I've taken a lot more interest in Michael Jackson's musical videos than either his music or dancing. He made made the look of pop as important as the sound. The Jackson-Landis Thriller (1983) collaboration combined a hit song with dance choreography, all within the framework of a combined werewolf and zombie horror story. The makeup effects of Rick Baker, and the “rap” of Vincent Price were added to the mix and the result became a pop culture event. Jackson has left a rich music video legacy.

But he was known as a song and dance man, and for the quality of his pop songs and his moonwalk dancing, before his work became saccharine and kitsch and became a well-known exhibit in the celebrity zoo. "Billie Jean" is a well-crafted pop song from the classic Thriller album in 1982. It was the first video by a black artist to be aired on MTV:

His music is seen as a significant event in pop music in the 1980s. Jackson, however, was never just about the good pop music or disco and r&b or being a fallen, narcissistic Peter Pan idol. He was also "King of Pop" (self-proclaimed) because of his street dancing.

Jackson's performance of "Billie Jean" during the May 1983 NBC broadcast of the Motown 25 special:

This is about the sexual body that trangresses the stereotypes of masculinity. Steven Schapiro at The Pinocchio Theory says:

In a certain sense, Michael Jackson’s diffuse expression of sexuality, which so many people have found disturbing, because it doesn’t fit into any normative paradigm, is the “line of flight” along which he continued to singularize himself, to a point beyond which universalization was no longer possible. It has a sort of negative relation to the deployments of sexuality in American popular culture today, where an evident explicitness and overtness of expression are purchased at the price of an increasingly narrow and normative range within which such expression is permissible, or even thinkable. You can be as raunchy as you want to be, as long as you remain even closer to the pre-established stereotypes of masculinity and femininity than was required in the pre-”sexual liberation” times of the 1950s. Michael Jackson’s refusal, or inability, to give more than rote lip service to this requirement, is the aspect of his persona, or expression, that is least understood today, and that desperately needs to be more fully explored.