Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star of 1983: Michael Jackson
(In 2018, the Billboard staff released a list project of its choices for the Greatest Pop Star of every year, going back to 1981. Read our entry below on why Michael Jackson was our Greatest Pop Star of 1983 — with our ’83 Honorable Mention runner-ups, Rookie of the Year and Comeback of the Year pop stars at the bottom — and find the rest of our picks for every year up to present day here.)
Simply put: There’s pop stardom, and then there’s 1983 Michael Jackson. The King of Pop’s greatest year is the yardstick against which all other years of musical mainstream supremacy will forever be measured, unprecedented in its LP sales, hit singles, iconic music videos and generally incalculable cultural impact. No solo pop star since Elvis Presley had been so ubiquitous before, and none — with one possible exception in 2023 — has been since.
But what’s forgotten to time 37 years later is that Michael Jackson didn’t exactly start the year on top. In fact, the buzz preceding Thriller, released in late November 1982, was largely anxious, thanks to the set’s questionable choice of lead single: “The Girl Is Mine,” a soft-rock duet with Paul McCartney that reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 but generally left fans and critics underwhelmed. The disco sound that had propelled Jackson to stardom on 1979’s Off the Wall had faded from the mainstream, and as 1982 turned to 1983, it was not Thriller that was unmoveable from the top of the Billboard 200 — the set debuted at No. 11 that December — but Australian new wave band Men at Work’s Business as Usual, an improbable 15-week No. 1.
However, in January of 1983, a second Thriller single would arrive to establish Jackson as a defining artist of the ‘80s: “Billie Jean.” Rooted in disco’s pulse but given a spooky synth-pop sheen by producer Quincy Jones and a vocal of unrecognizable paranoia and urgency from Jackson, the song raced to No. 1 on the Hot 100 that March. Just two frames after that song’s seven-week reign ended, it was succeeded by “Beat It,” a hard-rocking crossover cut that featured a searing guitar solo from preeminent early-’80s shredder Eddie Van Halen. By year’s end, MJ had notched three more spellbinding Hot 100 top 10s off the all-killer Thriller (“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” No. 5, “Human Nature,” No. 7 and “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing),” No. 10), on his way to scoring seven total top 10 hits off Thriller — three more than the previous record for a single LP, a mark since tied but not yet bested.
Meanwhile, following the breakthrough of “Billie Jean,” Thriller continued to rise on the Billboard 200, hitting No. 1 on the chart dated Feb. 26. And there it would stay for a record 37 non-consecutive weeks, ruling well into 1984, and quickly becoming the best-selling studio album of all time. The magic of Thriller changed the standards for the entire music industry: Where albums used to spin off a maximum of three or four singles over the course of an eight-month promo cycle, LPs could now produce as many as six or seven hits and exist at the mainstream’s center for as long as two years — as blockbusters by Bruce Springsteen, Def Leppard and Michael’s sister Janet would confirm later that decade.
But it wasn’t even on the charts that Jackson’s impact was most deeply felt in 1983. MTV had debuted two years earlier as a haven for aging rock stars and ascendant new wave breakouts, but in MJ, the channel found the star to take its burgeoning platform to the next level. “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” were both paired with captivating and instantly unforgettable visuals, based on Jackson’s singular stage presence, dancing ability and on-camera charisma, which were replayed relentlessly. Then, in December came “Thriller,” the larger-than-life 13-minute John Landis mini-movie shot for the album’s Halloween-ish title track, whose premiere instantly became the biggest event in MTV history. The short’s game-changing popularity cemented both “Thriller” and the music video in general as crucial elements of 20th century pop culture.
All these stats and superlatives — greatest, biggest, longest — about MJ’s music and videos barely scratch the surface of just how inextricable he was to American life in 1983. In one TV appearance alone, on the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever special that May, Jackson’s performance of “Billie Jean” rocked the worlds of fashion and dance, thanks to his soon-to-be-signature white glove and jaw-dropping moonwalk maneuver. His multi-million-dollar promotional deal with Pepsi, signed that December, set the bar for celebrity endorsements. And by becoming too big for anyone to ignore, Jackson broke down color lines all across the industry — particularly at MTV, which previously focused solely on rock-based videos from white artists.
Historic and peerless as Michael Jackson’s 1983 was, it’s impossible to deny in 2020 that its memory has been tainted by the revelations and allegations that have come out about the artist’s alleged abusive, scarring relationships with several of the millions of children he enraptured with his blinding star power. They reveal the potentially horrific downside of the unanimous acclaim he received, and arguably cast both the private-life defensiveness of “Billie Jean” and the sympathetic dewiness of “Human Nature” in an insidious light. But it’s because of 1983, when he set the all-time gold standard for pop stardom, that we can never excise Jackson from our memory entirely: Merely by using the term “pop star,” we’re evoking peak MJ, whether we mean to or not.
Honorable Mention: The Police (Synchronicity, “Every Breath You Take,” “King of Pain”), Lionel Richie (Can’t Slow Down, “All Night Long (All Night),” “You Are”), Billy Joel (An Innocent Man, “Tell Her About It,” “Uptown Girl”)
Rookie of the Year: Duran Duran
Michael Jackson might’ve been the Elvis of early MTV, but Duran Duran were its Beatles. The Fab Five of British heartthrobs expanded the proto-music video energy of A Hard Day’s Night into myriad globe-trotting mini-dramas, making their makeup-streaked visages unavoidable in the channel’s early years. They had the songs, too — as sophomore LP Rio proved, spinning off two of the biggest hits of ‘83 in the lusty synth-rock of “Hungry Like the Wolf” and the intriguingly incomprehensible glam-funk of the title track. By the end of the year, they were high enough on their own supply to title their follow-up album Seven and the Ragged Tiger and its lead single “Union of the Snake”; both still went top 10.
Comeback of the Year: David Bowie
While David Bowie had already been a genre- and gender-bending rock icon for well over a decade, his true pop star moment in the States didn’t come until 1983, with the release of Let’s Dance. Despite norming out his once-ostentatious image — writer Chuck Klosterman once described ‘83 Bowie as “dressing like a waiter from the Olive Garden” — his cinematic clips for top 20 hits “Modern Love,” “China Girl,” and the set’s Hot 100-topping title track made him a fixture of the early-MTV era that his imaginative ‘70s visuals had helped make possible. “It’s an unbelievably wonderful way to live,” Bowie said of his newly lush, Platinum-certified lifestyle in an ‘83 Rolling Stone cover story. “The hardest thing is not to feel guilty about it.”
(Read on to our Greatest Pop Star of 1984 here, or head back to the full list here.)
