Photo by Patrick Demarchelier
You live by the pop machine, you die by the pop machine. The sleek commodity known as Janet Damita Jo Jackson DeBarge Elizondo Jackson has done her share of living and dying lately, often simultaneously. She’s been all over editorial pages and gossip columns; her Super Bowl controversy launched two phrases into popular vernacular (wardrobe malfunction; Nipplegate), and yet her latest album, Damita Jo, is widely perceived as a commercial flop and critical disappointment (even though its first-week sales were far stronger than those of recent releases by Madonna, Britney, Whitney or J-Lo). Radio has been lukewarm at best, and the hypocrites at MTV have all but banished her from their airwaves. For someone so long plugged into the machine, Jackson has committed one critical error after another — the Super Bowl fiasco, the staggeringly bad choice for a first single, a lackluster video for that first single.
That’s not to say that the disc is an unfairly maligned masterpiece. It’s loaded with far too much dross: inane interludes where Janet burbles like a ditz, musing on island vacations, the origins of her middle name and whatever fluff pops into her head; the limp sex odes “Moist” and “Warmth,” which sound like they were penned and sung by some narcotized junior high school ho; an obsession with sex that started three albums ago and whose dividends are only rarely even semi-interesting. It doesn’t help that neither the “official” lead single, “I Want You,” nor the “leaked” single, “Just a Little While,” are anything other than album filler.
But wait. Damita Jo is still better than most reviews and word-of-mouth would have you believe. Thank the producers. The whole thing is very much a retro affair, from the girl-group arrangement of “I Want You” to the infectious doo-doo-doo-doo-doo that opens the album’s best track, “Like You Don’t Love Me,” an attitude-laden, TLC-ish demand for a good, vigorous fuck (“You need to make love to me/like you don’t love me”) to the Vanity 6 homage in “Strawberry Bounce.” And “R&B Junkie,” the CD’s second-best track and likely candidate for club hit of the summer, has offended many detractors with its boulder-size sample from Evelyn King’s “I’m in Love,” but the gambit works in the context of a song that’s an ode to old-school soul music and the dances those sounds inspired. Meanwhile, producer Kanye West continues his midtempo winning streak with “My Baby,” while the lilting, aptly named “Island Life” is pure seduction set to a groove. Had some careful pruning taken place before the album’s release, the CD could have been at least a minor-chord “F-you” victory to the wolves nipping at Janet’s tits.
Janet Jackson is simultaneously a minor talent and the unheralded mother-architect, for better or worse, of the current pop world. And though she’d be loath to admit it, her artistic baby-daddy is Paula Abdul, whose Control-era choreography has been the template for not only most of Miss Jackson’s moves over the past 15 years but for most pop choreography, period. (Producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis are the nannies who do all the unglamorous, necessary grunt work.)
While it’s a conditioned reflex for mainstream critics to heap praise upon Madonna as the mold from which MTV’s pop brigade is stamped, the truth is a bit more complicated. What Madonna’s really handed down has been a bottle of peroxide, a palpable contempt for her audience and a refresher course on the ways in which white skin earns props for its bearers way out of proportion to anything they actually do. Throw in some marketing-savvy DNA and you pretty much have her artistic legacy summed up. Case in point: The pathetic, creepy, faux-lesbian kiss last year between Madonna and Britney was largely interpreted as a passing of the diva torch. But Britney’s career, like those of her countless clones, rather than being a youthful updating of Madonna’s blueprint, is actually the Clorox remix of Janet’s. Brit’s every head snap, pelvic thrust and shoulder jerk was first executed by Miss Jackson, with many of her videos being almost frame-for-frame replications of past Janet clips. Even the most successful of the boy-band wave — ’N Sync, Backstreet Boys — owe much of their performing style to Janet and her various choreographers. (Tellingly, when Justin Timberlake was in ’N Sync, he and his group bit Janet’s style hard; as a solo artist, he lifts shamelessly from her brother.)
One of the most interesting aspects of the fallout from Janet’s controversial Super Bowl performance has been her subsequent psychological profile as crafted by a reactionary infotainment machine. Her every media appearance is prefaced with the news that her host has instituted a five-second delay, as though her titty baring weren’t an aberration for her, but the norm. Everything from the increased heat placed on Howard Stern to edited nude scenes on E.R. to the recently canceled Victoria’s Secret television special has been blamed on her: She’s been turned from the tapioca dominatrix no one could possibly take seriously into the stereotypical sex-mad Negress who’ll corrupt all she touches — or might touch. (One of the few critics to point out the race aspect of the media reaction to Jackson has been the Village Voice’s Richard Goldstein, who, in a recent essay commenting on the varying ways that Courtney Love and Janet have been treated in the press, opined, “Thank God, for Courtney’s sake, that she’s white.”)
