1982: Michael Jackson’s Killer Album

On speaking about his upcoming sixth studio album, Michael Jackson said that he wanted to make an album where every song was a killer and he nearly did that. Thriller, which debuted on this day in 1982, was Jackson’s first number-one album on Billboard’s Top LPs and Tapes chart. And it stayed there for 37 weeks. Seven of the album’s 10 singles were released including “The Girl Is Mine” (with Paul McCartney), “Billie Jean”, “Beat It”, “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ”, “Human Nature”, “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)”, and “Thriller”. All of them reached the top 10 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. Today, the most remembered song off the album is of course, “Thriller”, but Epic Records didn’t initially plan on releasing it as they saw it as a novelty song. In addition to Jackson, fans were also “thrilled” to hear horror movie star, Vincent Price performing a spoken-word sequence at the end of the song followed by his legendary laughter. (Image: Epic Records/Wikipedia)