Michael Jackson "Thriller" [1982]

Years after we're all long gone, books will tell of the 1980s and the highest-selling album of all-time, Michael Jackson's "Thriller." And history will not be kind: somehow we were all conned into listening to plastic beats from a plastic-voiced, plastic-faced plastic man, stuffing our faces with cheap, immature notions about love and life that should have come with a warning label: May Cause Instant Diabetes. While the Reagan administration got busy dismantling America and handing over the good pieces to their friends, the rest of us were suckered into gawking at MJ doing the moonwalk. Listen closely and you'll hear the The Gloved One's complicitness in the scheme amongst all the frosting: a mean-spirited undercurrent of denying paternity charges and the title track's fun-house horrors hiding in plain sight. "You're a vegetable," he told us. And we just kept on dancing.