Coming five months after Thriller’s release, and a month after the music video for "Billie Jean" broke MTV’s color barrier, fifty million Americans tuned in to watch Jackson perform the song during Motown’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration.
The first thing that jumps out about this astonishing performance is that Jackson is clearly lip-synching to the studio recording. Later artists—from Madonna to Britney Spears and Ashley Simpson—would be chastised for not singing in live or televised performances, yet Jackson remained untouched by such charges. Watching the video, it becomes obvious why no one questioned Jackson’s singing (or lack thereof)—his appearance is so clearly not about the song, but the performance of it.
Jackson appears alone on the stage, without the distraction of a backing band or the troupe of back-up dancers he would embrace post-Thriller. He strikes a sideways pose just before the music begins—the crowd already on its feet, screaming—then begins thrusting his pelvis in time as the drum beat drops.
More like a Broadway actor than a soul singer, Jackson’s approach is largely performative, acting out the song’s lyrical story of dark seduction through his dancing. He stalks the stage, mimicking meeting the titular character on the dance floor, before moving to the side of the stage for the song’s bridge. “People always told me/be careful what you do/don’t go around breaking young girls hearts”, and he raises his eyes and hand to the sky, in a knowing plead, as if begging God to take back the mistakes he has made with Billie.
But more than this, Jackson’s movements embody the music’s rhythms and tension, with whiplash kicks and head-snaps providing a visual illustration of the song’s mid-verse sound effects. His moves go from an almost liquid fluidity to a mechanic stiffness and back again in just a few beats, as he plays to both the smooth flourishes of the guitar and synthesizers and the insistent, metronomic throb of the drum and bass. As the song builds to its chorus, he stomps his feet theatrically, as the lyric builds to its cathartic confession of truth.
He spends much of the song, though, with one gloved hand in his pocket, giving the impression that the performance is almost casual, leaving the audience wanting more—imagine how great he must be when giving it all?
Even the hallmark of the performance—the debut of the Moonwalk—is presented as if an afterthought. Coming in the middle of a distinctly wooden series of poses and moves—for a dancer of Jackson’s grace, anyways—he performs the move for only four beats. He returns to the move during the song’s long fadeout, but again for only four beats. It’s a brilliant stroke of restraint, creating a disorienting effect, as the audience struggles to understand what they’ve just seen, and to question whether they saw anything at all.
It’s worth noting that the song itself is the first of Jackson’s long-line of songs tying sexuality and neurosis. Jackson’s sexiest songs—“Don’t Stop Til’ You Get Enough”, “Wanna Be Starting Something”, “Rock With You”—are all about dancing, while his songs about women and sex are soaked in anxiety and doom. A sexually powerful woman is “Dangerous” (and, later, “Invincible”) and, like “Billie Jean” and “Dirty Diana”, they use sex to control or manipulate the singer. This trend reaches an epic peak in the claustrophobic “In The Closet”, where Jackson only agrees to sleep with his seductress if she promises to never tell anyone.
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