legacy. The documentary won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special in September 2019.
The contested legacy is the subject’s defining feature. Jackson sold more records than any solo performer in history. He also stood trial on child sexual abuse charges and faced credible allegations of similar abuse from multiple subsequent accusers, allegations he denied throughout his lifetime. The cultural assessment of his career has continued to shift since his 2009 death and will continue to shift.
Bowie made the singer the performance. Jackson made the performance the video. The 1970s gave you Top of the Pops. The 1980s gave you MTV. Bowie killed Ziggy Stardust at Hammersmith Odeon on July 3, 1973. Jackson never killed his.