Times Online – Good pop is about sex or authenticity: Jacko had neither<br/> His squeaky voice was maddening, his music abysmal; I’d rather be torn apart by werewolves than listen to Thriller or Bad, let alone the later stuff, ever again, by James Delingpole

No, go on then: if you think his music is that great, try humming me Thriller. You can’t. The melody goes nowhere. It’s a dirge. The only thing that propels it along is the jerky backbeat, which you could only dance to comfortably if you spent every waking hour with a choreographer. Most of Jacko’s stuff is like that: dance music that only he could ever actually dance to.

A couple months ago I was looking at Wiki’s list of top selling pop albums internationally. I was curious how many of them were American, and was surprised how far down you had to go to get to one (that is, a solo artist) who was British or Japanese*. But I didn’t pay much attention to the copies sold. Yesterday I looked it up again, curious about the whole BEST SELLING ALBUM OF ALL TIME talk about Thriller. It sold 109 million copies. The next best-selling one, AC/DC’s Back in Black (never ‘eard o’ it) sold 45 million. So that stupid Thriller album sold two and a half times more copies than the next best-selling album. I mean for heaven’s sake.

* Friggin Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, and Celine Dion are up there though. And #2 is AC/DC which just now I’ve discovered to be an Australian band?!

Date: Jun 27th, 2009 · Comments RSS · Tags: Entertainment