Original Thriller tracklist?

[Sensual visionary]

I feel a little like Michael’s life had been a little easier with the first track list, if Thriller had become very very successful but not so huge. He might have released another album in 1985 with Chicago 45, Beat it, Human Nature and APOM etc. and his supercareer had grown in a more incremental fashion.

On the other hand, perhaps the ‘saving the record industry’ wouldn’t have been, and popular music as we know it had evolved very differently altogether.

His later 1989 album Troublemaker introducing poetic rap rock over house swing beats might have revitalized group dance across generations and species.
*Swoons*

 

[Kanye East]

'Beat It' was not a duet with a white artist.

Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo (on 'Beat It') is called Special Guitar Performance.

By that faulty logic, then 'Privacy' was also a duet with a white artist just because guitarist Michael Thompson plays the guitar solo on the song.

Or, by that faulty logic, then 'Dirty Diana' was also a duet with a white artist just because guitarist Steve Stevens plays the guitar solo on the song.

Van Halen was more famous than either of those guys, though, at the height of his fame in the early 80s


Anyway, I wish the original 10-track version (with Hot Street, the longer versions of Billie Jean and Lady in My Life) would become the official version of Thriller in re-releases, the way that the 11-track version of Bad is now the official one

 

[mj_frenzy]

Van Halen was more famous than either of those guys, though, at the height of his fame in the early 80s


Anyway, I wish the original 10-track version (with Hot Street, the longer versions of Billie Jean and Lady in My Life) would become the official version of Thriller in re-releases, the way that the 11-track version of Bad is now the official one

Keep in mind that 'The Girl Is Mine' had to be not only on the 'Thriller' album, but more importantly it had to be the lead single of the album, and here is the reason.

Michael Jackson and CBS Records wanted (with that album) to have chart success also at the MTV Top 20 Pop Chart.

But MTV at that time did not allow black artists to enter the MTV Top Chart.

So, 'The Girl Is Mine' (as a duet with a white artist named Paul McCartney who used to achieve a lot of radio play at that time) was the key that opened for them those MTV closed doors.