>
>
>Too many to name....
>
>You don't sell nearly 10 million copies of an Off The Wall and
>just be deemed as a successful black act....

sure. MJ was a cross-over act. like Stevie Wonder and many others before him.

What MJ did with
>Off The Wall was almost unseen for music acts in any genre of
>music beyond say Stevie Wonder...And MJ sold more than
>Stevie....

yeah, OTW outsold SITKOL to become the best selling R&B album of all time at the time. acts like Earth Wind & Fire had also crossed-over, of course. as had Donna Summer. and let's not forget Diana Ross. and Marvin Gaye. hell, Motown had created a roster of acts in the 60s largely designed to cross-over and many of them did successfully. OTW was released in the wake of all of that.

>Most black folks already viewed MJ as an American legend after
>Off The Wall...They were the same folks who watched the
>Jackson 5 cartoon...Now they were at the discos jamming to the
>hottest album on the planet....

'hottest album on the planet'...

was it?

i dunno about that.

it was a Disco record that was Pop too w/some R&B that was released at the tail end of the Disco craze. i've never heard anyone call it the hottest album on the planet at that time.

a look at the charts leads me to believe Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' was probably the hottest album on the planet back then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_200_number-one_albums_of_1979

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_200_number-one_albums_of_1980

...OTW didn't even top the Pop album chart. no way it was the hottest album on the planet.

was it the hottest R&B album on the planet? it may have been. though Donna Summers' 'Bad Girls' actually topped the Pop album chart. i dunno.

>What Thriller did was let Mars and the moon in on the MJ
>action....

i don't think so. i don't think OTW was the juggernaut you're trying to make it out to be. it was a big selling record, sure. very popular. about as popular as records before it like SITKOL and probably Gratitude. i've talked to older relatives about OTW and none of them talk about it the way you are now. i've read articles so i know the record sold more than any R&B album before it but none say it was received like it was the biggest Black record ever heard of in the history of ever or that it was received like Thriller w/in the Black community. hell, my mom who was a huge MJ fan didn't even own a copy of OTW. she stopped w/Destiny.

so, i don't think so.