Time & Perspective Quote by Martin Bashir

There is a kind of tabloid candor in the way Bashir frames history as a bank statement. “Still” does most of the heavy lifting: it’s not just that Thriller was massive, it’s that its massiveness refuses to end. The phrasing turns cultural legacy into a perpetually compounding asset, the pop equivalent of interest. And “biggest album of all time” lands less like awe than like a fact deployed for leverage.

Bashir’s intent reads pragmatic, even prosecutorial. He’s not admiring the music; he’s foregrounding the machinery around it: catalog value, royalty flows, the unglamorous math that survives scandal, reinvention, and even changing taste. “Returning huge royalty cheques” is pointedly transactional language, almost cheeky in its bluntness, and it implicitly answers a question that often hovers over celebrity downfall narratives: how does the empire keep standing? Money keeps arriving.

In context, this is the voice of a journalist trained to treat fame as both spectacle and evidence. Bashir’s broader reputation for high-stakes, controversy-tinged interviews sharpens the subtext: the remark can be read as a reminder that Michael Jackson’s story is never only about art or persona, but about an industrial-scale asset that institutions have incentives to protect, monetize, and mythologize.

It works because it punctures reverence without needing to insult. The sentence reduces a sacred pop monument to something that “still” pays out, revealing how our culture measures immortality: not just by memory, but by revenue.