Jackson's dynamic dance moves are still imitated today by the likes of Usher, Justin Timberlake and Chris Brown. One of the most memorable commercials during Super Bowl Sunday two weeks ago showed animated lizards in a SoBe Life Water ad, re-enacting the dance moves from the "Thriller" video.
No other album released in the past 25 years has managed to be so musically transcendent, which makes the seemingly rushed execution of the expanded edition a bit disappointing.
Given that so much of Jackson's music has been repackaged in just the past five years, maybe there was nothing else in the vaults to revisit. In 2001, the year Thriller turned 19, Sony released "special editions" of Jackson's four mega albums on Epic. Each disc included demos, outtakes and insightful interviews with key Jackson collaborators, including Jones and songwriter Rodney Temperton.
Such bonuses would have been ideal for the 25th anniversary edition of Thriller, which doesn't even come with liner notes. The state-of-the-art-remastering job of the original album is nice, revealing just how intricately layered the production is. But previous digital versions of Thriller, which won a Grammy in 1983 for best-engineered non-classical album, were fine.
The new remixes do absolutely nothing to buttress the album's legacy. The retooled songs - especially "The Girl is Mine" by will.i.am and "Billie Jean" by West - are unimaginative with generic hip-hop beats and pointless rapping (that would be from will.i.am) added to Jones' already superlative tracks. And Akon's slowed-down version of "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" sounds as nasally and overly processed as any of his own hits.
If anything, the reworked "bonus" cuts only reinforce what pop fans have known since 1982: Nobody can mess with Thriller.
rashod.ollison@baltsun.com
