The defin­i­tive block­buster albums of an 80s child­hood… maybe you weren’t there, but the Inter­net has made it so you might as well have been. Prince’s 1999 and Pur­ple Rain, Van Halen’s 1984, Michael Jackson’s Mid­night Man, the best-sell­ing album of all time and biggest thing to hap­pen to pop music since Off the Wall. Sure­ly you remem­ber the hit sin­gle “Starlight.” Its smooth grooves have bur­rowed into the brain of any­one who has ever seen a radio. Hit play above and tell me you don’t imme­di­ate­ly start singing the cho­rus:

We need some starlight starlight sun
There ain’t no sec­ond chance we got to make it while we can
You need the starlight some starlight sun
I need you by my side you give me starlight starlight tonight yeah

But this sounds an awful lot like that oth­er song, the one you actu­al­ly remem­ber singing—and dancing—along to every Hal­loween. In fact, it sounds exact­ly like “Thriller.” But what’s with these lyrics?

“Starlight” is the song writer Rod Tem­per­ton orig­i­nal­ly penned. And the album title? Tem­per­ton tells The Tele­graph that after Quin­cy Jones gave him the assign­ment, he went back to his hotel room, “wrote two or three hun­dred titles, and came up with the title ‘Mid­night Man.’” It didn’t last long. The next morn­ing, Tem­per­ton had an epiphany:

I woke up, and I just said this word… Some­thing in my head just said, this is the title. You could visu­al­ize it on the top of the Bill­board charts. You could see the mer­chan­dis­ing for this one word, how it jumped off the page as “Thriller.”

The rest is a his­to­ry so thor­ough­ly embed­ded in the pop cul­ture matrix that it’s near­ly impos­si­ble to think things could have been oth­er­wise. “Imag­in­ing ‘Thriller’ as any­thing else,” writes Patrick Rivers at Amer­i­can Music Review, “can be puz­zling, even unfath­omable.” In his short, but com­pre­hen­sive sur­vey of Thriller’s cre­ation, Rivers won­ders “whether unpol­ished prod­ucts of pop­u­lar artists should be made avail­able.” Do such demos com­pro­mise or enhance our appre­ci­a­tion of the final, com­mer­cial prod­uct? “ ‘Starlight’ can real­ly dis­turb pri­or under­stand­ings of Jackson’s career and image,” Rivers con­cludes; it “does not fit the prod­uct or artist that is Michael Jack­son.”

And yet, such record­ings almost invari­ably become pub­lic even­tu­al­ly: “While years of pop­u­lar music cre­ation remain behind the bliss­ful cur­tain, the pres­ence of ‘Starlight’ on social and peer-to-peer net­works demon­strates an appetite for this con­tent.” While no sim­i­lar appetite may exist in the case of great lit­er­ary works, the shock and sur­prise at hear­ing “Starlight” (read­i­ly avail­able on YouTube) is akin to that feel­ing many stu­dents of T.S. Eliot’s poet­ry expe­ri­ence when they dis­cov­er that his mas­ter­piece The Waste Land was orig­i­nal­ly titled “He Do the Police in Dif­fer­ent Voic­es” and was a very dif­fer­ent work of art before it was heav­i­ly edit­ed and even rewrit­ten by Ezra Pound.

The com­par­i­son illu­mi­nates an impor­tant point about all art, com­mer­cial or oth­er­wise: that it is very often the prod­uct of many hands and the result of many pri­or ver­sions, and its suc­cess depends upon an often ungain­ly, tri­al-and-error process that might have led to very dif­fer­ent results. “Starlight,” Rivers writes, “elu­ci­dates the cal­cu­lat­ed deci­sions made in the cre­ation of com­mer­cial pop­u­lar music.” Sure­ly we knew this, yet when it comes to an artist like Michael Jack­son at the height of his cre­ative pow­ers, we assume a kind of instant pop per­fec­tion, rather than the hit-by-com­mit­tee process Rivers describes in his arti­cle.

In the case of “Thriller,” the com­mit­tee most­ly con­sist­ed of Temperton—whose “Starlight” demo had been cho­sen from hun­dreds sub­mit­ted by others—and Quin­cy Jones, who gen­tly pushed the song­writer toward an edgi­er theme and secured the great Vin­cent Price for the song’s out­ro (writ­ten by Tem­per­ton in a taxi on the way to the stu­dio; Hear a stu­dio out­take of Price’s voiceover above.) Album engi­neer Bruce Swe­di­an remem­bers “the words ‘Edgar Allan Poe’ going between Quin­cy and Rod. Quin­cy say­ing it should be more Edgar Allan Poe. And that ‘Starlight’ isn’t, ‘Thriller’ is.”

Tem­per­ton recalled lat­er in his com­men­tary for the 2001 Thriller: Spe­cial Edi­tion that as “Thriller” took shape along with “Bil­lie Jean” and “Wan­na be Start­ing Some­thing,” the pro­duc­tion team “were kind of giv­ing the whole thing an edge and a direc­tion that some of the oth­er tracks didn’t have.” It was an edge, Rivers notes, “intend­ed to rep­re­sent Jackson’s unveil­ing as an adult record­ing artist,” jump­start­ing his tran­si­tion from child star and the boy­ish twen­ty-year-old of Off the Wall.

Deliv­er­ing to the world a grown-up Michael Jack­son in the artist’s next mas­sive hit record was cer­tain­ly Jones’ intent, though it was Jack­son who penned most of album’s edgi­er songs. Hits like “Bil­lie Jean” and “Beat It” arrived near­ly ful­ly formed. (Hear “Bil­lie Jean” in a home demo above and an a cap­pel­la demo of “Beat It” below.) But it took the bril­liance of Quin­cy Jones and his pro­duc­tion “A‑Team” to bring these songs to the pop music mar­ket­place, sup­ply­ing just the right embellishments—like Eddie Van Halen’s “Beat It” solo—to etch these tunes into our col­lec­tive con­scious­ness for­ev­er.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ori­gins of Michael Jackson’s Moon­walk: Vin­tage Footage of Cab Cal­loway, Sam­my Davis Jr., Fred Astaire & More

Miles Davis Cov­ers Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” (1983)

Hear the 1962 Bea­t­les Demo that Dec­ca Reject­ed: “Gui­tar Groups are on Their Way Out, Mr. Epstein”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Every Steely Dan fan remem­bers the first time they lis­tened to their music — not just heard it, but lis­tened to it, active­ly tak­ing notice of Wal­ter Beck­er and Don­ald Fagen’s com­plex­ly anachro­nis­tic lyrics (long scru­ti­nized by the band’s exegetes), jazz-and-rock-span­ning com­po­si­tion­al tech­nique, ultra-dis­cern­ing selec­tion of ses­sion musi­cians, and immac­u­late stu­dio craft which, by the stan­dards of the 1970s, raised pop­u­lar music’s bar through the ceil­ing.

Often, that first real lis­ten­ing ses­sion hap­pens in the neigh­bor­hood of a high-end stereo deal­er. For me, the album was Two Against Nature, their turn-of-the-21st cen­tu­ry come­back, but for many more, the album was Aja, which came out in 1977 and soon claimed the sta­tus of Steely Dan’s mas­ter­piece. At the end of side one comes “Dea­con Blues,” one of their best-loved songs as well as a pro­duc­tion that puts audio­phile lis­ten­ing equip­ment to the test. You can see a break­down of what went into it in Nerd­writer’s new video “How Steely Dan Com­pos­es a Song” above.

“There’s a rea­son why audio­philes use Steely Dan records to test the sound qual­i­ty of new speak­ers,” says host Evan Puschak. “The band is among the most son­i­cal­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed pop acts of the 20th and 21st cen­turies,” in both the tech­ni­cal and artis­tic sens­es. He goes on to iden­ti­fy some of the sig­na­ture ele­ments in the mix, includ­ing some­thing called the “mu major cord”; the record­ing meth­ods that allow “every instru­ment its own life” (espe­cial­ly those played by mas­ters like gui­tarist Lar­ry Carl­ton and drum­mer Bernard Pur­die); the strik­ing effect of “mid­dle reg­is­ter horns slid­ing against each oth­er”; and even sax­o­phone soloist Pete Christlieb, whom Beck­er and Fagen dis­cov­ered by chance on a Tonight Show broad­cast.

Puschak does­n’t ignore the lyrics, with­out a thor­ough analy­sis of which no dis­cus­sion of Steely Dan’s work would be com­plete. He men­tions the band’s typ­i­cal­ly wry, sar­don­ic tone, their detached per­spec­tive and notes of uncer­tain­ty, but in the case of this par­tic­u­lar song, it all comes with a “hid­den earnest­ness” that makes it one of the most poignant in their entire cat­a­log. “ ‘Dea­con Blues’ is about as close to auto­bi­og­ra­phy as our tunes get,” admits Fagen in the tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary clip just above, which puts him and Beck­er back into the stu­dio to look back at the song track by iso­lat­ed track.

“We’re both kids who grew up in the sub­urbs. We both felt fair­ly alien­at­ed. Like a lot of kids in the fifties, we were look­ing for some kind of alter­na­tive cul­ture — some kind of escape, real­ly — from where we found our­selves.” Beck­er describes the song’s epony­mous pro­tag­o­nist, who dreams of learn­ing to “work the sax­o­phone” in order to play just how he feels, “drink Scotch whiskey all night long, and die behind the wheel,” as not a musi­cian but some­one who “just sort of imag­ines that would be one of the myth­ic forms of loser­dom to which he might aspire. Who’s to say that he’s not right?”

You can learn even more about the mak­ing (and the mag­ic) of “Dea­con Blues” in Marc Myers’ inter­view with Beck­er and Fagen in the Wall Street Jour­nal last year. “It’s the only time I remem­ber mix­ing a record all day and, when the mix was done, feel­ing like I want­ed to hear it over and over again,” says Beck­er. “It was the com­pre­hen­sive sound of the thing.” Fagen acknowl­edges “one thing we did right” in the mak­ing of the song: “We nev­er tried to accom­mo­date the mass mar­ket. We worked for our­selves and still do.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pro­duc­er Tony Vis­con­ti Breaks Down the Mak­ing of David Bowie’s Clas­sic “Heroes,” Track by Track

The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

Neil Young on the Trav­es­ty of MP3s

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hav­ing recent­ly released a new album fea­tur­ing acoustic ver­sions of his big hits, Peter Framp­ton is now back on tour, play­ing in some small­er venues across the U.S. But no venue–not the Gillioz The­atre in Spring­field, Mis­souri, nor the Tobin Cen­ter for Per­form­ing Arts in San Anto­nio, Texas–is quite as small as the one we’re fea­tur­ing today. Above, watch Framp­ton per­form at the desk of NPR’s All Songs Con­sid­ered. The per­for­mance is part of NPR’s Tiny Desk series, and the setlist includes acoustic ver­sions of “Baby, I Love Your Way,” “Lines On My Face,” and “All I Want To Be (Is By Your Side).” Oth­er recent Tiny Desk per­for­mances include Gra­ham Nash, Wilco, Natal­ie Mer­chant, and Ben Folds. Enjoy.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

The lat­est install­ment from Blank on Blank’s series of ani­mat­ed videos drops us inside the bohemi­an Por­to­bel­lo Hotel in Lon­don. It’s May, 1976, and we hear a young Pat­ti Smith rail­ing against the cen­sor­ship of her music, using some colorful–that is to say, NSFW–words. She talks Rim­baud. The poet­ry and com­bat of rock. The dreams and hal­lu­ci­na­tions that feed her music. The stuff that would even­tu­al­ly earn her the cred to be called The God­moth­er of Punk.

The audio is part of a longer, two-hour inter­view with Mick Gold, which is avail­able through Ama­zon and iTunes. Enjoy.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rim­baud to Susan Son­tag

Pat­ti Smith’s Cov­er of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Strips the Song Down to its Heart

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

Pat­ti Smith Reads Her Final Words to Robert Map­plethor­pe