THRILLER媒体评论集

dalehsiang

Michael Jackson - Thriller 25 Written by Ally Brown Friday, 14 March 2008 The 14-minute video for Thriller is the pinnacle of all human achievement so far... Thriller’s status as the biggest selling album of all time is advertised heavily on this 25th Anniversary Special Edition. In fact, the album appears to have been renamed Thriller 25: The World’s Biggest Selling Album Of All Time. That’s a pretty safe tactic, because it’s a sales record that will never, ever be beaten: at 104 million sales Thriller is already 60 million or so in front of challengers like Back In Black, Saturday Night Fever and Come On Over; and the physical album sales market is in terminal decline, with only fancy and expensive editions seeming likely to find a market in the near future. This fancy and expensive edition consists of a shiny sleeve, a 24-page full colour lyrics booklet, bonus remixes from some of the biggest names in pop in 2008, and a DVD with videos. If you still believe in having a physical version of music that deserves the commitment of your money, then Thriller deserves the entire contents of your wallet. The bizarre thing about Thriller is that you can never really hear it for the first time. Thriller consists of nine tracks, seven of which were Top 10 hits in the US, with six reaching the top 11 in Britain. No other album comes close to being so well known throughout popular culture, so that virtually all of these tracks are instantly recognisable even the first time you put the record on. Thriller opens with the breathtaking groove of Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’, one of the greatest pop tracks of the 80s that still guarantees to fill dancefloors in all manners of different clubs. Baby Be Mine, the first of the two non-singles, is a decent slab of Rick James-style funk, but third track The Girl is Mine is a minor disaster. A soppy duet with King of Uncool Paul McCartney, the song reaches its nadir with an embarrassing spoken dialogue section that would surely put any self-respecting girl off both massively rich pop stars. But that’s OK, because the next three tracks feature three of the greatest basslines ever written in pop music: Thriller, Beat It and Billie Jean is the peerless triumvirate on which Thriller’s reputation and massive sales figure is built. Human Nature is a dream-pop ballad that has been sampled repeatedly by hip-hop heavyweights like Nas and 2pac, and P.Y.T is an under-rated Cameo-like funk jam. Finally, second non-single The Lady in My Life closes the album in a slow haze. Thriller is by no means a consistent album, or one of those records that exceeds the sum of its parts, but Thriller, Beat It, Billie Jean, Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ and Human Nature reach such heights that it’s impossible to deride its massive commercial success as some kind of sign of banality. Simply, Thriller is a killer, with only a little filler. This redux edition incorporates remixes by some of today’s biggest pop stars, in an attempt to persuade you to buy this massively selling album again. All the remixers lazily volumise and compress the drums and bass, a cheap and nasty trick to take advantage of the rather obvious point that most of Thriller’s greatness comes from the beats and the basslines. KanYe West’s string-heavy mix of Billie Jean is passable but for this tackiness, while wil.i.am’s version of P.Y.T arguably improves on the original by adding horns and sizzling the synths. You could also argue that wil.i.am’s The Girl is Mine is an improvement on the original, but only in the sense that any regular shit is better than sloppy runs. He heavily sizzles the synths again, syncopates the rhythms, and in an attempt to reprise Macca’s embarrassing dad routine, blurts out nonsense like “She like the way I rock!” It’s not essential. Akon’s take on Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ is frankly terrible, an impressive feat considering the source material. He introduces it with a flowery piano motif, which seems to miss the point completely, and attempts to turn the song into an autotune-dependent ballad before finally introducing the loud, compressed rhythm section. Finally, Fergie’s attempt at Beat It is another failure, not because she messes with it too much, but simply because she’s got a painful bleat of a voice. This 25th Anniversary Edition also includes an unreleased Jacko song from the Thriller sessions, a saccharine ballad called For All Time that’s cut from the same branch as Human Nature. Even if the added bonus tracks aren’t up to much, this special edition also includes a DVD with videos for Billie Jean, Beat It and Thriller, and a so-called live performance of Billie Jean that is clearly lip-synched. The Billie Jean video sees a young, agile black performer moonwalking through film noir backstreets, followed by an insidious private dick character, while in Beat It Jacko leads a cast of dodgy street characters in a choreographed dance. The most notable thing about both these videos, unfortunately, is the stark difference between Jacko then and now. For those of us who were a little young at the time to notice, seeing how young, athletic and black Michael Jackson was in 1983 is difficult to compute. Thriller, on the other hand, is notable for at least 30 different things besides the subsequent exploits of the singer. After careful study it has become my belief that the Thriller video is the height of all human achievement so far; not just for the zombie dance, but also for the genuinely scary werewolf sequence at the start (it is a 15-certificate), as he shouts “get away!” and the girl screams instead of running; Michael’s big stupid grin as he watches the chase; Michael dancin’ and slidin’ and groovin’ around his date as she walks away from the cinema; Vincent Price’s monologue as the zombies break out of the ground; how everything stops as the zombies encircle the couple; then Michael shockingly becomes a zombie! Then there’s the zombie dance. Then, when the chorus kicks in, dance-leader Michael is no longer a zombie! During the fade-out, the date is chased into a house and again it’s really frightening as the zombies, including Michael, bust their way in; they’re just about to get her and she looks up and sees normal Michael! And as he leads her away, he turns back to the camera and reveals his evil eyes, as Vincent Price cackles away like a maniac again. It’s incredible. As good a 42 minutes as the album Thriller is, mankind has yet to devise a better way of spending that same amount of time than watching the full Thriller video three times back-to-back. In fact, you can apply that formula to anything: as good as bungee jumping/rampant sex/swimming with dolphins/walking on the moon/fun thing x, y or z might be, it’s still not guaranteed to be as fun as watching the Thriller video instead; ergo, height of human achievement. Now, as we already know, almost everyone on the planet already owns Thriller, and the additional 2008 remixes add nothing to an album that is already, bar the Paul McCartney bits, among the greatest ever recorded. But those few poor souls who don’t already have it owe it some attention, rather than letting some vague process of osmosis rule their awareness of Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ and the like. Also, 14 minutes of DVD-quality Thriller is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick; try as you might and say what you like, but Thriller is a killer and there ain't no way to beat it. Out Now via Epic/Legacy http://www.skinnymag.co.uk/content/view/6772/141/ [ 本帖最后由 dalehsiang 于 2008-5-2 22:29 编辑 ]

MkGenie

MSNBC.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jackson changed the music industry the way Elvis, Beatles did before him By Mike Celizic TODAYShow.com contributor updated 6:48 a.m. ET, Thurs., April. 24, 2008 What Michael Jackson has become hasn’t changed what he was 25 years ago, when he was riding the greatest album ever made and making the music video that would change forever the way we thought about both. It was one of those defining moments that come along once in a generation, and those who witnessed it when they were young and impressionable will never forget. Elvis Presley had done that when he gyrated his pelvis and belted out his blues-influenced rock a half century ago. A generation later, it was the Beatles ushering in another deathless sound. And then it was 1983, and the man who burned his image and his music into young and febrile minds was Michael Jackson. If you were young then, the “Thriller” video and Jackson’s music became part of your DNA. But even if you were older, you knew when you turned on MTV and saw Jackson’s breathtaking performance that you were seeing something that had never been seen before. Many would say that the likes of “Thriller” hasn’t been seen since, either. Not just another Jackson Jackson was no musical ingénue. He’d practically been born with a microphone in his mouth, a cute, button-nosed boy with a voice so high and clear and penetrating it seemed on loan from heaven. He was just 11 when he debuted, and he was surrounded by his singing siblings, the Jackson 5. But as good as that group was, he was the star of the show. He had emerged from the family shadow in 1979 with the release of his first album, “Off the Wall,” the first ever to contribute four singles to the Top 10 charts. The album would sell 20 million copies over the years, but Jackson and his co-producer Quincy Jones felt they could do better. The vehicle that Jackson would use hadn’t even been born yet, but when MTV debuted on the burgeoning cable menu in 1981, he saw the potential of a new medium in ways that no one else did. The album “Thriller” was released late in 1982 to breathless reviews for the pioneering work of the 24-year-old superstar. “Rather than reheating ‘Off the Wall’s’ agreeably mindless funk, Jackson has cooked up a zesty LP whose up-tempo workouts don't obscure its harrowing, dark messages,” wrote Rolling Stone. “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.” Even NPR checked in with a review that included this declaration: “Where lesser artists need a string section or a lusty blast from a synthesizer, Jackson need only sing to convey deep, heartfelt emotion.” “Thriller” would become the best-selling album of original music ever recorded, a title it holds to this day. It remained atop the charts for an incredible 37 weeks. There were nine tracks on the record and seven of them went Top 10, including “Thriller,” “Beat It” and “Billie Jean.” A watershed moment for the industry But the best was yet to come. MTV played mostly music videos in those early days, but no one had yet considered the possibility of merging filmmaking and music in the way that Jackson envisioned. With co-producer Jones, Jackson enlisted John Landis, the brilliant writer/director whose credits at the time included “Kentucky Fried Movie,” “Animal House,” “The Blues Brothers” and “American Werewolf in London” to direct what many believe remains the greatest music video ever. The video would run 14 minutes, essentially a miniature feature film that cost $800,000 to make — an astonishing figure at the time. Vincent Price, the master of the horror movie, was brought in to do a sinister rap under the music. “Thriller” is a horror movie that turns out to be a dream that turns out to be maybe not a dream after all. It begins with a young couple — apparently of high school age — walking late at night. Jackson, whose skin was not yet bleached and whose features still resembled a normal human being’s, wears a wide-shouldered, red leather jacket, red leather pants and his trademark white socks. His date, Ola Ray, wears tight, calf-length jeans and a sweater straight out of “Grease.” The fun starts with the full moon rising and Jackson telling Ray, “I’m not like other guys.” The line has been repeated often over the years, the irony growing with each new episode in his life. “It’s close to midnight. Something evil’s lurking in the dark,” he warns her. The something is him. Landis did a takeoff of “American Werewolf in London” to transform Jackson into something resembling more a werecat than a werewolf. Ray spends a lot of the video running and shrieking, pursued first by the yellow-eyed feline and then by an army of zombies. Like all self-respecting undead, the zombies can barely put one foot in front of the other when walking, but man, can they dance. Along the way, we learn that Jackson and Ray are watching the action in a movie, and then they’re not. Finally, she awakes from a dream, but it ends with Jackson’s eyes flashing yellow feline slits. You watched it for the brilliant music. Kids danced in front of their televisions when Mom and Dad weren’t looking, trying to capture even a fraction of Jackson’s grace and power. And through it all was that heart-stopping plot. The video sold more than a million copies, and every year Lexington, Ky., turns its downtown over to a reenactment of the video performed by its fans-for-life. As Mike Joseph wrote for PopMatters.com: “Twenty-five years after ‘Thriller’s’ original release, amidst everything that’s gone on in Michael Jackson’s crazy, insane, screwed-up life, this album still makes people smile, the grooves still make people dance, and the videos still make people stop and stare in awe. This, folks, is where the mere pop stars get separated from the legends. Times may change, music may change, but ‘Thriller’ is one of those few iconic records whose influence seems to be prevalent no matter the climate.” © 2008 MSNBC Interactive URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24282347/

MkGenie

"Thriller" is 25 - What it means to us http://www.soultracks.com/story-thriller25 Thriller is 25. To a generation of boomers, this may seem like a period that has passed in the blink of an eye. And yet in other ways, it has been a long, long quarter century -- particularly in the music industry -- since the pre-King of Pop began his rule. Michael Jackson's siesmic LP won a record eight Grammy Awards in 1984, a recognition of both the album's artistic merit and the tidal wave of popularity it garnered. What the Grammy selection committee didn't know at the time was that it was also celebrating the high-water mark of "popular" music. Thriller was more than a good album that became the biggest seller of all time. In reconsideration, it was a cultural force majeure that captured black, white, pop, soul, rock, young and old audiences alike. It was a metaphor for the shared American culture. An album crossing so many boundaries seems foreign - almost quaint - in 2008. "Narrowcasting" dominates the musical landscape, with thousands of specialized music stations carving audiences into groups so small that it has become impossible to have the kind of shared American cultural experience that Michael Jackson created back in the day. Thriller sold 27 million units in America. Those kinds of numbers are mind-boggling now, and we won't see anything like that again in our lifetime. To put it in perspective, the biggest selling album of 2007, Josh Groban's Noel, didn't even sell 4 million, and most radio listeners never heard a single cut from it. Could you say that about Thriller, Born In The USA, or Purple Rain? Back then it would be tough to find someone who hadn't heard at least three or four tracks or who couldn't sing one by heart. They were part of the common language the majority of the country shared via popular radio. So if you liked MJ, radio also led you to the different sounds of Springsteen, Joe Jackson and the Police. Today, a new CD struggles to attract a focused target group of urban college aged men or 30 year old suburban housewives, but nothing approaches the mass audience of Thriller and its progeny a quarter century ago. We are instead in the age of choice, where my love for classic Philadelphia or Detroit soul vocal groups can be satisfied 24/7 and in an exclusive fashion. Not only can I ignore fringe or temporal acts like Maktub or Arcade Fire, I don't even have to waste my time on the biggest stars of the era such as Kanye West or Maroon 5. Instead I can focus exclusively on what I already know I like, as I listen to XM in the car on the way home to plug in my iPod. If music serves a cultural purpose, if there really is a message in the music (good or bad), the big issue is the price we pay for gratifying our insular tastes at all times. While the purveyors of profanity-laced or violent music love to argue that music simply reflects the culture, the true power of music is its ability to shape culture. The 60s and 70s illustrate this point. Music's power at one end advanced racial equality and changed public sentiment against a no-win war in Southeast Asia. At the other end it healed culture's open wounds by singing that "Love's In Need of Love Today" and "You've Got A Friend." We understood these together. What would we have lost if Curtis Mayfield or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had instead been narrowcast to only their most obvious audiences? Pop radio, while imperfect (political messengers like Mayfield were often forced to become more opaque to get airplay), was one of the great methods of mass communication during the last century. Even beyond the question of its political effect, popular music served to unify, or at a minimum provide the common language that spanned races, genders and ages. Since Thriller, and particularly in this decade, the arrival of uberchoice has all but removed this common language (save the occasional novelty song or, perhaps, American Idol). As a country we are left with our shared musical experiences being those in the past. Consequently, talented artists today play to restricted, MBA-defined audiences, with most stuck in a demographic prison from which they will never free themselves. Meanwhile, the 60s, 70s and 80s continue to be our broader culture's musical reference points. Look no further than Madison Avenue, where every element of advertising is dissected to appeal to the broadest relevant audience. Do they create multi-million dollar ad campaigns around tracks by 50 Cent or Fall Out Boy? No, because the vast majority of Americans couldn't identify a single song by either act. So corporate America returns to exhaust the haggard familiar, calling on the same tracks from the Motown catalog or 70s arena rock that we've heard for most of our adult lives. It is then your realize sadly: those are the only songs we all know! Certainly the loss of this shared cultural experience is not limited to music. It pervades all of media, where choice gives us the ability to self-select not only for style but also for substantive content. Do I watch "FOX News" or listen to "Air America" for balanced news or for that which supports my pre-conceived notions? The long term effect of this fragmentation on American society is the great uncertainty. In the political scene, at least, the short term results have been abysmal, as parochial media have played their role in polarizing "red" and "blue" America, effectively demonizing people of good will with differing opinions. And the increased media stratification will continue a sort of cultural mitosis, splitting us into thousands of mini-empires, each suspicious of those who look, think and act differently. So the re-release of Thriller is coming at a time when, frankly, the original album's impact would be impossible to replicate. And while Thriller is arguably not even Jackson's greatest album (I'd argue that Off The Wall was front to back his finest release), it is a cultural icon, a metaphor for consensus and the broader good. It is also a relic of a transitional time, when our commonality was taken for granted and advancement was equated with additional choices. Over the next few years when we enter an Eden of unlimited musical choice, we may find that the array of options has become the unexpected societal serpent; one that has robbed us of our shared culture, and sacrificed community at the altar of individuality. Then, when we face a national challenge where commonality would be our greatest asset, we may instead be a nation of strangers longing for the halcyon days of Thriller and other shared experiences, when we had more in common than our individual ability to choose. Chris Rizik Publisher, SoulTracks.com

MkGenie

Thrills and spills Mark Ellen Published 22 May 2008 3 comments Print version Listen RSS The Michael Jackson phenomenon represented a golden age - the peak of the music industry. The only way was down At four o'clock on 8 December 1982, Michael Jackson did one of his last print interviews with me for the pop magazine Smash Hits. Shortly afterwards, his album Thriller became such a huge hit that he disappeared into a cocoon of management and PR people, only resurfacing in 1993 to refute child-abuse allegations. I remember sitting at midnight in the Smash Hits office, trying to make sense of his high-pitched, disembodied voice and his strange blend of sharp business sense and childlike wonder. Jackson's rehabilitation is now well under way, with the second single from the 25th-anniversary reissue of Thriller, a remix of "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" featuring the singer Akon, due out in June. But will it ever be possible for him to reclaim his former place in the pop firmament? It is easy to forget how ubiquitous the sound of Thriller once was, and how widespread the Jacko mania. In March 1983, performing "Billie Jean" live for a celebration of 25 years of Motown that was later televised, Jackson stole the show and introduced a key component of his multi-pronged assault on popular culture: his signature dance, the moonwalk. Small children - many sporting a single glove - sashayed across kitchen floors at every party in my street while their parents comically failed to imitate them. Like all colossal success stories, the album had an element apparently decodable only by children. Very little I have ever owned has had its value change as fast as the tape of my Michael Jackson interview. Bowing to ever-mounting pressure, I eventually made a copy and gave it to my neighbours' daughters, after which it was bootlegged to buggery. Everywhere I went, 12-year-olds I had never met would shriek their sing-song Jackson impersonations at me from passing cars (on Lionel Bart's Oliver!: "Ooooh it's terrific . . . it's unreal, it's incredible, it's magic!"; on the Hammer Horror classics of Vincent Price: "I looooove all movies, but I don't like watching scary movies. I can't sleep after watching one!"). Most of the teenage population of Chiswick could recite one whole section verbatim, the bit about the Disneyland display of Pirates of the Caribbean privately installed at his ranch in California: "The faces move, the figures move, the eyebrows move, and their eyes and their bodies . . . and they shoot! When you step in this room there's a whole war going on!" They were right to remember it: it was a very telling revelation. It pointed up an extraordinary gulf between Jackson's professional capabilities and his personal life. He showed a pin-sharp judgement for stage clothes, choreography, marketing and sound and video production and, with the producer Quincy Jones, had clearly developed a sixth sense about songs that might electrify a dance floor. One of the tracks considered for Thriller, he told me, was sent in by Stevie Wonder. What kind of supernatural confidence would it take to turn down a custom-built floor-filler from the man who had released Songs in the Key of Life only six years earlier? A faintly eerie picture began to emerge of Jackson's life outside the music industry. Whenever I asked about it, everything he said pointed to a brittle, friendless isolation, a person suspended, not in adolescence, but in a permanent state of childhood. Not one single thing this 24-year-old said to me had a sexual dimension to it. His best "friends" appeared to be fellow celebrities whose predicaments he could relate to and whom he only ever seemed to meet on the phone: Elton John, the new pop sensation Adam Ant, the former child-star Mark Lester. But mostly they were icons from the illusory world of cinema. He had bought Steven Spielberg a priceless book about the life of Walt Disney ("We read it together on an aeroplane"). Barbra Streisand might be duetting with him soon, he told me. Katharine Hepburn had just been to one of his concerts. Expeditions to the outside world could be hazardous. "If you get trapped," he said, "it's not fun. They start kissing you and tearing your clothes and tearing the hair out of your head." In Europe recently, a girl had opened her wallet to reveal "a piece of my hair. 'Look, I took this out of your head two years ago!'" Was it any wonder that he retreated to his castle, with its library, exercise room and 35-seater private cinema where he watched ET on a loop? Sad though they are, the events that overtook him during the past 25 years didn't come as any great surprise - his unravelling as a human being, the loss of his moral compass, his debts to lawyers and the gradual evaporation of his £350m fortune. The more successful Thriller became, the harder it would be to follow and the less altruistic the advice available. On a professional level, everyone wanted a slice of his money-printing pie; on a personal level, we can only hazard a guess, but there was the odd chink of light in the Martin Bashir interview of 2003, in which Jackson told his interrogator that he had been kept awake, terrified, when touring with the Jackson Five at the age of eight, by the sound of his elder brothers having sex with girls in their communal bedroom. Nevertheless, Jackson's influence went way beyond his musical achievements. A cautious MTV discovered that a black artist wouldn't threaten the ratings. His pioneering videos opened TV outlets for subsequent stars to sell in territories they had never heard of, without ever having to perform a note of live music. Jackson's biographer claimed the album had reactivated an industry in decline since 1978: "At some point Thriller stopped selling like a leisure item - like a magazine, a toy, tickets to a hit movie - and started selling like a household staple." Listen to Thriller today and it has dated only very slightly, and principally because the songs have been overexposed for so long. The framework of their sound still seems as nervy and energising: the computer-driven drums, the winding synthesised bass figures, the dry and slightly claustrophobic ring of studio trickery. It's not a record that belongs outdoors, it's for a contained space with low ceilings and strip lights. Everything about it still seems artificial, including the person performing it. There's no real colour or warmth, and no real feelings. Songs are either set in a fantasy world of PG- certificate horror or cast in some social context beyond the singer's capabilities. Almost every lyric is about girls - dreams, hopes, heartbreak, loss, proprietorial fights, stand-offs with rivals - yet never, even at the time, did you imagine that he was singing about his own life. It simply didn't matter. It was synthetic and superficial, and, to a young audience, completely unthreatening. It was as if he was simply some dazzling singing-dancing actor in an endlessly replayable cinematic musical. You can hear echoes of Thriller's shuddering rhythms in virtually any form of machine-generated dance music today. You can remember the spectacle of Michael Jackson performing it, the first instance when music seemed to have been constructed for video rather than the other way around. And you're reminded of how emblematic it is - even today - of the great peaks the music industry scaled at the height of its monumental sales boom. But the air up there was perilously thin and there was nowhere left to climb. Mark Ellen is editor of "The Word" magazine "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' 2008" featuring Akon (Sony BMG) is out on 9 June

鮭鮭

P.Y.T.(Pretty Young Thing)2008 我觉得挺好听的 歌词也很可爱