Everyone is watching but what are they seeing? The dancefloor, an arena of liberation on Off the Wall, becomes a place of peril and exposure. “Every girl claimed that their son was related to one of my brothers.” Either way, in Billie Jean, sex is a trap, especially if you’re famous. “There were a lot of Billie Jeans out there,” he said in 1996. Jackson, however, traced the song’s theme back to the groupies who pursued his older brothers in the Jackson 5. Taraborrelli claims that she sent the star a package containing a gun and instructions for a suicide pact. According to producer Quincy Jones and biographer J Randy Taraborrelli, Jackson himself was stalked by a disturbed young woman who claimed that he had fathered her child. In the aftermath of John Lennon’s murder and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan by a Jodie Foster obsessive, celebrities learned to fear their fans. He wrote Billie Jean in 1981, a sweaty year for the famous. Thriller was the first time that Jackson acknowledged his celebrity in his songs, and perhaps the last time that his celebrity didn’t define his music. While Thriller’s title track is cartoonishly scary, Billie Jean is authentically scared. It is a hunted, haunted song about a paternity claim, which forsakes the lushness of his earlier work for stark, neurotic future-funk. Billie Jean, however, reeks with the paranoia that came to dominate Jackson’s career. From the Jackson 5’s first singles through to Off the Wall’s hymns to the weekend, Jackson had a preternatural gift for making people feel good. Yet it remains a thoroughly bizarre record, spawned in the darker precincts of Jackson’s imagination.īillie Jean was his Rubicon. On one level that makes sense: it’s Jackson’s biggest-selling solo single, and one of the biggest hits by anyone ever. In radio stations, gyms, cafes and wedding dancefloors (at least when they were open) certain of his songs have been deemed too good to lose, and Billie Jean tops the list. Whatever personal arrangement you may have come to regarding the life and music of Michael Jackson, the culture at large has made its decision.