The LAT in honor of the 25th anniversary of the release of “Thriller” has both an appreciation of the album’s individual tracks by a variety of folks and 25 fun sidebar facts as well. From the former, it’s hard to argue with this graf, by Randy Lewis, about the album’s leadoff track and second-best song:

“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”: Hot as Jackson was after the quantum leap that 1979’s “Off the Wall” brought his solo career, few expected him to match, much less dramatically surpass, those heights so quickly. But “Thriller’s” leadoff track immediately established the new album as another giant step forward. It connected to “Off the Wall” with an irresistible Afro-Caribbean funk dance-floor pulse and peppery horn accents akin to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” then rocketed to new heights with even more sinewy bass and guitar lines propelling his impossibly nimble vocals. If “Off the Wall” demonstrated that Jackson was a kid no more, “Somethin’ ” signaled the full maturity of his musical acumen. All the more impressive for a song built on just two chords.

And this, from Richard Cromelin, on the album’s indelible achievment:

“Billie Jean”: Twenty-five years later, “Thriller’s” central chamber has lost none of its fevered mystery. This is where the album’s material plane gives way to a haunted interior, excavated by that remorseless bass line and shaped by a taut interplay of instruments — the arrangement is ingenious, so lean and spare that it’s hard to accept that there are three synthesizers at work. Jackson finds a new voice here, a victim’s voice that shudders in the shadows of this remarkable sonic space, lashing at his own naiveté and at the false accusers who were just starting to gather at his door.

The fun facts aren’t so much but are worth checking out. One small mistake: Jackson didn’t “moonwalk” in the “Billie Jean” video; that came a few months later, at the “Motown 25″ TV show. And the most salient fact about the song is that Jackson wrote, arranged and produced the track almost singlehandedly, most significantly the riveting bassline and the extended intro; Quincy Jones, the producer of record, wasn’t that enamored of it but refused to share production credit. (My source for this is Randy Taraborrelli’s “Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness.”) After the first single from “Thriller” was revealed to be the insipid “The Girl Is Mine,” “Billie Jean” was in the wings ready to make the argument for Jackson’s claim to pop greatness. His “Motown 25″ appearance–with choreography he put together the evening before it was taped–closed it.

As for the song’s thematics, Cromelin doesn’t say it, but that victim’s voice is not an attractive one. “Billie Jean” the song and video sit as an extraordinary fulcrum for Jackson’s career; besides being his artistic and commercial watershed, their over- and undertones echo in reality and unreality, internally and externally … even hetero- and homosexually. There was an actual “Billie Jean,” a somewhat deranged fan who, according to Taraborrelli, did accuse him (unjustly) of fathering her son but who was later committed. That said, Jackson grew up from a very early age on tour with his fathers and brothers, and saw a lot of the sexual activity, and its fallout, that is common on the road.

The video, which shows Jackson being pursued by what is apparently a process server and the press, is a paranoid’s tale only on its shallowest and most uninteresting level; it is most interesting in its prospective imaginings. Since Jackson’s heterosexual life is almost entirely undocumented and his homosexual tendencies at this point almost overdocumented, “Billie Jean” is also an example of one of Jackson’s most successful feints. (Another would be “Leave Me Alone,” recorded at the height of his press manipulations.) And finally, as events over the next decade would show, the press would indeed ultimately be literally trying to get pictures of Michael Jackson in bed, but for reasons much less fantastical than those in the storyline for “Billie Jean.” Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you don’t belong in jail.