Since 1970, some African Americans in popular music have achieved unprecedented fame, wealth, and cultural influence. At the same time, though, their achievements have contrasted strongly with persistent economic, social, and racial struggles of black communities in the post–Jim Crow era. To perceive how recent popular music fits into African American history since 1970, it is helpful to begin in the middle of the story, with the facts surrounding the best-selling recording of all time.

In December 1982, Epic Records released Michael Jackson’s new album, Thriller. Jackson was a proven star, so it was not surprising that Thriller, containing tracks such as “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and the title song, quickly reached the top of the sales charts.

Unexpectedly, though, the album remained a top ten best-seller in the United States for the next eighteen months. American listeners purchased more than 30 million copies of Thriller, and 70 million more units sold overseas. It became the most commercially successful record album ever released, and it put Jackson on course to join Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles as one of the biggest-selling musicians in history. That final fact may have been important to Jackson, the only African American member of that elite group. In later years he would buy the rights to all of the Beatles’ songs and marry Presley’s daughter.

Thriller earned a share of its success, and a great deal of its historical significance, from its position at the intersection of important trends in African American music. Jackson was twenty-five years old when Thriller was released. As a child, he had been the youngest member of the family ensemble the Jackson 5, which had enjoyed commercial success since the late 1960s. Motown Records, the group’s record label for most of those years, had established itself in the 1960s as the most successful blackowned music company ever, and the Jackson brothers’ sound was representative of Motown’s brand of commercially crafted soul music.

Styles that predated even Motown’s found their way into Thriller, as well as into the Jackson albums that bracketed it, Off the Wall, released in 1979 and Bad, released in 1987. This was largely due to the influence of their producer, Quincy Jones. Jones, born in 1933, had roots in African American popular music going back to the swing era. His rich career encompassed jazz (as a trumpeter in the Lionel Hampton band), classical music (including study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, a famed teacher of composers), band arranging (for Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, and many others), and film scoring, as well as producing albums (on some of which he performed). Few individuals rivaled Jones’s smooth and highly lucrative movement through the highest echelons of the popular music business, which made him an icon of post–Jim Crow racial integration.

At the same time Thriller referenced earlier styles, it also heralded emerging new trends in African American culture and popular music. Jackson and Jones drew cannily on music and dance trends of the late 1970s and early 1980s, most prominently funk, disco, salsa, “glam” rock, and rap. In performances after the release of Thriller Jackson pushed the last two elements into the foreground, flaunting glittering, fantastic costumes and a highly stylized, even eccentric persona. Thriller’s huge success persuaded Music Television (MTV) in 1983, tardily, to make Jackson the first African American performer ever to appear on the popular cable channel (in the video of “Billie Jean”), nineteen months into its run. This development was both a testament to the persistence of racism in the post–Jim Crow United States and the music business, and a confirmation of the new centrality of videos in the popularization of new songs and albums.

Videos of songs from Thriller, such as the title tune and “Beat It,” surprised many white viewers. They included vignettes of resentment and violence, in which Jackson appeared as a gang member, a werewolf, and a zombie. In videos derived from later albums, Jackson’s anger at his media coverage and depictions of violent behavior were even more vehement. These developments reflected new strains of pessimism and angry social criticism in black music of the 1980s. “Post-soul” music, percolating out of resentful young urban black communities, also influenced the entertainer. Jackson’s adoption of the backslide or “moonwalk” dance step paid homage to Cab Calloway and James Brown, who made similar moves on stage, but it also popularized current urban African American dance styles. Like the gang imagery in the “Beat It” video, the moonwalk paid heed to the emergence of hip hop culture in a decade of new black inner-city unrest. Jackson exhibited a different kind of social concern when he and Quincy Jones produced “We Are the World” in 1985, a song and video project featuring a menagerie of music stars, which raised funds to fight famine in East Africa and rejuvenated social activism in the popular music mainstream.

In later years Michael Jackson was beset by controversy. The self-styled “King of Pop” became increasingly reclusive and eccentric, and startlingly altered his appearance, seemingly by means of plastic surgery and skin bleaching. Allegations that he molested children dogged him for a decade, and in a trial in 2005 threatened to end his career, although he was acquitted of criminal charges.

The story of how Michael Jackson’s explosive creativity in the Thriller era was sapped in later years by personal confusion and crises is an extreme example of the general tensions that faced African American music at the end of the twentieth century. Massive profitability and exposure established, once and for all, the centrality of black music in American tastes, but its success in the white-majority market still created pressures, tensions, and public images that were disturbing to African American artists and communities. The continuing economic pain and social inequality suffered by many blacks contrasted sharply with the success of a relative few, and forced musicians and others to declare their allegiances either to “the neighborhood” or to the new affluence of the black middle class. In the decades after the release of Thriller, rap music and hip hop culture powerfully expressed many concerns that were latent in Jackson’s persona and music: male-female conflict, gender confusion, violent resolution of disputes, and mistrust of the nonblack listening audience. At the same time, though, like Thriller, hip hop and the broad universe of contemporary African American musical expression also exhibit a healthy vitality, mining a great and diverse musical heritage, new technology, and global music to respond to the personal and social needs of black people and of a wider audience as well.