The singles released from the 1979 album 'Off the Wall' showed that the singer was indeed his own man, but "Billie Jean" was still the song that demonstrated to most listeners that Michael Jackson had grown from a child prodigy to a young man with an absolute mastery of the modern recording studio. With its sinuous, insistent beat and impassioned vocal, which was recorded in a single take, the 1983 smash is still the most inescapable and irresistible dance song of Jackson's career. Said Jackson of the song in his auto-biography, Moonwalk, "I knew it was going to be big while I was writing it."

"Billie Jean" was composed as production on Jackson's album Thriller was nearing an end. "We had everything in the can for Thriller, and we were about to leave the studio," producer Quincy Jones told French journalists Pierre Edelman and Jean Pierre Lentin. "I played the tapes a few more times, and I didn't get that feeling. I told Michael that he had to write some stronger material. Everyone thought I was crazy. Over the next few days, he wrote 'Beat It' and 'Billie Jean.'"

The tale of a vengeful woman who insists that she's bearing the narrator's child, "Billie Jean" is fraught not with "Thriller" -style cartoon scariness but with the real-life fears of a star in the spotlight. "The girl in the song," wrote Jackson, "is a composite of people [my family has] been plagued by over the year." Appropriately, the song was the one Jackson chose to perform when he appeared on the television special Motown 25 — Yesterday, Today and Forever, at which time he unveiled the moonwalk and propelled his career to a different level altogether.