bboy87 said:

Agreed. But you know the odd thing about it was Epic thought Akon would be guaranteed 'cause usually his songs do make the top 40/10 and shit but I guess he couldn't do it this time.

The Girl Is Mine '08 would definitely have been better but it's only doing modest work in the UK.

On the better side of the other Jackson - Janet, her song is still in the fifties. That's just too disappointing. Michael had Akon on the thing and the thing wasn't any higher than "One More Chance" was.

Timmy84 said:

I think One More Chance did better on certain terms

#83 on the Pop charts, #40 on the R&B, and #1 in R&B sales. It was #5 in the UK

This WBSS 08 is gonna go tupperware

Pictures of the Limited Edition Thriller 25 iPod:

30. Billie Jean (Underground Mix) (6:42)
*previously released


31. Thriller (Instrumental) (5:59)
*previously released

01.02.2008 : Odeon to screen exclusive Thriller video
We're delighted to announce that Odeon cinemas are showing the enhanced version of the full length Thriller short film for FREE at selected screens as a major UK first on the Friday and Saturday before release (8th & 9th February)

The exclusive screenings will be held at Odeon cinemas in the following places. Please contact your local Odeon for more information.

Covent Garden - 8th & 9th Feb
Hatfield - 8th & 9th Feb
Kingston - 8th & 9th Feb
Leicester - 8th & 9th Feb
Manchester - 8th & 9th Feb
Southampton - 8th & 9th Feb
Guildford - 9th Feb only

http://de.click2music.co....jthriller/

Can the mods make this one a sticky?

-I have to say that i'm shocked that they gave it 5 stars since #1)most of the remixes are pretty awful if you ask me and #2- Rolling Stone favors Rock artists and they usually trash MJ like most mainstream media so I was expecting the review to be negative. Suprising.
[Edited 2/8/08 13:57pm]

Rollingstone review of "Thriller 25"

Michael Jackson

Thriller 25 Deluxe Edition

5/5

Thriller is the sound of Michael Jackson in 1982, when he was the coolest, slinkiest, prettiest pop star alive. He was Boy George times Rick James and beat both of them at their games, although he did nothing but make the competition sound even better. He taught Boy George fans and Rick James fans to hear each other's music, just as he taught Van Halen, Lionel Richie, ZZ Top, Stevie Nicks and Bruce Springsteen to play to this grand new pop-thrills audience he'd called to the floor. After this, nobody claimed disco sucked again. "Billie Jean" was the hit, with MJ's voice aching with erotic longing and dread, and nearly five minutes of creepy strings and seductive bass and breathy gasps, though there wasn't a station on the dial that faded the song out early. "Beat It" was the one designed to get on rock radio — but "Billie Jean" got there first, since the rock stations played it, along with the rest of the world. They couldn't resist that bass. Who could?

Thriller has been the world's favorite pop album ever since, and this deluxe expanded edition shows why, even with six lame new remixes from artists like Fergie, Akon and Kanye West, as well as the mediocre ballad "For All Time," a rerecorded outtake from the original sessions, tacked on. The twenty-fifth-anniversary edition is like the I'm Not There soundtrack: All the new artists sound cowed by the originals, and they know nobody will ever play their versions twice. Even Kanye can tell he's in over his head, so he sends "Billie Jean" out there without the bass line, which is like putting Bobby Orr on the ice without a hockey stick. And in an early fast-track contender for the year's most pointless musical moment, there's Fergie's "Beat It 2008." How funky and strong is her fight?

Akon's "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" is actually kind of great — he slows it down into a piano ballad, lingering over the easily obscured lyrics. Paul McCartney doesn't show for "The Girl Is Mine 2008," but that would be a sore subject anyway. (What can it mean that the music on "The Girl Is Mine" was played by the guys from Toto, who had that song about Rosanna Arquette — who has recently been linked to McCartney?) Instead we get Will.i.am, whose idea of production is dumb-thug bluster and trying to hide the goofy "doggone" hook, which is the whole point of the song, dude. "The Girl Is Mine" without "doggone" is like "Same Girl" without the Waffle House. Note: Though MJ's original vocals are on here, Jackson himself doesn't participate much in the new versions, showing previously well-hidden instincts of self-preservation.

So that leaves the original Thriller, which hasn't lost any of its fizz. One of the funny things about the album is that even though it's as close as you can get to timeless, it really only could have happened in 1982. That was a watershed year for pop music, with New Wave synth pop and disco feeding into each other, the year of Madonna's "Everybody" and George Clinton's "Atomic Dog" and the Human League's "Don't You Want Me" and Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing." Jackson got this whole era grooving a few years earlier with Off the Wall, but at the end of 1982, right when everybody was still reeling from Prince's 1999, he dropped Thriller and shocked everyone. Madonna made her own version of "Billie Jean," retitled "Like a Virgin." Stevie Nicks called her version "Stand Back," Pat Benatar called hers "Love Is a Battlefield." Bob Dylan called his "Tight Connection to My Heart." Yet none of them could touch the original.

Thriller has MJ at his breathiest and most salacious ("PYT"), and his most beautifully fragile ("Human Nature," so open and brave it makes "She's Out of My Life" seem phony). The one hit that sounds tired now is "Thriller," killed off by the video, with its bid for middlebrow respectability. ("Billie Jean" and "Beat It" are great videos — "Thriller" is just a crap John Landis movie.) But the wiggly bass that kicks off the album in "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' " feels like the sound of MJ's soul, and you can hear it all over his voice. (A big hand for bassist Louis Johnson, please, who also played on "Billie Jean.") By the time he came back with Bad, the wiggle was gone from his bass and his voice. Yet the weirdest thing about Michael Jackson will always be that he gave the world this work of genius.

http://www.rollingstone.c...xe_edition

-I have to say that i'm shocked that they gave it 5 stars since #1)most of the remixes are pretty awful if you ask me and #2- Rolling Stone favors Rock artists and they usually trash MJ like most mainstream media so I was expecting the review to be negative. Suprising.
[Edited 2/8/08 13:57pm]

from Sony BMG:

"Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' 2008" highlights from markets working this track as first single:
SWEDEN gets the "WHITE GLOVE AWARD" this week: single moved up to #3 (LW#7) on national sales chart + #2 on iTunes chart!!!
NEW ZEALAND: single enters chart at #8!
AUSTRALIA: single enters national chart at #20 and is already #4 on iTunes chart!
COLOMBIA: single enters airplay chart at #20
ITALY: single enters chart at #25 - airplay position moves up to #12 (#18)

"The Girl Is Mine 2008" highlights from markets working this track as first single:
MEXICO: single moves to #2 (#7) in airplay chart
KOREA: single enters airplay chart at #4
JAPAN: moves to #14 on airplay chart
NETHERLANDS: single moves up the charts to #17 (#41) this week
SOUTH AFRICA: single moves up to #18 (#68) on airplay chart
BRAZIL: single is at #19 on RJ airplay
GERMANY: single enters chart at #21
FRANCE: single enters chart at #22
POLAND: singles moves up to #28 (#38)
BELGIUM: single moves to #39 (#208) on airplay chart
SWITZERLAND: chart entry at #47
UK: single is at #48 on digital chart

EUROPE: Billboard chart entry at #23 + up to #41 (#46) on overall digital charts

Pictures of the Limited Edition Thriller 25 iPod:

Check out Allmusic.com's new review on THRILLER 25:

The Funk of 25 Years: Thriller Hits The Quarter Century Mark
February 8th, 2008 | 4:40 pm est | Stephen Thomas Erlewine


The quarter-century mark carries weight for Thriller - not necessarily for the anniversary of the album’s release itself, although it offers as good an opportunity as ever to revisit one of the true pop phenomenons of the Twentieth Century, but rather for another anniversary: Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever, the television special where Michael Jackson performed Billie Jean and unleashed the moonwalk, sending Thriller into the stratosphere. For those that hadn’t paid attention to Off the Wall and despite its success there were some, often older listeners that didn’t bother with discos, this performance was the unveiling of a marvelous, mature Jackson, a musician whose growth seemed sudden, swift, staggering. Maturity isn’t a word that was much associated with Jackson over the next 25 years. Not long after Thriller was logging its second year on the charts, well on its way to becoming the biggest album ever (a title it eventually lost to the Eagles Greatest Hits, which is merely a technicality; that was a catalog item, not a supernova that burned up the charts), Jackson methodically turned himself into a man-child, first through his public appearance - he was first seen with ET, then Emmanuel Lewis - and that antiseptic mass appeal crept into his music, so by the 10th Anniversary of Thriller, there was not much adult about his music.


Because of this gradual morphing into something other, many listeners may have not listened to Michael Jackson or Thriller in years, maybe even two decades, so the album was given a much-hyped re-release in February 2008, with Epic/Legacy releasing Thriller: 25complete with bonus tracks, an extra DVD, several different editions with different covers, too. There was so much hype surrounding this reissue that it’s easy to overlook the fact that this is the second pumped-up reissue of Thriller within a decade. Six years earlier, Michael Jackson’s Epic catalog was refurbished to coincide with the release of Invincible, so the album was given a bunch of bonus tracks and a new cover an outtake from the photo shoot that produced the gatefold pic of Jacko cuddling with a baby tiger, playing right into his frozen childhood - and it didn’t garner much attention, possibly because only two of the 12 bonus tracks were interesting (the rest were almost all interview snippets). Those two songs, Someone in the Dark and a demo of Billie Jean, are left behind on that issue and Thriller 25 likewise contains none of the assorted oddities and rarities MJ released during this era. Unlike the ‘01 reissue, this is not targeted to listeners who care about digging deep into the vaults, curious about how the album was made and what was left behind. No, Thriller 25 is for fans who want to take a trip back and for younger listeners that may have never heard the entire album before - and to rope the latter in, this reissue has five new remixes all featuring modern stars. That sounds more impressive on the surface than it actually is, as, for whatever reason, such Michael-mimicking superstars as Justin Timberlake and Chris Brown did not participate, but Kanye West, Akon, Fergie and will.i.am did. By and large these are outright embarrassments - only Akon has the guts to rework the original track, turning Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ into moody piano murk, so he gets credit for vision; it’s not great, but it is better than Fergie parroting the lyrics of Beat It back to a recorded Jackson, and it’s better than will.i.am turning The Girl Is Mine to a hapless dance number - but it’s also true that these artists can’t help but seem small when compared to Michael. Kanye is the closest of these four to having anything close to the musical and cultural impact in ‘08 as Jackson did in ‘82/’83 but even that is a bit of a reach, as Kanye isn’t nearly as close to being as omnipresent as Michael was at his peak.

Of course, those were different times, as one listen to the proper album makes clear. Thriller built upon the disco breakthroughs of Off the Wall but was designed to crossover to all audiences: baby boomers (a duet with Paul McCartney on “The Girl Is Mine’), hard rockers (Eddie Van Halen’s guitar on “Beat It”), electro-funk (the paranoiac “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the stark “Billie Jean”), modern R&B (the bright “Baby Be Mine”), quiet storm “(The Lady in My Life”), soft rockers (”Human Nature’) and kids (the cartoonish title track). That large streak of softness is often overlooked in memories about Thriller; it’s rightly overshadowed by “Billie Jean,” “Beat It” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” and the visual extravaganzas of the video (all documented here on the DVD, with only the overcooked “Thriller” seeming old). But the genius of Thrilleris that Jackson, producer Quincy Jones and writer/arranger Rod Temperton made with LA studio pros (including many members of Toto, Greg Phillinganes and David Foster), so it has an alluring slickness placing it as firmly within pop as it is within R&B. Jackson, Jones and Temperton meticulously assembled these tracks, finding a balance where the tight grooves laid down by the studio musicians and the synth sequencing by Michael and Rod felt precise yet pulsated with a human heart. This polish helped bring Thriller to a mass audience who otherwise might have paid no attention. Once Thriller got their attention, it captivated because Jackson did everything and he made it seem so easy. Once his dazzle wore off, the songs stuck around because there were no weak tunes — even the weakest, the slow-burning closer “The Lady In My Life,” is a fine generic R&B ballad — and the best are eternal.

Even so, classic pop can be overplayed and several of the Thriller signature hits no longer sound fresh — that creaky title track and the clenched posturing of “Beat It” are the worst offenders — but “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” and “Billie Jean” remain startling in their futuristic funk and “Baby Be Mine,” one of two songs not to be a hit single, sounds positively incandescent, perhaps because it isn’t as familiar, but more likely because it is a brilliantly crafted piece from Temperton. And, again, it’s that craft that impresses after all these years - it’s possible to hear past the myth, past the baggage that Jackson accumulated in the years since its release, and hear what he created on this singular sensation. It’s not necessary to purchase the 25th Anniversary reissue to appreciate this for those that appreciate the craft behind the album, the only worthwhile extra is the perfectly fine unreleased ballad For All Time but the set does have one trump card up its sleeve: the DVD has that performance of Billie Jean from Motown 25. It is the one thing on the set that comes close to capturing the excitement that Thriller generated upon its initial release - and since excitement was as necessary to Thriller’s success as the craft, such a jolt is needed for this, although it may not be quite enough of an enticement for millions of fans to purchase this album a second time.

As much as I hate to admit it, Allmusic nailed this review. Seriously, Mike & the folks at Sony need to dig deeper in the vaults, so when THRILLER 40 comes around, when finally have some great oddities to admire, instead of some boring modern remixes.

silverchild said:

I'd probably be 38 when that comes out. That review says to me what I really wanted to say. "It's the same thing from 2001 but with hip-hop acts in it." LOL

Cinnamon234 said:

I'm not very surprised. Thriller is a classic album. They woulda looked crazy, reviewing Thriller with a negative spin.

That being said, the review had a number of errors. The part in "The Girl Is Mine" that they wished was still in the song, is. Michael still sings it.

Another thing is, towards the end Kayne left the "Billie Jean" bass line in. Just gotta wait for it to appear at the end.

That being said, I'm glad it had a positive review.

Timmy84 said:

Right! I mean I don't really have any interest in buying it, even though I'm a huge MJ fan. This is like the 100th time this dang record has been reissued and nothing truly remarkable has been added to the bonus tracklisting. The 2001 special edition of THRILLER was the only reissue that really mattered. THRILLER 25 is just stupid to me.

Timmy84 said:

Right! I mean I don't really have any interest in buying it, even though I'm a huge MJ fan. This is like the 100th time this dang record has been reissued and nothing truly remarkable has been added to the bonus tracklisting. The 2001 special edition of THRILLER was the only reissue that really mattered. THRILLER 25 is just stupid to me.

silverchild said:

I was sooooo pissed when I saw the tracklisting. The remixes are pointless but SonyBMG and Michael think it's the way to go.....NO IT WASN'T!

It couldve been:
Disc 1-The Album
10.Got The Hots
11.Starlight
12.Wanna Be Startin Somethin(original demo recording)
13.The Girl Is Mine(original demo recording)
14.Behind The Mask
15.Carousel
16.Stand Tall
17.P.Y.T.(original demo recording)
18.another unreleased track

Disc 2:
Beat It
Billie Jean
Thriller
Motown 25 performance
Making Michael Jackson's Thriller
Exclusive Documentary- Behind The Magic of Thriller with interviews with MJ, Quincy, Rod, Michael Boddicker, Greg Philliganes, Bruce Swedien
And any unreleased video

silverchild said:

I was sooooo pissed when I saw the tracklisting. The remixes are pointless but SonyBMG and Michael think it's the way to go.....NO IT WASN'T!

It couldve been:
Disc 1-The Album
10.Got The Hots
11.Starlight
12.Wanna Be Startin Somethin(original demo recording)
13.The Girl Is Mine(original demo recording)
14.Behind The Mask
15.Carousel
16.Stand Tall
17.P.Y.T.(original demo recording)
18.another unreleased track

Disc 2:
Beat It
Billie Jean
Thriller
Motown 25 performance
Making Michael Jackson's Thriller
Exclusive Documentary- Behind The Magic of Thriller with interviews with MJ, Quincy, Rod, Michael Boddicker, Greg Philliganes, Bruce Swedien
And any unreleased video

bboy87 said:

I think you could really teach those folks at Sony a thing or two about reissuing a historic album. They really botched this anniversary. And plus who will seriously put down $20 or $30 dollars and buy the same thing. It's not like most people don't have a copy of this in their households already. Until Sony comes out with a proper reissue of this album with worthy oddities and special extras, I'm not interested!

bboy87 said:

It's a shame when 20-something year-olds have more creative ideas about a special edition of a classic album than the artist who created it.

silverchild said:

I don't know why they didn't do it like Marvin's Midnight Love and the Sexual Healing Sessions album. True, it didn't feature Erick Sermon on it but it had interesting alternate cuts, acapella versions, different productions of the same song, a demo and even a taped message from the man himself just before the album came out.

But I guess this proves people's point that Michael "always go for the commercial sales rather than artistic value".

Timmy84 said:

That's exactly how I was thinking!

This could've been a great opportunity to satisfy old and new fans because alot of us like the unreleased material.

And it's too safe. Yeah, it's great that we're getting For All Time and remixes to the Girl Is Mine and PYT demos and Got The Hots(hot damn I want this song! ) It feels like a wasted chance.

And now word is that he's not going to be at the Grammys and they've cancelled the Thriller tribute. I would really like to sit down with Michael, Raymone, Londell, and the reps of SonyBMG and say.....











WHAT THE FUCK ARE YA'LL DOIN?!