Fear of a Black Titty

Pundits, who know they should be furious at something or someone but are too cowardly to take aim at the proper targets, have lumped endless scorn on Jackson for unleashing a puritanical FCC on us all. Aiming their vitriol at the agency itself would mean not only outlining the right-wing consolidation of media power in the hands of a privileged few, but also noting the Christian Taliban mentality of those who hold the purse strings and control the airwaves. In short, it would mean biting the conservative hand that signs their paychecks.

Meanwhile, Jackson’s Super Bowl accomplice, young master Timberlake, has proven himself to be the bitch-made-pop-star you always knew he was. As though aiming to get his own chapter in Greg Tate’s book Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture, Timberlake shed all wigger affectations the moment he felt the heat of real controversy. He dropped the hip-hop gear, grabbed a suit and tie, and literally held his mommy’s hand as he strolled into this year’s Grammy Awards, where he all but burst into tears as he apologetically explained onstage how he’d been bamboozled into taking part in Janet’s shameful shenanigans. Poor thing.

 

The real problem for Janet is that, in total, Damita Jo underscores her as the ultimate modern American sex symbol in ways she didn’t intend. As she cruises toward 40, she has to figure out what it means not only to compete with her own cultural spawn on a playing field whose terms are viciously youth-obsessed, but also what it means to be a mature woman who is sexually vibrant, sexually curious and willing to speak with candor about her desires and experiences. For Jackson, that simply translates into a cataloging of sexual positions and X-rated activities. With her breathy, multitracked voice as her calling card and primary weapon, and slight-to-say-the-least lyrics as the bullets, she comes off more as a sexually precocious teenybopper than a woman of the world.

It’s not just that there’s no depth to her boudoir insights and philosophical musings, or that the bulk of her lyrics manage the unimpressive feat of being explicit and banal, but that she’s morphing into an aging porn starlet of the most tragic type — chasing relevance with ever bigger hair, ever bigger boobs, and a willingness to fall to her knees in mirthless, monotonous mimicry of sexual ecstasy. It’s like, after all the fucking and talking about fucking that she’s done, she has almost no idea what true liberation — or even pleasure — really is.