Thriller

Summer. 1984.

The music video for Michael Jackson's Thriller was released in December of 1983.

It played on MTV, which we didn't have.

It played on Friday Night Videos, but I always seemed to miss it. (This was a few years before we would own a VCR.)

The first time I remember seeing "Thriller" was at a roller skating rink, in that magical summer of 1984.

There was a girl there who I'll refer to as "V". I was eight and a half. She was closer to nine. I didn't have the faculty of expression that I do now... but I wanted to bang the living snot out of her...

For the most part, you could just skate around the rink in circles while they projected music videos on this massive screen. But every so often, they would announce,

"This is a couples-only skate!"

... and for a few minutes, you could only skate on the rink if you were holding the hand of a partner of the opposite sex. (Boys+Girls only, ya little fackin' homos!)

At one of these prompts, V clomped her way toward me with an outstretched hand.

"Come on, Malice, let's skate!"

She was a friend of the family—the daughter of my mom's boss—so there was this extra level of futility at the prospect of anything greater developing. But the "couples skate" gave me an excuse to hold her hand, which was practically sexual intercourse for an 8-year-old boy in 1984.

I wasn't that great of a skater on my own, and I was even more unstable trying to hold hands with her while we tried to skate together... but there was even excitement in the sheer awkwardness of it. Sixteen wheels clomping along the waxed floorboards. The sky was filled with sunbursts. There was the possibility of amazing things.

And then they projected that video onto the screen... and all of us stopped skating and grabbed onto some handrails to watch...

This is another one of those things that will always be difficult to explain to younger generations. It looks so cheesy in hindsight—and there have been so many remarkable and visually innovative music videos since then... but there had been NOTHING like this before. No matter what you may think of the trajectory of their later-year careers, John Landis and Michael Jackson raised the bar for what you could do in a music video.

As an 8-year-old kid who wasn't accustomed to seeing horror movies, I found the music video genuinely scary and simultaneously... well, thrilling! Funny and cool and frightening. Holding onto the handrails next to this girl I had this secret crush on. The world just seemed so vast and goddamn optimistic...