/culture

There's a date I always use as a benchmark whenever someone tries to convince me that "they just don't make music like that anymore": March 25th, 1983. Motown 25, at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. Michael Jackson walks on stage, sings "Billie Jean," and at one point slides backward as if the floor had simply stopped existing beneath him. It lasts six seconds, maybe seven. And it changed how an entire generation understood what a body could do on a stage. I've watched that clip maybe two hundred times over the years — the first time was on a pirated VHS tape an uncle brought back from Lisbon, taped over some soap opera, with that interference band running along the bottom corner — and it still gives me chills. It's not cheap nostalgia. It's recognizing serious craft when I see it. Because that's what it was, at its core: craft. People like to talk about Michael Jackson's "genius" as if it fell from the sky, some mystical gift he simply possessed. And they conveniently ignore that the kid was rehearsing twelve, fourteen hours a day starting at age five. That his father hit him when he missed a step. That the "magic" of the moonwalk came from years of watching street dancers on Soul Train, from mimicking Fred Astaire frame by frame on an 8mm projector in his bedroom. The talent was real, of course it was real — but talent alone doesn't produce "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'." That comes from obsession. And obsession is an uncomfortable word to use when talking about children, which is why most pieces on him prefer to stick to the myth. I'm going to be blunt about something and I know it'll annoy people: the period that actually matters, from a pure artistic-construction standpoint, isn't "Thriller" as a whole. It's the Quincy Jones–Michael Jackson–Rod Temperton triangle, between 1979 and 1987. Three albums. "Off the Wall," "Thriller," "Bad." After that there's still good work — "Dangerous" has tracks that hold up well, especially once Teddy Riley brought that new jack swing sound in — but the engine that made those years function at a near-impossible level started to seize up. And nobody talks about that much, because it's easier to sell the "eternal King of Pop" narrative than to dissect why an artist loses the thread. Rod Temperton is probably the least-talked-about name in this whole story, and he should be the most-talked-about. English, from Cleethorpes, an unglamorous port town, ex-keyboardist of Heatwave. He wrote "Thriller." He wrote "Rock with You." He wrote "Off the Wall." He never showed up in photos, never gave interviews, refused to go to launch parties. He died in 2016 and most obituaries gave him a paragraph, maybe two. That says a lot about how the music industry builds its gods: it systematically erases the people standing three feet from the spotlight who are, often, the actual reason the spotlight exists. I'm not saying Michael's vocal and performance talent wasn't brutal — it obviously was, that's beyond dispute — but the architecture of those songs, the chords resolving in unexpected ways, the dirty groove of the bassline in "Thriller," that comes from somewhere else. And it's telling how most writing on this period prefers to skip past that engineering in favor of the simpler lone-genius storytelling. Then there's the Quincy question. I'll admit upfront I have a strong bias here and won't pretend otherwise: I think "Off the Wall" is objectively better than "Thriller," despite selling a fraction of what "Thriller" sold. "Thriller" is more iconic, bigger, has more singles that entered pop culture permanently — but "Off the Wall" has a cohesion, a sense of album-as-closed-work, that "Thriller" never had. "Thriller" is a collection of massive hits stitched together with less care. I've seen people disagree with this almost religiously, and honestly I've given up arguing it on forums — back in 2019 I spent an entire night, must've been around two in the morning, arguing this on some subreddit, and woke up the next day to something like 340-odd notifications and zero regrets, but also zero desire to repeat the experience. What separated that era from everything that came after — and this applies to a lot of what gets made today too, we'll get there — was the availability of time and the absence of algorithmic pressure. "Thriller" cost something like 750 thousand dollars to produce, which sounds small today but was a fortune in 1982, and spent nine months in the studio. Nine months. Today a top-tier artist is pressured to drop a single every six or seven weeks to "feed the algorithm," to avoid vanishing from Spotify's radar, and then we act surprised nobody's making another "Human Nature." It's no mystery. It's incentive structure. An artist with nine months to polish a track makes something different than an artist with nine days. This brings me to something that genuinely bothers me about almost every recent documentary on him: they treat the artistic decline as purely a consequence of the personal scandals, the media pressure, Neverland, all of it. And yes, that weighed enormously, it'd be stupid to deny it. But there's also a more mundane, less dramatic explanation: over time, he lost the right people around him. Quincy Jones stopped producing his albums after "Bad." Rod Temperton stopped writing for him. And Michael, increasingly isolated, increasingly surrounded by people who told him yes to everything — this is almost a textbook pattern of extreme stardom, I've seen it happen on a much smaller scale with content creators I know, that moment when there's nobody left nearby who'll say "this track isn't there yet, let's redo it" — started relying too heavily on his own instinct, at a moment when that instinct was no longer in sync with what was happening culturally outside his bubble. "HIStory," from '95, has fantastic tracks, far from a bad record. But it also carries a visible, almost uncomfortable paranoia, with "Scream" and "They Don't Care About Us" functioning more as personal catharsis than careful artistic construction. It's a record of someone responding to accusations, not someone making art for its own sake. And honestly I think that's understandable given the context — I'm not here passing moral judgment on his personal life, that's an entirely different territory I'd rather not even brush against in this piece — but from a pure craft standpoint, the difference is noticeable. A small tangent that has nothing to do with the main argument but always crosses my mind when I think about this: I remember finding, years ago, in a used record shop in downtown Porto — closed now, it's a vape shop — a Japanese pressing of "Off the Wall" with completely different artwork from the American version, more saturated colors, entirely different typography. Cost me something like 14 euros, which at the time felt like an outrage for a student. I still have it. Sometimes I think these small regional variations of physical artifacts are going to disappear from culture entirely and nobody will notice, because nobody born after 2005 got to hold an object like that and realize different versions of the same record existed scattered across the globe. Anyway, back to the point. There's also the vocal-technique angle, which most people ignore because they don't have the vocabulary for it. Michael had a falsetto and vocal-percussion control — the "hee-hee"s, the "shamone"s, the vocal hiccups — that were, in practice, a second layer of drumming performed with the throat. Listen to "Working Day and Night" closely, mentally isolate the vocal from the rest of the mix, and you realize he was doing the rhythmic work a percussionist would normally do. That's not something you can copy through pure singing technique. It's almost a percussionist disguised as a vocalist. And that's one of the reasons so many artists who've tried to "channel" Michael over the years — from Usher to, I don't know, half the contestants on 2000s talent shows — end up sounding like caricature. They copy the gesture, not the rhythmic logic behind it. I'll admit a contradiction here, because I think it's more honest than pretending to hold one solid position start to finish: I said earlier that "Off the Wall" is superior to "Thriller," and I mostly stand by that. But there are days I put "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" and "Beat It" back to back and just can't argue against the sheer firepower of that. Maybe the question isn't which one's "better" in some absolute sense, but that they serve different purposes. "Off the Wall" is for listening alone, attentively, front to back. "Thriller" is for a packed room at three in the morning. Maybe I'm trying to impose a hierarchy where none needs to exist. Something I think gets completely lost in current conversations about him — and this might be the most controversial point in this piece — is that a huge part of the "undeniable greatness" people get nostalgic about wasn't just musical talent. It was choreography as narrative language. "Thriller," the video, directed by Landis, cost close to 900 thousand dollars, an absurd amount for a music video in 1983, and MTV initially refused to give regular rotation to Black artists until Motown/CBS put real pressure on them. This is a detail that tends to get left out of the more celebratory narratives, because it's uncomfortable — but it's factual, and it's central to how all of this actually happened. The "King of Pop" literally cracked open MTV's door for Black artists through commercial pressure, not through any generosity from the industry. And here's something that trips me up whenever I hear someone my generation — I'm in my thirties, for context — talk about Michael Jackson only through the lens of the scandals, as if the work and the person are so inseparable that the work no longer deserves serious analysis. I get the moral argument, I really do. But if we applied that standard consistently across the whole history of music, we'd end up with an incredibly short and probably hypocritical list of "acceptable" artists, because we'd also have to cancel out half a dozen idols who still headline festivals today without anyone blinking. I don't have a clean answer for this. I think it's legitimate to separate craft analysis from the personal question, but I also think it's legitimate for people who can't make that separation. I won't pretend I have this point neatly resolved, because I don't. Back to the technical side, because that's where I feel on firmer ground: there's something about the "Thriller" production process almost nobody mentions and that I find fascinating — engineer Bruce Swedien recorded Ndugu Chancler's drums across multiple isolated takes and then literally built a "Frankenstein" drum track by stitching together the best parts of each take. That sounds trivial today, it's basically what any producer does in a DAW in two clicks in 2026. But in 1982, on analog tape, that meant hours of physical editing, cutting and splicing magnetic tape with a razor blade and splicing tape, syncing everything by hand. The result sounds "perfect" because it was literally built piece by piece until it hit perfection, not because it was played flawlessly in one take. And that completely undercuts the romantic narrative of the "genius who nails everything in one inspired take," which is the image most people carry in their heads when they think of classic records. I think that's ultimately what went missing later. It wasn't lack of talent — the talent stayed, even on "Invincible," from 2001, an expensive record that flopped commercially but has underrated tracks, "Butterflies" for instance, which critics mostly ignored at the time. What went missing was the whole ecosystem around him: Quincy saying no, Rod Temperton writing the right song, Bruce Swedien spending weeks piecing a groove together, studio time without immediate commercial pressure. The "undeniable genius" people get nostalgic for wasn't some isolated individual trait. It was a production system that existed during a specific window, with specific people, under specific conditions that never repeat again — not for him, not for anyone. And maybe that's the most uncomfortable lesson in all of this, more uncomfortable even than the scandals: we like to think of genius as something that belongs solely to the person, portable, eternal, context-proof. It isn't. It gets discovered, built, sustained with help from people whose names most of us will never know. And when that network disappears, the "genius" often disappears with it, even if the person stays exactly the same, same voice, same body, same instincts. What's left is just the memory of when it all worked together — and a pirated VHS tape, interference running along the corner of the screen, of a guy sliding backward on stage in 1983 like he was daring physics itself to stop him.