Music Discussions

So, I realize that Michael Jackson died a week ago and this this post is really late. However, I did not have anything new to add to the already insane level of activity on the Internet surrounding his death at that time. A book I picked up recently changed that.

I recently purchased "The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics" which credited Michael Jackson with showing society that "zombies could be fun". That correlation had never occurred to me before. I am unsure if Michael Jackson’s video of "Thriller" caused zombies to gain popularity in media of all forms, or if there was another cause and "Thriller" was just one of the first examples of this already emerging trend.

What I do know is that "Thriller" was a very popular video among my classmates in elementary school and that it continued to be considered by MTV to be the best video ever made as of the late 1990’s. Not many songs or videos have the initial level of impact of "Thriller" while maintaining such a high standing a decade and a half later. Many songs are popular when they first come out, but are forgotten by the next year – "Pop Goes the World" by Men Without Hat’s comes to mind. Others are barely heard of at the time of their initial release but gain a cult following later.

The saying goes that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and "Thriller" has been imitated multiple times. Several of these homages have even become highly popular by riding of the coattails of Michael Jackson’s video’s continued fame. The two that come to mind first are the viral videos of prisoners re-enacting and a video nicknamed "Indian Thriller"; both of these videos can be found at the end of this post.

Without "Thriller" it is hard to say how media would be different today. As mentioned previously, I am unsure of whether the observation by "The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics" is correct, or if Michael Jackson was at the forefront of a trend that would have emerged anyway. However, if he did spark off the trend, the Marvel series of zombie comics, remakes of George A. Romero’s dead series, the "Return of the Living Dead series", "The Zombie Survival Guide", the "Zombies!!!" series of games, and many more works may never have been made. Whether or not you are a zombie fan like I am, it is still easy to see how the shape of modern forms of entertainment would have turned out differently had "Thriller" never have been made into a video.