Does it come down to how popular they are? If so, Michael Jackson is the most important pop star of all time, because he sold the most records. Thriller, released in 1982, remains the biggest selling album ever (and probably always will, given how C
D sales are now plummeting). More than 100 million people own a copy.
But the album is also, unquestionably, an exceptional work of pop art. Creatively, it was the moment when Jackson really hit his stride. The trademark vocal tics and quirks were beginning to show. The lyrics were getting darker and more interesting. The attention to detail in the album's production, arrangement, and choice of sounds is still striking – rather like the Beatles' best work, the songs sound completely of their time and yet, unlike the many lesser 1980s records that stole Jackson's ideas wholesale, completely fresh.
And Jackson was trying daring new things with every song, and pulling it off, collaborating with everyone from Eddie Van Halen to Sir Paul McCartney and Toto, and throwing in everything from Swahili chanting to a voiceover by Vincent Price.
It might not have worked. The story goes that Jackson and his producer, Quincy Jones, chose Thriller's nine songs from a list of hundreds, with a view to making an album on which every track was a potential smash hit. If that sounds calculated, it was more like a process of trial and error. Jones famously didn't think Billie Jean was strong enough to be included, and that the intro was too long. Jackson had a crisis of confidence and almost pulled the album release at the last minute. And the song they chose to launch the album was not Thriller, Beat It or Billie Jean but The Girl Is Mine – a sweet song, sure, but one of the least memorable.
Looking back now, you wonder what on earth they were thinking.
But they pulled it off. It is hard to overstate just how influential Thriller was. It was an album that changed the industry's perception of how successful black performers could be and what kind of music they should make, paving the way for Prince, Whitney Houston and countless others. It also changed the industry's perception of albums themselves – almost uniquely, it was hugely successful both as an album and as a set of individual hits (seven of its nine tracks were released as singles).
Albums were thought to be the terrain of serious "rock" acts, singles for "pop" acts. Jackson convinced as both – he gave the world seven brilliant singles and an album that was a coherent artistic statement, all in one package. And that's without even mentioning the huge impact of the videos, Thriller in particular, in spawning what would later be known as the "MTV generation".
If Jackson has any claim to be the "King of Pop", it's Thriller that put him on the throne. But how much credit should he take for that as an artist, and how much was it due to a particular set of circumstances? Bad, five years later, had all the same ingredients – production by Quincy Jones, tremendous songs, inventive videos – but it never quite had the same cultural impact, or sold as many copies.
By then, of course, the distracting freak show was gradually beginning to take over – the extravagant spending, the weird stories about his personal life. If the albums had continued to be as good, perhaps it would have mattered less – in pop music, ultimately the more eccentric you are the better – but after Bad the creative slide slowly began.
By the time Jackson was promoting his HIStory album in 1995, its lukewarm reception wasn't just down to the fact that the child molestation allegations were beginning to stick, but also to the gulf between the self-aggrandising marketing campaign and the middling standard of the music.
Jackson's label, Sony, hoped it could spend its way to re-establishing Jackson's reputation as the King of Pop, and packaged an album of new songs with a 15-track greatest hits collection. But the tactic just demonstrated even more clearly that HIStory Continues, the CD of new songs, was no Thriller. In fact, a man who had once been a great pop innovator was starting to look like he was riding on the coat-tails of others – in particular the producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who had transformed the fortunes of his sister Janet, and R&B stars such as R Kelly.
Meanwhile, Jackson was becoming his own worst enemy. The infamous decision to float a giant statue of himself down the Thames made him seem more like a mad dictator than pop royalty. His jaw-droppingly self-important performance of the mawkish Earth Song at the Brit Awards was a disaster too.
When the performance was sabotaged by an appalled Jarvis Cocker, the media's initial reaction was to condemn the Pulp singer as a thug – until it quickly became obvious that the public mostly agreed with him.
What went wrong? Arguably, Jackson's gradual retreat into his own deluded fantasy world – inevitable, perhaps, for someone who endured a childhood like his, and then extreme fame like his – helped kill his creativity.
While Madonna has managed to keep her ears to the ground, seeking out collaborators such as William Orbit and Jacques Lu Cont, who could help her reinvent herself and keep her music fresh, Jackson was perhaps too isolated, too wrapped up in his own paranoia, to be able to make a comeback similar to the ones Madonna has pulled off several times in the past 20 years.
In different circumstances, it's easy to imagine Jackson recording fantastic music with Danger Mouse, the Neptunes, Timbaland, Will.I.Am or even David Sitek of TV on the Radio. Instead, he began making music with an Arab sheikh nobody had heard of, who then sued him.
Is this to say Jackson was only ever as good as his collaborators? That's unfair. He was not just an extraordinary singer and dancer, but a hugely gifted songwriter too. But at some point, that gift seemed to leave him. It was one of the more minor tragedies of his life, perhaps, but a tragedy nonetheless.
