Before Michael Jackson, a music video was a simple thing. A singer stood in front of a camera, sang the song, and the camera recorded it. Sometimes there was a stage. Sometimes there were lights. That was enough, because the video was only an advertisement for the record. Then Jackson came along, and within two years the music video became something else entirely: a short film, a dance spectacle, a cultural event that people talked about the way they talked about movies. He did not invent the music video. He invented what it could be.
The revolution began, quietly, with Billie Jean. The video, made in 1983, is built around a simple, magical idea: as Jackson walks down a dark street, the sidewalk tiles light up beneath his feet. He dances through a world that responds to him, and the camera follows him like a character in a film rather than a singer on a stage. It was stylish, cinematic, and unlike anything most viewers had seen in a three-minute pop video. And it arrived at exactly the right moment. The music video channel MTV had launched in August 1981, and it was quickly becoming the most powerful force in pop music. But its early playlists featured very few Black artists. The Billie Jean video became one of the first videos by a Black artist to receive heavy rotation on the channel, and that mattered enormously. It meant Jackson was not just reaching his existing fans. He was reaching every teenager with a cable subscription in America, and through them, the world.
Beat It went further. The song itself was already a collision of worlds: a pop vocal, a rock arrangement, and a guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen, one of the great rock guitarists of the era. The video matched that collision with a story. Two gangs face each other in a warehouse, knives drawn, and Jackson dances between them, first as a peacemaker and then as the leader of a dance that dissolves the fight. The choreography is sharp, aggressive, and athletic, nothing like the smooth party dancing of most pop videos. The message was clear: dance could be drama. It could carry a story, resolve a conflict, and hold an audience the way a film scene does. Teenagers did not just watch the Beat It video. They learned the dance, argued about it, and re-enacted it in schoolyards. The video became a shared language.
But it was Thriller that changed everything. Released in 1983 as a short film directed by the film director John Landis, it ran to about fourteen minutes, an unheard-of length for a music video. It had a plot, dialogue, a horror-movie setting, and a cast of dancing zombies. It had a costume — the red leather jacket — that became one of the most famous outfits in pop history. And it had choreography on a scale no one had attempted in a pop video before: dozens of dancers moving in perfect, eerie unison, led by Jackson with a precision that still looks superhuman. When it premiered, it was treated not as a promotional clip but as an event. Television networks cleared time for it. Newspapers reviewed it. People gathered to watch it together, the way they gathered for a film opening.
What made Thriller work was not just its budget or its length. It was Jackson’s understanding that a music video could be a complete work of art, not a supplement to a song. The song and the film belong together, but the film adds something the song alone cannot: a world, a mood, a story you can see. The zombies are funny and frightening at the same time, which is exactly the tone of the song. The dance sequence turns horror into celebration, which is exactly what the best pop music does. And Jackson himself is not just singing. He is acting, dancing, and commanding the screen like a movie star. That was new. Pop singers had been on camera before, but they had rarely tried to carry a narrative the way Jackson did here.
The effect on the industry was immediate and permanent. After Thriller, every major pop star wanted a video that was more than a performance. Directors who had worked in film began working in music video. Budgets grew. Choreography became a central part of pop stardom, not an afterthought. The music video stopped being an advertisement and became an art form in its own right, with its own awards, its own stars, and its own language. And MTV, the channel that had given Jackson his platform, became the centre of youth culture for the rest of the decade, largely on the strength of what he had shown it could do.
There is a deeper reason Jackson’s videos lasted, and it has to do with dance. Jackson was not a singer who danced. He was a dancer who sang, and his videos were built around movement in a way that no one else’s were. The moonwalk, the zombie dance, the gang choreography of Beat It: these were not decorations. They were the point. They gave audiences something to imitate, something to practise, something to share. Long before social media, Jackson’s dances spread the way viral things spread now: person to person, playground to playground, living room to living room. The videos were the delivery system, but the dance was the message. And because dance needs no translation, the videos travelled across languages and borders in a way that lyrics never could.
It is also worth noting what Jackson’s videos did for representation. In the early 1980s, Black artists still had to fight for space on mainstream television. Jackson’s success on MTV did not end that fight, but it changed its terms. Once a Black artist had made the most famous videos in the world, the argument that Black pop did not belong on the channel collapsed. The door that Billie Jean opened stayed open, and a generation of Black stars walked through it. That is a legacy that goes beyond any single video, and it is part of why Jackson’s video revolution is remembered as a cultural turning point, not just a career milestone.
Today, the music video looks very different. It lives on phones, not on television channels, and it competes with a thousand other forms of attention. But its grammar — the idea that a song deserves a visual world, that dance can tell a story, that a video can be an event — was written by Michael Jackson in 1983. Every ambitious pop video since, from the biggest blockbusters to the smallest independent clips, works in the shadow of what he did. He showed the world that three minutes of music could contain a film, and the medium has never gone back to being just a filmed performance.
So here is the question. The Thriller video is now more than forty years old, and people still watch it, still learn the dance, still dress as zombies for Halloween. Which music video since then do you think has come closest to that kind of shared, everybody-knows-it moment? Or was Thriller the last video that the whole world watched together, before audiences split into a thousand separate streams? Tell us your pick — and whether you learned the zombie dance yourself.
About the author: Tommy Hayes writes about the songs that defined America in the 1970s and 1980s. He grew up with a radio always on — in the kitchen, in the car, in a bedroom with posters on the wall — and he writes from that memory: what these songs meant then, and why they still matter now.