Only in pop music could an album by a renowned twenty-four-year-old eccentric unite a thoroughly fragmented audience, and that's exactly what Thriller did. Whites, blacks, highbrows, heavy-metal fans, teenyboppers and even parents were taken with this suave, Quincy Jones-produced hybrid of pop and soul. The results: seven Top Ten singles, seven Grammy Awards, worldwide sales of nearly 40 million copies and Michael Jackson's all-encompassing domination of radio, video and the mass media. Nothing like it had been seen since the peak of the Beatles' popularity.

Though professional associates like Steven Spielberg and Quincy Jones have praised Jackson's creative genius and technical know-how, Jackson himself was very modest about the origin of his magic when interviewed by Gerri Hirshey for Rolling Stone in 1983: "I wake up from dreams and go, 'Wow, put this down on paper,'" he said. "You hear the words, everything is right there in front of your face. ... That's why I hate to take credit for the songs I've written. I feel that somewhere, someplace, it's been done and I'm just a courier bringing it into the world."

If the biggest-selling album of all time seems a little tame now that the hoopla has subsided, that's nearly beside the point. "Beat It," with its whooshing Eddie Van Halen guitar solo, still compensates for the camp silliness of the title track; the relentless throb of "Billie Jean" blots out the memory of fluffy outings like "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)" and Jackson's execrable duet with Paul McCartney, "The Girl Is Mine" — the first single from an album that would produce much better ones. In fact, it was Jackson's performance of "Billie Jean" on the 1983 television special Motown 25: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow that broke the album wide open and paved the way for Jackson's year in the sun.

Though Thriller's audience has since fragmented again, the record is testament to pop music's ability to strengthen the ties that bind.