"Beat It" at 40: A History of the Style Behind the Song

By the time “Beat It” was officially released as a single, Thriller was already well on its way to achieving astounding success as the album was becoming a worldwide phenomenon alongside the success of its previous two singles “The Girl Is Mine,” and “Billie Jean.” With the help of an epic guitar solo from Eddie Van Halen, “Beat It” was released as the record’s third single on February 14th, 1983, peaking at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 where it stayed for three weeks.

Later on that same year, Billboard ranked “Beat It” as the No. 5 song for 1983, and the track has since gone on to be certified 8x platinum with over 11 million copies sold, making it one of the best-selling singles of all time. Furthermore, “Beat It” earned two Grammy Awards the following year Record of the Year and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance.

Now here’s where we get into the style part of this article. Fashion wise, “Beat It” is known for two iconic pieces—the red jacket and the piano t-shirt. Jackson can be seen at the beginning of the video wearing the piano keys t-shirt as he’s lying in the bed, and the cool thing is that you can find various replications of this shirt on places such as 80sTees and even Amazon. As for the red zippered jacket with gold accents, that was designed by Marc Laurent for the video. Similar to the piano keys shirt, you can also find various replications of the jacket on places like Amazon. It should also be noted that underneath the jacket, Jackson wore a graphic tee with the word Amour written on it.