In the early 1980s, Michael Jackson was riding high thanks to his 1979 hit album “Off The Wall,” which had sold 10 million copies and established the former Jackson 5 frontman as a solo star in his own right. But Jackson was unhappy with where his disco-inspired solo material sat in the greater scheme of contemporary pop music.

“I used to see signs of graffiti saying “Disco Sucks” and “Disco is this” and “Disco is that” … it was so popular, that society was turning against it,” said Jackson to minister Jesse Jackson in 2005. As such, the singer decided to widen the sonic palette of his music and worked with producer Quincy Jones to incorporate a range of genres from rock to funk that would see the release survive the anti-disco backlash. And in terms of the quality of the songwriting that Jackson was striving for, his inspiration came from an unexpected source: a 19th-century Russian composer. Jackson told Ebony: 

“it was Tchaikovsky that influenced me the most … like Nutcracker Suite, every song is a killer … people used to do an album where you´d get one good song, and the rest were like B-sides. They´d call them ‘album songs’ … and I would say to myself, ‘Why can’t every one be a hit song? Why can´t every song be so great that people would want to buy it if you could release it as a single?’ So I always tried to strive for that. That was my purpose for the next album … I worked hard for it.”