Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” turns 30 this year. It is still the biggest-selling album ever, worldwide, by a lot. As is the case with most biggest-evers, actual or perceived (“I Love Lucy,” say, or “Star Wars”), it’s hard to imagine a world in which “Thriller” didn’t exist. And who would want to remember the pre-“Thriller” days anyway, at least the stretch of months right before it was released, which were nasty ones for the music business? To paraphrase Don McLean’s “American Pie,” the year that “Thriller” came out, 1982, was the year the music almost died.

Since the beginning of time (1954, or when Elvis came along), there had never been a bleaker year for pop than 1982. Disco had been gone for a couple of years, but nothing — not punk, not new wave, not Journey — had replaced it as the music industry’s cash cow. Top 40 radio, the usual confluence of musical rivers, where Motown met Zeppelin, was in decline. MTV was ascendant, but black artists were routinely shut out there. There was no one place where an open-eared music fan could find Luther Vandross and the Clash and Grandmaster Flash and Tom Petty. Perhaps the clearest indication of the parched pop-music field, other than the fact that Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” was the summer’s biggest song, was that there were only 16 No. 1 singles that year (the average in the ’70s was more than 25). As Time magazine reported, the music industry was floundering among “the ruins of punk and the chic regions of synthesizer pop”; it needed a messiah....
And maybe “Thriller” wasn’t even the best album of 1982. A good number of critics would probably tell you that Prince’s “1999,” a double album released a few weeks before “Thriller,” was much more ambitious and that its pioneering electro-sex-funk was what kept the music business churning through the mid- and late ’80s. A similar dynamic existed between Carole King’s “Tapestry” and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” bellwethers of the singer-songwriter era that were released within a few months of each other in 1971....