Halloween landed on a Saturday this year, and Mary J. Blige had a show to play. The Queen of Hip-Hop Soul is in the middle of her first Las Vegas residency, “My Life, My Story,” at Dolby Live at Park MGM. It opened this spring, and demand has been strong enough that she’s added more dates since. Fans who bought tickets for October 31 expected her hits. They got a surprise.
Partway through the night, Mary came out in a red leather jacket made in the spirit of the one Michael Jackson wore in his “Thriller” video. A troupe of dancers lined up with her and went into the moves from that video, the stiff-armed zombie routine people still try at parties. The song was “Thriller,” and Mary sang it herself.
Clips were all over social media by the next morning. One music blog called it “A Queen saluting the King.”
For Mary, the song goes back a long way. She was 11 years old when the “Thriller” album came out in November 1982, a kid growing up in Yonkers, just north of New York City. The video, with the red jacket and the dancing zombies, hit TV a year later and became one of the most famous music videos ever made.
A fan in the crowd caught the performance on a phone, so the picture isn’t studio quality. You can still see the jacket, the dancers and the “Thriller” moves.
Mary J. Blige’s “Thriller” tribute in Las Vegas
That jacket wasn’t a random costume pick. Mary has called herself a lifelong Michael Jackson fan, and she has a story most fans would trade a lot for.
She met him.
In a short interview for W magazine in 2015, Mary looked back on the time she met Michael in person, and the place was the Soul Train Awards. For anyone who didn’t grow up with it, “Soul Train” was the TV dance show that brought Black music into living rooms across America for more than 30 years. Its awards night put the newest names in R&B and hip-hop in the same room as the legends they’d grown up on.
That’s how the girl from Yonkers who was 11 when “Thriller” came out got to meet Michael face to face. Mary tells it herself, in her own words, in the W clip below.
Mary J. Blige talks about meeting Michael Jackson
The clip is short, so it’s an easy one to watch to the end. There’s no stage and no dancers this time, just Mary in a quiet studio talking about her childhood idol.
Her residency at Park MGM runs into 2027, with the final show set for February 20. Nobody has said whether “Thriller” will stay in the set now that Halloween is over, so the fans who were there on October 31 may have seen it the only time it happens.