Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, multiple Grammy winner, and controversy magnet Michael Jackson recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday last Friday (8/29) by just eating cake and watching cartoons with his three kids.  As freaky as I may think that he is, I can’t deny his talent as a singer or a dancer.  In honor of his birthday, I thought I would give you his Billboard chart history.  I’m going to concentrate only on his #1 songs from his ten albums, which are significant.

His first solo album, 1971’s Got to be There, peaked at #14 on the Top 200 Albums chart and didn’t have any #1 singles on it.  1972’s Ben peaked at #5 and contained the title track as the only #1.  1973’s Music and Me (#92) and 1975’s Forever, Michael (#101), didn’t have any #1’s on them.  1979’s Off the Wall went 7x Platinum, peaked at #3, and contained the #1 singles “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and ”Rock with You.”  1982’s Thriller went 27x Platinum (the highest selling album of all time behind only The Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971–1975), peaked at #1 (for 37 weeks), and contained the #1 singles “Billie Jean” and ”Beat It.”  In 1984, he had his sixth #1 song with “Say Say Say,” a duet between Jackson and Paul McCartney off of McCartney’s 1983 album Pipes of Peace.  1987’s Bad went 8x Platinum, peaked at #1 (for 6 weeks), and contained five #1 singles (the most #1 singles ever released on a single album in history): “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” “Bad,” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “Man in the Mirror,” and “Dirty Diana.”  1991’s Dangerous went 7x Platinum, peaked at #1 (for four weeks), and contained the #1 single “Black or White.”  1995’s HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I was a half studio album, half compilation album.  It went 7x Platinum, peaked at #1 (for two weeks), and contained the #1 single “You are Not Alone.”  His tenth (and final…so far) album, 2001’s Invincible, went 2x Platinum and peaked at #1 (for one week), but it didn’t have any #1 singles on it.

Happy Birthday Michael!  If the next fifty years are as memorable as the first fifty, we may be all treated to tabloid heaven!

Here is a featurette about Jackson turning 50:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 5:27 pm and is filed under The Chart Guy, Michael Jackson, Billboard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.