Let me preface this all by saying that I don't particularly care for Jackson, and generally prefer Jordan's 'work' in his "field".
Michael Jackson had an immense impact. Without even dabbling into music, what he did for dance was crazy. Every RnB performer since him has been doing imitations of his shit on stage. Usher, Chris Brown, Aaliyah, beyonce, Omarion, etc all have some of MJ's DNA as performers. You guys might not know this, but MJ's video and dance game was a global game changer too. After Thriller there was a total shift in the way dance and song numbers go in Bollywood. They went from slow sad affairs to dance and singing heavy affairs, and a lot of the industrys most popular actors cribbed his moves, like Amitabh.
Thriller represents a paradigm shift in music video making to me as well, they became less performance based and more cinematic from that point. If you're talking about marketing and demographic shifts, Thriller also changed things; first album with a worldwide debut for example.
And you're all downplaying the effect Jackson had on the color barrier for black music and videos, globally.
"I remember taking a red-eye to New York and going to MTV [with] a rough cut of 'Billie Jean' and MTV declining the video," Weisner recalls. He walked from there to Epic headquarters. "I sat down with [CBS Records head] Walter Yetnikoff," he says. "We then went to [CBS head] Bill Paley, and he and Walter [told MTV], 'This video is on by the end of the day or [CBS Records] isn't doing business with MTV anymore.' The record company played hardball and that was the day that changed history. That was the video that broke the color barrier."
Motown?
Chuck Berry?
James Brown?
(Image removed from quote.)
Um.
Before Michael Jackson, there was a clear line in American music. Black music and white music. Most white people did not fuck with black music, and black music certainly never had an international advertisement. What MJ, Whitney, and Sade did for black musicians alone, and made it okay for them to be seen in the mainstream cannot be understated. MJ allowed a paradigm shift to happen. Before MJ, black musicians were NOT pop. They were r/b, disco, funk, soul, jazz. White dudes fought tooth and nail for disco to die, and blackness was a huge part of that. MJ literally opened the floodgates for black music artists to be recognized by the mainstream. Before then, white people occasionally fucked with black music, but black music was mostly in its own segregated place. I bet you without MJ, rap would have never been the global phenomenon it later became.
And this is just talking about America.
Nevermind MJ's impact with dance and music video choreography with Billie Jean and Thriller. Before that, you had that, you had stuff like Pat Benatar Love Is A Battlefield, but it wasn't as huge a deal because MJ's dancing was such a huge step up.
If you look at music videos and pop music before Thriller, there's a distinct line and difference. After Thriller, he influenced not only music videos, but dance PERIOD.
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